Political Correctness and the University’s Pink Police State

In his 1953 book, The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom, the sociologist Robert Nisbet sets forth an explanation for why many men and women join totalitarian movements, such as the fascism that preceded Nisbet’s book, the communism of his time, or something like Islamic State today.

In the preface, Nisbet notes that the “real significance of the modern state” lies in its “successive penetrations of man’s economic, religious, kinship, and local allegiances, and its revolutionary dislocations of established centers of function and authority.” These penetrations into the space of civil society—those autonomous institutions existing between the individual and the state—Nisbet believes to form the framework for “the twentieth-century’s obsessive quest for moral certainty and social community,” which make “so difficult present-day problems of freedom and democracy.”  (more...)

Political Correctness and the University’s Pink Police State