The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Still, the open reader returns to The Lonely Crowd feeling many aftershocks of recognition. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the alert observer is made aware every day that the shift Riesman discerned in the educated upper-middle classes of metropolitan centers has swept the country. In recent elections, presidential candidates have been expected to answer the questions of ordinary men and women (Bill Clinton ingratiatingly, George H. W. Bush less so) and chat with reporters on camera during long bus trips (John McCain). The remote, Wizard-of-Oz-like presidential aura belongs to a vanished yesteryear, along with a White House like Lincoln’s open for casual presidential chats.

  Popular culture itself registers the sea change. Consider the differences between the quiz shows of the 1950s, “The $64,000 Question” and “Twenty-One,” and the hit series of the year 2000, “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” On “Twenty-One,” the contestants were sealed off from influence in “isolation booths,” with no hints, no multiple-choice questions; they were literally “inner-directed.” On the year 2000’s “Millionaire,” they stand out in the open, are given four prefab options from which to choose, and get to throw out “lifelines” to family, friends, and audience members. On the earlier shows, questions concerned areas of special expertise like opera, boxing, and European royalty. Paul Farhi, an enterprising reporter for the Washington Post, put the difference this way:

  On “The $64,000 Question” (1955–58) … a contestant was shown six portraits and asked to name not just the artist and the subject, but also the teacher with whom the artist had studied. Another contestant was asked to name the Verdi opera that started Arturo Toscanini’s conducting career, as well as the date of the performance and its location. In 1957, a young college professor named Charles Van Doren was asked on “Twenty-One” to name the kings of Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Jordan. Herbert M. Stempel, the contestant who faced Van Doren and eventually exposed the rigging on “Twenty-One,” was eliminated from the show when he could answer only two parts of the following three-parter: What was the name of the anti-populist Kansas newspaper editor of the 1920s? (William Allen White.) What was the name of his newspaper? (The Emporia Gazette.) What was the name of the column he wrote? (’What’s the Matter With Kansas?)7

  On “Millionaire,” by contrast, contestants can win huge sums by knowing “what two colors make up an Oreo cookie” or decide to pass up the chance to win $500,000 by not taking a chance with “How many von Trapp children were there in ‘The Sound of Music’?” In other words, the authority of knowledge derives largely from popular culture, knowledge shared with one’s peers, not knowledge derived from the idiosyncrasies of personal mastery.

  Granted, television today is far more widespread than in the late 1950s, so the educational level of viewers today is probably, on average, lower than before. But this factor by itself cannot explain the extent of the shift. It is likely that not only the knowledge base but the cultural aspirations of most Americans have changed. No longer do Americans take pleasure in being stumped, suggesting (in gyroscopic fashion) that there might be more to learn in the course of their lives. Today, in the name of “self-esteem” they are “sensitive” to their own weaknesses; they need to demonstrate how much they already know. “I am somebody” replaces “I will someday be somebody.”

  One longs for appropriately ambitious, germane studies of today’s mentalities—books with the reach and approachability of The Lonely Crowd and its partial successor, Habits of the Heart (1986), by Robert Bellah et al. One wonders, in particular, how the current boom (and attendant anxieties) are playing in the consciousness of Americans, those who have benefited greatly as well as those who have benefited little or not at all. Sociology ought to be news that stays news, but few sociologists today extend their imaginations beyond narrow milieus to the biggest questions of social structure, culture, and conflict. Their elders, hell-bent on professionalization, do not encourage range. (Here it is worth noting that like another of our outstanding sociologists, Daniel Bell, Riesman never was trained into writing a Ph.D. dissertation. He holds a law degree.)8

  If I may close on a personal note: I met David Riesman during my sophomore year, in 1960, when he was a faculty adviser to the Harvard peace group, Tocsin. A longtime critic of nationalism, Riesman had become deeply involved in writing and speaking against reliance on nuclear weapons, and I was amazed to learn that he, one of the most famous professors in America, was lending his station wagon to transport groups of peace activists to Vermont, to campaign for a pacifist congressman. Practicing the attitude he commended, harboring both Utopian hopes and practical ideas, he always had time to chat about American politics and society. He helped us raise money, contacted luminaries in our behalf, brought us to conferences, wrote follow-up letters after conversations. He wrote letters around the year and around the clock, sometimes more than one a day to favored correspondents (he might be the most prolific letter-writer since Thomas Jefferson), and while it was decidedly flattering for an undergraduate to be on the receiving end of such attention, Riesman did not take his mentoring lightly—that is, he was not afraid to disagree with us, sometimes vehemently, about some of our decisions. In those years, he was also editing a journal of political commentary, the Committee (later Council) of Correspondence Newsletter. For decades he was, indeed, a one-man committee of correspondence. He was interested in everything. He picked up tiny references and gave back paragraphs of rumination and reference. The world is far-flung with hundreds of his correspondents, men and women of several generations who over the decades have had the daunting experience of writing him a letter or sending him an article only to receive back, often within a week, a much longer letter, two or three pages worth at times, or an apology for all of two weeks’ delay.

