Robert Nisbet Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Henry Regnery

Critical Essay by Henry Regnery

SOURCE: “Robert Nisbet and the Blight in the Olive Grove,” in Perfect Sowing: Reflections of a Bookman, edited by Jeffrey O. Nelson, ISI Books, 1999, pp. 156-62.

In the following excerpt, Regnery emphasizes Nisbet's criticisms of Enlightenment ideas and their tendency to overestimate the individual's capacity for reason and virtue.

The university, in Professor Robert Nisbet's view of the matter, is in its basic structure a medieval institution to survive into the modern world. All the others, the universal church, chivalry, the fief, the craft guild, were swept away by the reformation and the political and social upheavals that followed; the university alone remained intact. What we are now experiencing in the collapse of the values that for some eight hundred years sustained the university he calls “the last reformation.”

“No community, no organization, no institution,” Nisbet maintains [in The Degradation of the Academic Dogma], “can exist for long without...
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