Robert Nisbet
American sociologist (1913–1996)
Robert Alexander Nisbet (; September 30, 1913 – September 9, 1996) was an American sociologist, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, vice-chancellor at the University of California, Riverside, and an Albert Schweitzer Professor at Columbia University.
Life
Nisbet was born in Los Angeles in 1913. He was raised with his three brothers and one sister in the small California community of Maricopa, where his father managed a lumber yard. His studies at University of California, Berkeley culminated in a Ph.D. in sociology in 1939. His thesis was supervised by Frederick J. Teggart. At Berkeley, "Nisbet found a powerful defense of intermediate institutions in the conservative thought of 19th-century Europe. Nisbet saw in thinkers like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville—then all but unknown in American scholarship—an argument on behalf of what he called 'conservative pluralism.'" He joined the faculty there in 1939.
After serving in the United States Army during World War II, when he was stationed on Saipan in the Pacific Theatre, Nisbet founded the Department of Sociology at Berkeley, and was briefly chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a vice-chancellor. Nisbet remained in the University of California system until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Nisbet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.