Background
Nisbet was born in Los Angeles on September 30, 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.
Nisbet was born in Los Angeles on September 30, 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.
Nisbet studied at the University of California at Berkeley before service in the U.S. Army during World War II. His thesis was supervised by Frederick J. Teggart.
Robert joined the faculty at Berkeley 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 briefly became the Chairman. Nisbet left an embroiled Berkeley in 1953 to become a dean at the University of California, Riverside, and later a Vice-Chancellor. Nisbet stayed in the University of California until 1972, when he left for the University of Arizona at Tucson. Soon after, he was appointed to the Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia.
On retiring from Columbia in 1978, Nisbet continued his scholarly work for eight years at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan asked him to deliver the Jefferson Lecture in Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Robert claimed that modern social science's individualism denied an important human drive toward community as it left people without the aid of their fellows to combat the centralizing power of the nation-state.
Nisbet began his career as a leftist but later confessed a conversion to a philosophical conservatism.