Robert Nisbet sought to push back against the Progressivist tide by asking the question, “How can progress have led to the worst and bloodiest moments of human history?”  His main thesis in his writing and teaching centered on how rabid “individualism” always leads us away from community and freedom.  In this last session, Dr. Deneen discusses Nisbet’s views and wraps up the study with some concluding thoughts.

A native Californian, Nisbet spent twenty-one years as a student and then professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Department of Sociology beginning in 1932. He later moved on to become the dean of the University of California, Riverside, won a Guggenheim Fellowship at Princeton, taught at the University of Bologna in Italy and the University of Arizona, and then occupied the Albert Schweitzer Chair of the Humanities at Columbia University. He retired professionally while a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.