  Max Weber, the century’s greatest sociologist, famously deplored “specialists without spirit.” Riesman, now over ninety, has given of both mind and spirit without specialization. He deserves to be reread and his model honored.

  Twenty Years After–A Second Preface

  At the time The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd were published, we had no expectation that these books would be widely read outside the relevant academic fields. The Lonely Crowd was greeted in professional journals with often quite astringent criticism, and it made its way only slowly to a wider, nonprofessional audience. These nonprofessional readers need to be reminded that few scholars of even moderate sanity would sit down today to write a comprehensive, empirically oriented work like The Lonely Crowd. Studies of such scope are understandably out of style. Indeed, in some of the fields of scholarship on which The Lonely Crowd draws, including aspects of American history, probably as much specialized work has been published in the last twenty years as in all the preceding years.

  When in 1960 the Yale University Press planned a new paperback edition of the book, I took the occasion to write a new preface (which follows directly after this one) to outline what seemed to me some of the main errors of the book, both as these might have been better appreciated at the time of writing and as they appeared in the glare of hindsight.1 And now, eight years later in 1968, I have reread The Lonely Crowd in preparation for this new printing. While making no changes of substance, so that any criticisms of the original edition a reader might come across would still apply, I found myself on many pages writing marginal notes indicating that a statement now struck me as dubious or extreme or plainly mistaken.

  This would not trouble me much, since knowledge proceeds by successive approximations and even by speculations which turn out to be wrong, if it were not for the fact that The Lonely Crowd has in some measure entered the picture many Americans—and some readers in other countries—have of ourselves, both past and present. In however small a degree, the book has contributed to the climate of criticism of our society and helped create or reaffirm a nihilistic outlook among a great many people who lay claim to moral or intellectual nonconformity, or who simply want to be “with it” in order to escape being considered geria
tric cases. Since our earlier Preface of 1960 was written, the moral temper of well-educated young Americans has greatly altered, and so has the context of our common life; also my own thinking has continued to evolve; and thus I feel that a still further cautionary preface should be written.

  Obviously, the problems that preoccupy attentive Americans now are different from those preoccupying people when The Lonely Crowd was written; and, among the reflective, an atmosphere of what seems to me extravagant self-criticism has succeeded an earlier tendency toward glib self-satisfaction. In my opinion American society is not basically more evil and brutal than heretofore. In spite of war and preparation for war, and in the face of heightening racial tension, the lessening of bigotries described in The Lonely Crowd has continued; improved education and the more liberal mass media have had an impact on traditional xenophobia. The fact that progressive measures, men, and attitudes have not brought peace at home or abroad keeps Americans polarized between our generous impulses and our fears. (Contrary to current opinion on both the Right and the Left, liberalism has not dominated American society but has been a minority tradition in the face of historic, unideological conservatism.) The sense of profound malaise many of us have about our society today reflects our nearly insuperable problems; but it also reflects our heightened expectation as to the society we should be and the contribution we should be making to the world. Yet the beliefs we have about ourselves are also facts: they help shape our reality— this is the meaning of self-fulfilling prophecy, about which Robert K. Merton and others have written. Measured despair of our society, expressed publicly, can serve to warn us against catastrophe and to arouse us from somnolence; extravagant despair, however, can lead some to withdraw from political and cultural action while others feel justified in acts of destructiveness and fail to grasp the potentials for nonviolent change that do exist.

  The Lonely Crowd has been read by many as arguing that Americans of an earlier day were freer and of more upstanding human quality. Developing a typology between inner-directed and other-directed, we focused on changes that most readers seem to have regarded as changes for the worse. But others have read the book as too benign in diagnosing our time. While we viewed both the American past and present with irony and ambivalence, readers tended to identify with the weaknesses they felt in themselves or in the people they knew; and they could regard the cruelties and insensitivities of earlier Americans with the sympathetic detachment we reserve for evils which no longer threaten to overwhelm us.

  The Lonely Crowd certainly contributed to these misreadings. For example, Part II on politics falls at times into a nostalgia the book generally eschews. Thus it was an overstatement to say (as the book does on page 174) that cynicism toward politics as a whole was virtually unknown in the nineteenth century, and no less wrong to declare that the defined political problems of that epoch “were thought to be manageable.”2 Similarly, although it seems to me that the book’s portrait of the nineteenth-century moralizer is as unflattering as that of the contemporary inside dopester, the self-mockery to which contemporary readers are prone led many to assume that the latter was an invention of our own decadent era.

