The Present Age challenges readers to re-examine the role of the United States in the world since World War I. Nisbet criticises Americans for isolationism at home, discusses the gutting of educational standards, the decay of education, the presence of government in all facets of life, the diminished connection to community, and the prominence of economic arrangements driving everyday life in America. This work is deeply indebted to the analyses of Tocqueville and Bryce regarding the threats that bureaucracy, centralisation, and creeping conformity pose to liberty and individual independence in the western world. The Present Age relates a tragedy – the unprecedented militarisation of American life in the decades after 1914, as the result of the necessary resistance to National Socialist and Communist totalitarianism that fed into and reinforced the profound tendencies toward centralisation within modern society.