Title page from The Present Age

The Present Age

Nisbet examines the role of the United States in the world since World War I focusing on the threats that the unprecedented militarization of American life in the decades after 1914, bureaucracy, centralization, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world.

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Key Quotes

War & Peace

What would the Framers (of the U.S. Constitution) be most struck by in America today? … Three aspects of the present age in America would surely draw their immediate, concerned, and perhaps incredulous attention. First, the prominence of war in American life since 1914, amounting to a virtual…

Sport and Liberty

It is good that sports are so important. They—and especially the contact or “violent” ones like football, hockey, and boxing—play a role of reliving pressures in human beings which once had no other outlets but wars, Bedlams, and public hangings. If by some major accident we ever lose the mayhem of…