  Several contributions to the Lipset-Lowenthal anthology contend that the ethic of egalitarianism and achievement has been characteristically American since the very beginning of the republic and that American character has not changed fundamentally.3 In my opinion, whether one emphasizes continuity or discontinuity should depend on what one is interested in, as well as on one’s assessment of conflicting evidence. Of course there is a great deal of continuity, but I think that the upper-middle-class affluent American described in The Lonely Crowd and in Faces in the Crowd differed from his ancestors in the quality of his relations to others. Not that Americans today are more conformist—that has always been a profound misinterpretation; and it is not that today’s Americans are peculiar in wanting to impress others or be liked by them; people generally did and do. The difference lies in a greater resonance with others, a heightened self-consciousness about relations to people, and a widening of the circle of people with whom one wants to feel in touch. As the representatives of adult authority and of the older generation decline in legitimacy, young people and the millions who seek to stay young become even more exposed to the power of their contemporaries both in person and through the mass media. That focus of attention often leads to resistance and noncompliance, but the point at issue is primarily the degree of resonance, and not so much of conformity.

  Since 1950 the decline in the weight and authority of adults chronicled in The Lonely Crowd has proceeded even further. Now attending high school and college are the children of the self-mistrustful parents who felt themselves revealed in books like The Lonely Crowd. The loss of inner confidence among adults is a worldwide phenomenon, reflecting rapid change in technology and values. Margaret Mead has spoken of native-born American parents feeling like immigrants in the country of the young. The young react to the loss of adult legitimacy with even greater self-mistrust, confusion, and rebellion. There are differences of course of degree, so that while students from Tokyo to Prague take sustenance from each other’s protests and learn from each other’s tactics, the generational conflict is not everywhere the same. Indeed, the American student movements seem to me in some respects unique. South Africa may face a racial crisis in the future comparable to that of the United States, but the moral and intellectual priority this crisis now compels among sensitive whites as well as blacks is peculiarly American. The civil rights activities of earlier years provided the moral catalyst and much of the tactical experience later shifted to protests against the war and against colleges and universities. And while students elsewhere protest against the war in Vietnam, not even in Japan are they as directly engaged as are American young men who are compelled by the draft to face ambiguous and intransigent moral quandaries.

  A heightened sensitivity to such quandaries reflects among other things a shift since The Lonely Crowd was written toward a greater concern with autonomy and a rejection of adjustment as immoral compromise. There is also in our high and popular culture preference for anomie over adjustment, and more awareness of the anomie that does exist. This universal dimension of character remains significant even at a time when a putative shift from inner-direction to other-direction might no longer be the best scheme for delineating the social character of upper-middle-class Americans. Many young people presently appear to be impulse-directed or circumstance-directed far beyond what was true in the same social strata several decades earlier. Yet since no country—not even the United States—changes all at once, much that was said about contemporary social character in The Lonely Crowd still seems to me relevant. But what is more important is to continue work on the problem of social character itself. Little empirical work exists concerning what distinguishes the social character of one era or stratum from that of another.4 If one is to separate social character from ideology or behavior, the vignettes we published in Faces in the Crowd suggest the need to use projective material. We can only understand our society if we are able to analyze both how people behave and talk and what their more fundamental and often unconscious dispositions are like, how these are shaped by history and in turn shape history.

  The Lonely Crowd was one of a number of studies that used the content analysis of children’s stories, movies, fiction, and inspirational literature as a way of assessing the attitudes of readers and audiences. Such work is inferential, involving a judgment as to what an audience might have seen in a work—and if that audience is deceased and no longer available for interview, the most exquisite content analysis remains speculative. My colleague David McClelland has made this kind of analysis of fantasy material as a clue to attitudes of earlier times into a fine, though risky, art.5 Comparative studies of the audiences for popular culture are infrequent, although the files of market researchers must contain data capable of historical analysis. Currently it would be interesting to have some studies of the “
talk jockeys” who, in giving air space to the previously voiceless, sometimes spread and sometimes combat the contagious paranoia of the powerless.

  Public opinion polling has continued to improve and we are more amply provided with repeatable and reliable surveys concerning who thinks what about race, the bomb, the war in Vietnam, human happiness, the popularity of leaders, and who is believed to run America. Even so, as many have noted, our indicators for unemployment and gross national product and other economic indices are better than our indicators for intangibles such as satisfaction in love and work, or for the latent feelings that have not yet been mobilized by cultural or political evocation.

  But the indicators we have offer only modest help in assessing the larger political and cultural questions raised by the continuing increase in the gross national product and concerning the uses we make of our relative abundance. The Lonely Crowd made the assumption, somewhat novel at the time, that the economic problem of abundance had been fully solved on the side of production, if not on the side of distribution—the 1960 Preface that follows deals with what I now think was the mistaken notion that economic work was no longer important and that we can afford the postindustrial attitudes now so widely prevalent. A great many others have spoken prematurely in this same vein, including the economist Robert Theobald and the critic Paul Goodman; John Kenneth Galbraith has probably been the most influential social critic to insist that the United States does not need more production, more affluence, but rather more “public” goods, such as cleaner air, streets, and water, instead of more quickly obsolescent “private” goods.6 Undeniably, the pursuit of production as an end in itself is pathological, although it is less socially dangerous than the pursuit of power as an end in itself.