The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  It is implicit in what we have just said that the inwardness of individuals is only awkwardly if at all captured by a typology designed for the understanding of large-scale social change. It is easier to classify individuals by means of typologies developed by psychologists for just this purpose, and thus we can say of someone that he is an “oral” or “receptive” type, or a “sadomasochistic” one, and take account of much that is relevant about him as an individual in doing so. But it is much harder, if not impossible, to classify a particular individual as other-directed or inner-directed, and when we have done so, we may have made a statement that helps explain his social or occupational role, but not much else about him—not what we would know about him if we were his friend. However, in spite of caveats to this effect in both The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd, many readers, including some professional social scientists, have not only felt that it was possible to make such classifications, but have also jumped to the conclusion that the tentative hypotheses of The Lonely Crowd about social character could be unambiguously stated and regarded as proven.7

  The most tentatively held ideas about American character— ideas which we ourselves regarded as unclear or fluid—now are cited as definitive, and in an intellectually foreshortened way. It is understandable that such use of the book would be made by readers and popularizers who like to believe that all the careful apparatus of the social sciences is mere intellectual boondoggling, and that scrupulous and methodical efforts to find out whether something that is believed to be so is really so reflects the pretentious pedantry of upstart sociologists. Rereading The Lonely Crowd presently on the basis of a somewhat less sketchy acquaintance with empirical and theoretical work in the social sciences, I find over-generalizations at many points where I would now be inclined to qualify or retract or wait for further evidence. (In what follows, however, I have taken account only of the largest criticisms and lacunae and not of the many smaller points that would need to be changed if the book were to be written or rewritten today.) What I want to emphasize is that the book could not have been written without painstaking work by many researchers on whose data and interpretations we drew; we hoped, in our turn, to contribute to ongoing work by suggesting questions and frames of discourse for further inquiry. In sum, the authors of The Lonely Crowd have been pluralistic in their approach to the social sciences, sympathetic to holistic and even extravagant work in older veins, but also responsive to newer, more rigorous efforts—our interest in survey techniques and interviewing reflect the latter concerns.

  We have already referred to the tendency among readers of The Lonely Crowd to equate inner-direction with autonomy. Only a very small minority, sometimes people brought up in a puritanical milieu, have responded warmly to the values of other-direction, to its openness and lack of inhibition, its interest in the others, and its readiness to change. Quite possibly The Lonely Crowd did not sufficiently stress these values; at any rate, the great majority of readers in the last ten years have decided that it was better to be an inner-directed cowboy than an other-directed advertising man, for they were not on the whole being faced with the problems of the cowboy, but rather those of the advertising man.8 Everybody from the free enterpriser to the socialist has come out against conformity, so much so that when Elaine Graham Sofer’s study turned up a fervent apostle of other-direction, the student in question was no naive defender of togetherness but a believer in the values of the Israeli kibbutz who hoped to emigrate and take up residence there.

  The distinction between character structure and its manifestation in behavior is at best a shadowy one. Moreover, inner-direction and other-direction are abstract concepts and, as this book and its companion volume (Faces in the Crowd) seek to make plain, no individual is ever entirely one or the other, particularly if his life is viewed as a whole, and not at any one moment. Thus, while it is interesting to compare individuals in terms of degrees of inner-direction and other-direction, such work can hardly be conclusive, and those who have called for a large-scale empirical test of these traits, applied to a whole population, have little appreciation of the complexity and scope of the theoretical analysis and empirical investigation that would be required before such work could even begin.

  The quotation from Tolstoy in the first chapter and the quotations from Alexis de Tocqueville that are scattered through the book reflect our concern about whether other-direction is something specifically new in the world. Professor Seymour Martin Lipset has forcefully argued in a recent paper that, on the basis of the reports of European visitors to this country (including Tocqueville), Americans have always been other-directed, this being the psychological fruit of a social structure without established hierarchy and with a strong drive toward equality and social mobility.9 When we were working on The Lonely Crowd, we were frustrated by the paucity of historical materials in many areas we deemed relevant; for instance, we could not find reliable evidence as to what religion meant for the different social strata when Tocqueville was here in the 1830’s. We could get data on church membership and activities, on various revival movements, and on theological disputes, but little that gave us the firm sense of the emotional weight of religion for men as well as women, adults and children, the more and the less respectable classes, the newer and the older denominations. We could only speculate as to how nineteenth-century young people might have responded to the questionnaires we were administering in an extremely rough and ready way to mid-twentieth-century young people. What we did in working on The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd was to look for individuals who might in some way speak for the nineteenth-century—those who, by reason of location and occupation, were less directly in the path of modernization and who were not being prepared to enter the new middle class and the affluent society. But history buries its dead, and those who preserve older traditions in a changed situation are themselves changed.

