As we continue on a path toward ever increasing regulation and overreach at every level of government, we must, at least at the local level, defend and preserve our individual and community's freedoms by finding our own way in the world without the undue influence of outsiders.

"The Quest for Community," By Robert Nisbet (1953), is a modern "classic" on the human condition.  Nesbit was a sociologist who, in the post-war 1940s, began began looking at the evolution of the structure of societies in the modern world.  The conditions he observed then are even more critical now to our freedoms and our natural sense of community.

Modern conditions have changed so that people more easily become detached from their traditional allegiance and attachment to family and community, to a void then filled by the collectivism of the state.  Man's need to belong to a social network can be transferred to the state which upends the balance between individual freedom and community.

Below are excerpts of the Introduction to the 2010 edition of the book.

THE QUEST FOR COMMUNITY

A STUDY IN THE ETHICS OF ORDER AND FREEDOM 

Robert Nisbet

Introduction to the Background Edition

ROSS DOUTHAT

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 

But this is not the only possible modern story, he is careful to insist. The mass community offered by totalitarianism may be more attractive than no community at all, but it remains a deeply unnatural form of human association. And it's possible for both liberal government and liberal economics to flourish without descending into tyranny, so long as they allow, encourage, and depend upon more natural forms of community, rather than trying to tear them up root and branch.

PREFACE TO THE 1970 EDITION

I believe today, as I believed throughout the 1940s, when this book was beginning to take form in my mind, that the single most impressive fact in the twentieth century in Western society is the fateful combination of widespread quest for community—in whatever form, moral, social, political, and the apparatus of political power that has become so vast in contemporary democratic states. 

The combination of search for community and existing political power seems to me today, just as it did twenty years ago, a very dangerous combination. For, as I argue in this book, the expansion of power has remained—has indeed become ever more—destructive of the contents of new forms of community.

There is, first, alienation from the past. Man, it is said, is a time-binding creature; past and future are as important to his natural sense of identity as the present. Destroy his sense of the past, and you cut his spiritual roots, leaving momentary febrility but no viable prospect of the future.

Closely related is alienation from things. Here I mean property, hard property, the kind that one can touch, be identified with, become ennobled or debased by, be driven to defend against attack. ... And Schumpeter warned us that the transition from capitalism to socialism would not even be noticed by a population whose idea of property is not hard property but soft property—shares and equities in something distant, personally unmanaged, and impersonal. It is said that the passion for automobiles among American boys, a passion which can destroy or weaken educational aspiration, and account for much juvenile delinquency in this country, is a consequence, at least in part, of the deep-seated desire for hard property that is thwarted in so many areas of our society today.

What I have tried very hard to do, however, is to show that a structure of power capable of obliterating traditional types of community is capable of choking off new types of community. Hence the appeal, in the final pages of the book, for what I call a new laissez faire, one within which groups, associations, and communities would prosper and which would be, by their very vitality, effective barriers to further spread of unitary, centralized, political power.