The Quest for Fraternity

“A specter is haunting the modern mind, the specter of insecurity.” So wrote Robert Nisbet in his classic The Quest for Community, published in 1953 describing “the preoccupation with personal alienation and cultural disintegration” at midcentury. The late Rutgers University Professor Wilson Carey McWilliams would agree (without referencing Nisbet) twenty years later in his magisterial The Idea of Fraternity in America (1973), surely one of the most impressive published dissertations of the twentieth century. The fiftieth-anniversary edition from the University of Notre Dame Press is well worth the long read, and it is long, clocking in at 624 pages of well-written, if occasionally meandering, prose, not including the index and footnotes. The new edition begins with an introduction by the political theorist Susan McWilliams Barndt, daughter of the late McWilliams, with personal anecdotes and insights that bring the author to life and help to place his queries and concerns in personal and professional contexts. Reading the book also brings into relief the work of McWilliams’ most prominent student, Patrick Deneen.