The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  The Lonely Crowd

  The Lonely Crowd

  A study of the changing

  American character

  by David Riesman

  with Nathan Glazer

  and Reuel Denney

  Abridged and revised

  edition with a foreword

  by Todd Gitlin

  First Published as a Yale Nota Bene book in 2001.

  First abridged edition copyright © 1961 by Yale University Press.

  Copyright © renewed 1989 by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. Foreword copyright © 2000 by Todd Gitlin.

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

  For information about this and other

  Yale University Press publications, please contact:

  U.S. office sales.press@yale.edu

  Europe office sales@yaleup.co.uk

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Library of Congress catalog card number: 00-105884

  ISBN 0-300-08865-5 (pbk.)

  A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Contents

  Foreword by Todd Gitlin

  Twenty Years After—A Second Preface

  Preface to the 1961 Edition

  PART I: CHARACTER

  Chapter I. Some Types of Character and Society

  I. Character and Society

  High Growth Potential: Tradition-directed Types

  A Definition of Tradition-direction

  Transitional Growth: Inner-directed Types

  A Definition of Inner-direction

  Incipient Decline of Population: Other-directed Types

  A Definition of Other-direction

  The Three Types Compared

  The Case of Athens

  Some Necessary Qualifications

  II. The Characterological Struggle

  Chapter II. From Morality to Morale: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation

  I. Changes in the Role of the Parents

  Parental Role in the Stage of Tradition-direction

  Parental Role in the Stage of Inner-direction

  Character and Social Mobility

  Character Training as a Conscious Parental Task

  Passage from Home

  Parental Role in the Stage of Other-direction

  Character and Social Mobility

  From Bringing up Children to “Bringing up Father”

  The Rule of “Reason”

  II. Changes in the Role of the Teacher

  The Teacher’s Role in the Stage of Inner-direction

  The Teacher’s Role in the Stage of Other-direction

  Chapter III. A Jury of Their Peers: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation (Continued)

  I. The Peer-group in the Stage of Inner-direction

  II. The Peer-group in the Stage of Other-direction

  The Trial

  “The Talk of the Town”: the Socialization of Preferences

  The Antagonistic Cooperators of the Peer-group

  Chapter IV. Storytellers as Tutors in Technique: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation (Continued)

  I. Song and Story in the Stage of Tradition-direction

  Chimney-corner Media

  Tales of Norm and “Abnorm”

  II. The Socializing Functions of Print in the Stage of Inner-direction

  The Whip of the Word

  Models in Print

  The Oversteered Child

  III. The Mass Media in the Stage of Other-direction

  The Child Market

  Winner Take All?

  Tootle: a Modern Cautionary Tale

  Areas of Freedom

  Chapter V. The Inner-directed Round of Life

  I. Men at Work

  The Economic Problem: the Hardness of the Material

  Ad Astra per Aspera

  II. The Side Show of Pleasure

  The Acquisitive Consumer

  Away from It All

  Onward and Upward with the Arts

  Feet on the Rail

  III. The Struggle for Self-approval

  Chapter VI. The Other-directed Round of Life: from Invisible Hand to Glad Hand

  I. The Economic Problem: the Human Element

  From Craft Skill to Manipulative Skill

  From Free Trade to Fair Trade

  From the Bank Account to the Expense Account

  II. The Milky Way

  Chapter VII. The Other-directed Round of Life (Continued): The Night Shift

  I. Changes in the Symbolic Meaning of Food and Sex

  From the Wheat Bowl to the Salad Bowl

  Sex: the Last Frontier

  II. Changes in the Mode of Consumption of Popular Culture

  Entertainment as Adjustment to the Group

  Handling the Office

  Handling the Home

  Heavy Harmony

  Lonely Successes

  Good-bye to Escape?