  Nevertheless, we would agree with Lipset and with other critics that the American of today and his ancestor of a hundred years ago are much alike if we range them for example against the still unemancipated South American, Asian, or African. It remains true, as when Tocqueville was here, that Americans, at least outside the South, lack feudal traditions, a strong established church, and extended family ties; they are people who believe themselves to be pragmatic, and sometimes are; on the whole (again outside the South) they tend to be optimistic for themselves, their children, their fair city, and their country; and they are mobile in terms of rank and region. Moreover, as Harriet Martineau observed on her visit, American parents seemed even then to be more the prisoners than the masters of their children, courting them and caring for their good opinion. I think that this judgment should not be taken to mean that American child-rearing practices in the nineteenth century were as child-centered as they have become in our own day, but rather that children were expected in this country to be self-reliant earlier than in Europe, and were somewhat less sternly subordinated.

  Of course, no historical change happens all at once. Precursors of what we term “other-direction” can be found in the nineteenth century and earlier. It cannot be emphasized enough, however, that other-direction is one step beyond conformist concern for the good opinion of others (see pp. 23–24). Americans have always sought that good opinion and have had to seek it in an unstable market where quotations on the self could change without the price-pegging of a caste system or an aristocracy. What we mean by other-direction (though the term itself connotes this only in part) involves a redefinition of the self, away from William James’ emphasis on the externals of name, dress, possessions, and toward inner or interactional qualities. The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed; he wants not to gull or impress, let alone oppress, others but, in the current phrase, to relate to them; he seeks less a snobbish status in the eyes of others than assurance of being emotionally in tune with them. He lives in a glass house, not behind lace or velvet curtains.

  In the self-conscious society of our tim
es,10 the negative aspects of these qualities have been emphasized by many readers of The Lonely Crowd, and the positive aspects underemphasized. The authors of The Lonely Crowd are not conservatives harking back to a rugged individualism that was once a radical Emersonian ideal.11 No lover of toughness and invulnerability should forget the gains made possible by the considerateness, sensitivity, and tolerance that are among the positive qualities of other-direction. Young, well-educated Americans today want more and different things out of life than their ancestors did: security and affluence enable them to want “the good life” rather than the full dinner pail, although at the same time the multiplicity in choices has raised doubts as to what is good. There has been a general tendency, facilitated by education, by mobility, by the mass media, toward an enlargement of the circles of empathy beyond one’s clan, beyond even one’s class, sometimes beyond one’s country as well. That is, there is not only a great psychological awareness of one’s peers but a willingness to admit to the status of peer a wider range of people, whether in one’s own immediate circle or vicariously through the mass media. The problem for people in America today is other people. The social and psychological landscape has become enlarged because those other people are more in number and, possibly, in heterogeneity than ever before. But other figures in the landscape—nature itself, the cosmos, the Deity— have retreated to the background or disappeared, with the result that aspects of character that were always in some sense “there” or available become more salient, and other aspects recede.

  The concepts of inner-direction and other-direction, loosely used to refer at once to social setting and to social character, helped us organize into clusters a number of possibly related historical developments. However, in the course of history various social and psychological configurations which have seemed permanent splinter and give way to new alignments—much as political parties in this country have served at once to divide some interests and to bring others together. Likewise, some of the behavioral items we linked with inner-direction or other-direction can no longer be classified in the same way. For example, many upper middle-class people who, in the 1940’s, were proponents of “life adjustment” in school, would today, after Korea and Sputnik, be found in the ranks of those demanding discipline and “hardness.” So, too, an investigation of a California suburb by Harold Hodges indicated that the language of popularity and group-adjustment is favored by the lower middle class and eschewed by the upper middle class.

  The concept of social character, as employed in The Lonely Crowd, involved a tentative decision as to what was important for salient groups in contemporary society. It was thus a different concept from national or modal character, which is usually a more aggregative statement about personality dispositions in a group or nation; we were only interested in certain aspects of character in very imprecisely specified parts of the population, and even there primarily in what was changing. But we did not differentiate carefully enough between character, behavior, values, and a style or ethos of particular institutions—the sorting out that this involves is a still uncompleted task for research. When we were working on The Lonely Crowd, we were convinced that the older social sciences—history, political science, economics—gave far too little weight to the understanding of social change that might be gleaned from a better grasp of psychoanalytic psychology; even so, we sought in the book to emphasize both the social character and the major institutions of the modern world and not to assume that the institutions were merely the frozen shapes given to their childhood dreams by rigidly imprisoned adults. And yet all our experience of the world since the book was written has led us to believe that modern industrial society can press into service a great variety of social character types. Thus we see in Japan contemporary institutions which have been powerful enough to incorporate people without waiting twenty or thirty years for a new generation to be created. What the Japanese do and what they say has changed more radically than their social character.12

