THE PRESENT AGE Progress and Anarchy in Modern America<i> by Robert Nisbet (Harper & Row: $17.95) </i>

This book isn’t always easy to follow; Robert Nisbet’s theories are as involved as they are inspired, inhabiting a political never-never land between liberalism (America’s military is depicted as headstrong and Visigothic) and conservatism (the national bureaucracy is analogized to monarchs, 18th Century despots and totalitarian regimes). But while ideologically complex, “The Present Age,” addresses a familiar trend in the American mood: a growing sense of spiritual discontent. Nisbet is disturbed by what he sees as the decline of the sacred and heroic in American culture and the growth of “subjectivism,” a belief that “what lies within . . . one person’s consciousness, has more reality, more value, perhaps even more truth, than what lies outside the person in the world of external event and change.” Persuasively, Nisbet charts the growth of subjectivism in the arts, finding an obsession in postwar literature with “one’s own little ego and assembled feelings” rather than a curiosity about “other people’s accomplishments, joys and tragedies.” “The Present Age” is a bold warning, challenging us to reconsider our definition of liberty, for as Nisbet writes, paraphrasing G. K. Chesterton, “To be free merely to be free is the stuff of inanition--like making hammers to make hammers to make hammers.”