  III. The Two Types Compared

  PART II. POLITICS

  Chapter VIII. Tradition-directed, Inner-directed, and Other-directed Political Styles: Indifferents, Moralizers, Inside-dopesters

  I. The Indifferents

  Old Style

  New Style

  II. The Moralizers

  The Style of the Moralizer-in-power

  The Style of the Moralizer-in-retreat

  III. The Inside-dopesters

  The Balance Sheet of Inside Dope

  Chapter IX. Political Persuasions: Indignation and Tolerance

  I. Politics as an Object of Consumption

  II. The Media as Tutors in Tolerance

  Tolerance and the Cult of Sincerity

  Sincerity and Cynicism

  III. Do the Media Escape From Politics?

  IV. The Reservoir of Indignation

  V. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”

  Chapter X. Images of Power

  I. The Leaders and the Led

  Captains of Industry and Captains of Consumption

  II. Who Has the Power?

  The Veto Groups

  Is There a Ruling Class Left?

  Chapter XI. Americans and Kwakiutls

  PART III: AUTONOMY

  Chapter XII. Adjustment or Autonomy?

  I. The Adjusted, the Anomic, the Autonomous

  II. The Autonomous Among the Inner-directed

  III. The Autonomous Among the Other-directed

  Bohemia

  Sex

  Tolerance

  Chapter XIII. False Personalization: Obstacles to Autonomy in Work

  I. Cultural Definitions of Work

  II. Glamorizers, Featherbedders, Indispensables

  White-collar Personalization: toward Glamor

  The Conversation of the Classes: Factory Model

  The Club of Indispensables

  III. The Overpersonalized Society

  The Automat versus the Glad Hand

  Chapter XIV. Enforced Privatization: Obstacles to Autonomy in Play

  I. The Denial of Sociability

  II. Sociability and the Privatization of Women

  III. Packaged Sociabilities

  Chapter XV. The Problem of Competence: Obstacles to Autonomy in Play (Continued)

  I. The Play’s the Thing

  II. The Forms of Competence

  Consumership: Postgraduate Course

  The Possibilities of Craftmanship

  The Newer Criticism in the Realm of Taste

  III. The Avocational Counselors
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br />   IV. Freeing the Child Market

  Chapter XVI. Autonomy and Utopia

  Index

  Foreword

  Todd Gitlin

  In an age that views books as quaint artifacts on the fringes of the entertainment business, we may find it hard to recall that books ever guided national conversations in America. Sometimes the impact on history has been direct. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 polemical novel, The Jungle, galvanized public sentiment in behalf of the Pure Food and Drug Act. In the 1960s, The Other America, Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, and Unsafe at Any Speed helped the anti-poverty, environmentalist, feminist, and consumer movements get under way, and subsequent reform-minded conservative books, notably George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s Fixing Broken Windows, have had an equivalent impact.

  But practical essays in advocacy are not the only books to count in public life. Sometimes books have mattered not by provoking action but by recognizing patterns, offering big interpretations of life, providing names for what, until the volumes appeared, were nothing more than hunches or diffuse sentiments. A serious book comes out, crystallizes a fear, a knack, or a hope into a big idea, a sweeping interpretation of reality that strikes a collective nerve in a large general public.1 As with Friedrich van Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962), and Charles A. Murray’s Losing Ground (1984), a book may become a spur to a major ideological turn. In the case of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964), it can furnish the media themselves with a vocabulary of self-recognition. Rarest of all is the book that penetrates into popular consciousness so deeply that its insights become clichÉs, its wisdom conventional—to borrow a phrase devised, in fact, in one such book, The Affluent Society (1958), by John Kenneth Galbraith.

  Half a century ago, Yale University Press published the first edition of The Lonely Crowd, by David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, a book that contributed its own conceptual phrases to the American vocabulary.2 The book’s subject was nothing less than a sea change in American character: as America was moving from a society governed by the imperative of production to a society governed by the imperative of consumption, the character of its upper middle classes was shifting from “inner-directed” people, who as children internalized goals that were essentially “implanted” by elders, to “other-directed” people, “sensitized to the expectations and preferences of others.” In Riesman’s wonderful metaphor, the shift was from life guided by an internal gyroscope to life guided by radar. The new American no longer cared much about adult authority but rather was hyperalert to peer groups and gripped by mass media. Father might be reputed to know best, but if he did, it was increasingly because a television program said so.