  Any sufficiently large society will throw up a slate of psychological types varied enough to suggest possibilities in many different directions; if America is not fascist, for example, it is not for want of sadists or authoritarians. There are plenty of these to staff the more benighted jails and mental hospitals, or to compete for the post of sheriff in many Southern communities; it is the institutional and juridical forms—and their own limitations—that make it difficult for these men to coalesce into a political movement. To be sure, these protections for liberty would collapse in the absence of men of appropriate character to run or watch over them; but our point is that, within wide limits, in a large society institutions evoke within individuals the appropriate character. Or, more precisely, given the range of responses of which men are capable, institutions may select certain of these for reinforcement (while other, more rebellious, impulses are channeled off through a variety of escapes); and once the institutions are there—created as Kenneth Boulding points out in The Organizational Revolution by the achievements of the full-time organizer—enough facets of enough people prove adaptable to the going concern. Karl Marx saw the factories of the industrial revolution as a massive power, wrung from the labor of the workers and now confronting them with that labor in alienated form so that they in turn were alienated. Max Weber saw the bureaucracies of a later stage of capitalism and socialism as an “iron cage” within which man was caught and to which he could only resign himself with stoicism, his historical perspective garnishing his sense of duty.

  It is in line with this view that many social scientists have concluded that individual and social character may become of decreasing importance as “factors of production” in the modern world; that indeed to interpret society one need not inquire into the motives of men, but rather notice that the situations they face are much alike, that the power of modern technology and science, modern economic organization, modern ideological and party organization is such that a single style of society becomes possible everywhere: a society based on efficient bureaucracies and the production of great quantities of goods, which may be used either to advance national prestige or power or to improve the material circumstances of life. Many Americans, including the authors of The Lonely Crowd, have been reluctant to accept these versions of determinism and have thought it possible to moderate the intractabilities of institutions, believing particularly that it made an enormous difference whether these institutions were created and controlled by a central elite for definite objectives, as in totalitarian countries, or were developed with less central guidance, growing up in more vegetable fashion, as in democratic countries.

  On reconsideration, we still resist simplistic answers to the question as to the relative weight of social character and social institutions even in a world unsettled by the drastic message written in the sky above all countries: “You, too, can be modern and industrial.”

  Despite the residual plasticity of most adults which renders them employable under a variety of social systems, there are limits. The American Indians made poor slaves, the Africans good ones—and this is not only because (as Stanley Elkins points out in Slavery) the slave ships broke the spirit and destroyed the cultural cohesion of the latter; some African tribes were better for plantation work, others for household work. For empirical reasons of experience, not on ideological grounds, the Spaniards found themselves eliminating native West Indians and replacing them with more adaptable imports, whose social character made survival under harsh conditions possible. Under our tutelage, the Pueblo Indians have proved less friable than other Indian tribes, more resistant if not more resilient. So, too, the history of immigration in this country is dramatically full of instances of differential response to apparently similar conditions: second-generation Japanese-Americans sought education, while third-generation Chinese were still running laundries and restaurants—and so on throughout the list of entrants, who only begin to approach each other in the third and later generations. Quite apart from the importance of individuals in h
istory, and of their idiosyncratic character, the role of social character independent of institutions can at times be decisive. Moreover, as pointed out in The Lonely Crowd, while different kinds of social character can be used for the same kind of work within a society or institution, we believe that there will eventually be consequences of the fact that character types who fit badly pay a high price in anomie, in contrast to the release of energy provided by congruence of character and task.

  This is not to say that those leaders of the “developing” peoples are correct who believe that they can retain their unique cultural or racial tradition while also going “modern”; as many are poignantly aware, the effective means they employ tend to become their own ends, so that one can foresee eventual supersession of the regionally distinct religions and cultures which once were created and carried, if not unequivocally cherished, by people of very different social character. Against these means and against the hope of power and plenty (and at times as revenge against those who had previously monopolized these), traditional values fight everywhere a rearguard action, buttressed by decaying institutions and the ineffectively recalcitrant social character of the older generation. If this were the end of the human story, one could invent a new “plastic man,” as many writers of science fiction and behavioristic psychology have already done, to take the place of nineteenth-century economic man, and to get rid of the “problem of man” in the social sciences.