The American sociologist Robert Nisbet famously defended the existence and authority of non-state communities, seeing these non-political forms of social life as essential to healthy human psychology and society. Beginning in Quest for Community and continuing throughout the entirety of his career, Nisbet criticized the rise of the political state in the modern world as inherently destructive of community, because the modern state is too abstract and too large to provide the deep sense of community found in family, neighborhood, and other close, personal forms of association. He believed that many of these historical forms of associations had been suppressed by the national state and that new forms of association could not take hold because very structure of political power in the state that had suppressed old forms of community made impossible the rise of new ones, including voluntary associations. Nisbet only addresses freedom of association in a few places. However, his entire scheme is predicated upon freedom for social groups to act. Nisbet defended what he called a “laissez faire of groups” as an alternative understanding of the liberal notion of laissez faire of individuals. In Nisbet’s new conception of laissez faire, social groups would compete for the allegiance of individuals and individuals would be free to enter and to exit groups. While Nisbet does not use the term “freedom of association” to describe this concept, his laissez faire of groups is in all essential respects freedom of association. It requires that groups be free to form their own community, which includes the power to exclude individuals who do not fit into that community for one reason or another.