  The Lonely Crowd went on to become, according to a 1997 study by Herbert J. Gans, the best-selling book by a sociologist in American history, with 1.4 million copies sold, largely in paperback editions.3 (The first abridged pocket-size paperback was one of the first beneficiaries of the wave of mass-market paperback editions.) For years, the book made “inner-direction” and “other-direction” household terms, canapÉs for cocktail party chat. It was read by student radicals in the making, who overinterpreted its embrace of the search for autonomy as a roundhouse assault on conformity, when in fact Riesman was at pains to point out that any society ensures “some degree of conformity from the individuals who make it up,” the question being how it secures that unavoidable conformity. In the 1960s, The Lonely Crowd was read as a harbinger of alienation leading to affluent revolt. Its title phrase even cropped up in a Bob Dylan song of 1967, “I Shall Be Released.” By the time of his introduction to the 1969 edition, Riesman was regretting that “The Lonely Crowd had contributed to the snobbish deprecation of business careers.”

  The hoopla, the public embrace, not to mention misinterpretation, were all a far cry from original expectations. On publication in 1950, the book was greeted with respectful but frequently critical reviews in professional journals. When it came out in a paperback abridgment three years later, Riesman and Yale University Press expected the book to sell “a few thousand copies as a reading in social science courses.” Instead, it caught on. Why? With unerring hindsight we can see that it sympathetically exposed the anxieties of a middle class that was rising with the postwar boom, suburbanizing, busy availing itself of upgraded homes, machines, and status, relieved to be done with the Depression and the war but baffled by cultural and psychological upheavals beneath the surface of everyday life.

  Not least, The Lonely Crowd was jargon-free (while inadvertently contributing its own either-or, quiz-show style to the vocabulary of a culture that relishes bipolar categories, as with introvert/extrovert, hip/square, marginal/central). Today, sociological writing has all the public appeal of molecular biology, having substantially earned its reputation as a specialty for number crunchers and other pseudoscientific poseurs. By immense contrast, The Lonely Crowd was lucidly written, with a knack for puckish phrases: “inside-dopester,” “the whip of the word,” “from invisible hand to glad hand,” “from the bank account to the expense account,” “ambulatory patients in the ward of modern culture,” “the friendship market,” “wildcatting on the sex frontier,” “the featherbed of plenty,” “each life is an emergency.” It was decidedly unpretentious, unforbidding in tone, omnicurious, with a feeling for recognizable types. Although demanding of the serious reader, and scarcely written in sound bites, it had the sound of an agreeable human voice, by turns chatty and approachably awkward, graceful and warm, nuanced and colloquial, sober and avuncular, but frequently casual and good-humored. Unlike most academic treatises, it did not get bogged down in definitional chatter. It was the book of a fellow-feeling citizen who wanted to counsel society, not lecture it.4 It spoke directly to the people—Americans, largely, but not exclusively—whom it concerned (in both senses). It commiserated as it chastised, and even when it did chastise, it reassured the reader that one was not so lonely in one’s anxieties as one might have imagined. It could be read with the reassurance of recognition. The style of speaking to rather than about has in the past half century devolved into the self-help mode, at the cost of intellectual seriousness, but The Lonely Crowd is proof that intelligent analysis can be directed to intelligent readers without treating them strictly as egocentric self-improvers.

