Finished reading: Twilight of Authority by Robert Nisbet, from 1975. Nisbet has long been an important writer for me, but this, the only one of his major books I hadn’t read, is a disappointment, vague and full of moot assertions. There’a a provocative point in the Preface, though: having made the familiar old-school conservative case that we suffer from a decline in civil society, in the various institutions that mediate between individuals and the state, he adds this:
Accompanying the decline of institutions and the decay of values in such ages [of decline as ours] is the cultivation of power that becomes increasingly military, or paramilitary, in shape. Such power exists in almost exact proportion to the decline of traditional social and moral authority. Representative and liberal institutions of government slip into patterns ever more imperial in character. Military symbols and constraints loom where civil values reigned before.
This is very much a book of the Vietnam era, so I’m sure it has no application to our own moment. 📚