  Accessibility was not altogether unique in sociology in those years. In the 1950s, even the professional journals were written so that any decently educated person could read them; books by C. Wright Mills made the best-seller lists, too. The popularity of The Lonely Crowd must also have owed something to the supple way it ranged far and wide for its evidence, trotting through novels, children’s books, movies, and anthropology. Although Riesman and Nathan Glazer were conducting formal interviews at the same time, Riesman emphasized that he drew on them only slightly; that The Lonely Crowd was “based on our experiences of living in America—the people we have met, the jobs we have held, the books we have read, the movies we have seen, and the landscape.”5

  Though published when television was still a fledgling medium, Riesman took seriously the fact that Americans had been plunged into a media bath. He did so with concern but also without scorn. Even as television was still taking shape, he understood that the mass media were powerful in both content and form, and yet he did not succumb to the hype that characteristically greets each wave of technological marvels in American history.6 He did not suppose that television would be able to conjure national character from scratch. As he put it, “Americans were ready for the mass media even before the mass media were ready for them.” A rereading of The Lonely Crowd shows, in fact, how sympathetic it is to mass media virtues—mainly, to television’s challenging of provincialism, its cultivation of taste hybridization and a certain cosmopolitanism. With a sophisticated grasp of the cultural production process, it understood that the major reason for these benefits was that the media were headquartered in large metropolitan centers, �
�where the pressures toward other-directed tolerance are greatest.” (This would remain the case even as the giant media corporations would later spin off specialized channels for demographic niches.) Although The Lonely Crowd was frequently read as an assault on other-direction, Riesman bent over backward to find virtue in the “con-siderateness, sensitivity and tolerance” characteristic of a society no longer gazing upward, toward elders and traditional authorities, for guidance.

  The Lonely Crowd had no trouble surviving the early collapse of one of its central hypotheses. This was the idea that each phase of social character (traditional, inner-directed, other-directed) corresponds to a rate of population growth. In her review of The Lonely Crowd in the American Journal of Sociology, Margaret Mead early observed that Riesman’s evidence for the population theory was weak. She was not the only skeptic on this front Riesman himself was aware in 1949, when the book was still in proofs, that the population model was seriously contested. By the time of the book’s 1969 reissue, Riesman had already renounced his demographic model. The revision didn’t—and doesn’t—matter. The book is so rich in observation that divergent readers will attend to different passages and feel themselves instructed. Mead herself pointed to a passage noting that other-directed conformism predisposed Americans to project power centers outside the self—a reason the paranoid streak in American life loomed so large, and perhaps also a reason Americans were excessively afraid that the Russians would take them over. Myself, I have been struck by the prophetic quality of Riesman’s discussion of the “inside-dopester” as a social type, whose goal is “never to be taken in by any person, cause or event.” Sam Donaldson, Chris Matthews, and company were imagined long before smirking became a lucrative style for Washington pundits. In sum, as Margaret Mead put it, “almost every paragraph in this book incites one to theoretical speculation and … suggests to the reader additional lifetime programs of research.”

  Inevitably, the book reads differently than it did half a century ago—although not less incisively. The starkness of the transition from inner-direction to other-direction was more evident to readers of the ’50s, caught up as they were in a sudden tide of affluence. Today, the book may not resonate in the same way. In the mid-’80s, teaching The Lonely Crowd to freshmen and sophomores at Berkeley, I discovered that they had trouble grasping the key distinction between inner- and other-direction. Intuitively, it made little sense to them. This was not because, as Riesman had suggested, “the shift from inner-direction to other-direction [seems] unimportant by comparison with” the momentous shift from tradition-directed life to both inner- and other-direction—because, in other words, the shift from traditional society to the whole of modernity is the momentous transition in human history. No, the distinction between inner- and other- was lost on students born after 1960, born into a world of rock music and TV, because these students had lived their entire lives as other-directed, with radars. By the 1980s, the “exceptional sensitivity to the actions and wishes of others” that Riesman held to be typical of other-direction had long since been institutionalized into the norms of talk shows and “sensitivity training.” The notion of life with a psychic gyroscope had become well-nigh unimaginable.