The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  On a more factual plane, we assumed in The Lonely Crowd that the political accomplishments of the New Deal—social security, reasonably full employment, labor’s right to organize, and so on—would not be reversed and would in fact be readily extended. Although we had regarded the New Deal as shifting power away from Wall Street toward the industrial managers (less enlightened, we thought, than the bankers), we regarded neither Wall Street nor big business as monolithic; and we saw that America had made the tacit but irreversible discovery, after 1939, that a war economy is a politically feasible cure for depression; hence, we took for granted an economy of abundance, however sustained. All this was probably too complacent. Stimson Bullitt correctly points out (in To Be a Politician) that the postwar increase in the size and opulence of the middle class pushed the residual poor and unorganized still further away from political influence. About the all too evident dangers of the war economy we shall have more to say hereafter.

  In judging The Lonely Crowd today, however, it should be remembered that in 1948 political imagination and flexibility, even though rare, could still be reasonably hoped for. The Lilienthal-Baruch plan for the control of atomic energy had been proposed; so had the Marshall Plan. Both initiatives had been turned down by the Soviet Union and, we knew, this had prevented their becoming matters of great domestic controversy, as would have happened to any serious proposal to “give something away” to the Russians. Still, both plans made clear that men in high places could have large aims; and under the Marshall Plan (whatever disingenuous and eventually self-defeating Cold War arguments were deployed in its wake) money was appropriated by Congress for economic aid alone. Before Korea and McCarthy, foreign policy could still be debated, though of course not without pressure from jingos, and a story in Time or the New York Times about Morocco or Pakistan was not almost invariably angled in terms of the Cold War and the American bases. We had not yet put ourselves by domestic exploitation of the struggle with world Communism into the bi-partisan deep freeze of the last ten years.

  Nevertheless, even if one recalls the relatively less oppressive and less terrifying political climate of 1948, it is hard to justify now the implicit assumption in The Lonely Crowd that the fragmentation of American political power by the veto groups and the political apathy of most Americans could be taken somewhat lightly, since the major tasks of our national life were those of personal development, the removal of “privatization,” and the development of city planning. Preoccupied with our own bewildering country, we concerned ourselves only marginally with the entry of Asia, Africa, and Latin America into the arena dominated by European peoples. (In 1948, India was just becoming independent, in the midst of massacres; the Communists were only then consolidating power in a disorganized China; the only industrialized non-Western state was under American occupation; and, save for Liberia and Ethiopia, there were as yet no independent African Negro states, or near prospect of any.) In seeking to describe the moral climate of American abundance, The Lonely Crowd treated this in isolation from a world which was just beginning to clamor for like blessings, and in which the most sensitive and intelligent Americans recognized the justice, the realism, and the complexities of the claim.

  These are matters of the book’s focus, and its tone and temper, but the largest controversy having to do with Part II of The Lonely Crowd has been over the issue of who has the power; that is, whether, as we contended, there is no clear hierarchy of power and an inhibition by veto groups of decisive action by leaders, or whether, as G Wright Mills argues, there is a power elite.

  The concept of the veto groups is analogous to that of countervailing power developed in Galbraith’s American Capitalism, although the latter is more sanguine in suggesting that excessive power tends to call forth its own limitation by opposing power, resulting in greater freedom and equity all round (at a possible slight price in inflation). Both books agree that there is no single coherent, self-conscious power elite, but an amorphous set of would-be elites, bidding for and forming coalitions. In The Lonely Crowd we argued that this state of affairs made it easier to stop than to initiate action on the national scene (locally there were bosses and elites), the result being a leaderless society in which people withdrew from affairs that had become unmanageable and incomprehensible.17

  We do not see that this general picture has changed radically; it has changed some. The Strategic Air Command seems to us to have considerably greater power than any single agency possessed in 1948. For a time, it brought the Navy along (by sharing nuclear capability) and reduced the Army to a role of minor irritant and occasional veto group. In alliance with the AEC, it forced the Oppenheimer hearings and temporarily silenced the opponents of Teller and an H-bomb foreign policy. In alliance with the big and little contractors, their unions and workers, and “their” senators, it has made the war economy so central to our whole economy that the stock market rises when the Summit breaks down. Many of these things have happened, not because SAC has planned it that way, but rather because it has had a clearer sense of mission than the other services, has been led by men of great dedication, and has often worked in a vacuum of civilian leadership. Even so, SAC has not gone unchallenged. Despite the help provided by diplomatic stalemates and provocations, it was not able to persuade President Eisenhower to order a permanent alert; and despite its enormous influence in Congress, it has periodically felt—like most rich people—pinched for money. So, too, the AEC has met countervailing power, from the unlikely source (if one follows Mills) of the scientific community; indeed, for Mills even a zealous innovator like Teller must be a mere aide-de-camp of the big brass, the big businessmen, and the big politicians.18 Reflecting on particular decisions since the end of World War II, such as the decision not to intervene in Indochina or the scries of decisions on disarmament policy and a test ban,19 we think people may well come to feel as we do, that there are few cohesive groups which consistently know what they want and get it (though some men of SAC and of the AEC do have clear, one-eyed aims), but rather a continual intramural combat, resting not only on the personal feuds of a palace guard (that, too) but also on divergent economic and ideological interests and on different understandings of the world and how to cope with it.

  The main problem, then, of our approach does not lie in our closing our eyes to the existence of a power elite, or in our being taken in by what Mills regards as the illusory and distracting game being played at the middle levels of power, which were once the major levels. What we failed properly to understand was that our government is at once much too powerful, being able to threaten the whole world, including Americans, with extermination (and to risk this result in a series of provocative bluffs), while being at the same time too powerless in the face of the veto groups to move toward the control of this threat. Just as our cities are helpless before the bulldozers that herald the highways that herald the clogged transport and flight from the city—the auto industries being the peacetime analogue of SAC—so our national government only managed to hold the line against the massed vendors of “defense” because a general as President cared deeply for peace and was somewhat less vulnerable to fear of being thought soft or an appeaser than most public men, and because of the fortunate complacency and fear of inflation he shared with the Coca-Cola kings and other non-defense-oriented golfing partners.

  But, as we have just indicated, there is no security for the citizen in the incoherence of the government and its incapacity to act. The veto groups in an earlier epoch provided in their interstices and clashes some areas of freedom for the individual. Now, however, the relative helplessness of government often has the effect of making citizens feel more rather than less helpless. When one man can give the order or make the mistake that will decimate the planet, countervailing power now works no better than the traditional constitutional balance of power. The fait accompli of a strategically placed group—often subordinate officials or officers, not necessarily holders of the “command posts”—can replace democratic pol
itics. In this situation, many men see a strengthened national executive as the only way out, even though one result may be an increase in the very nationalism and chauvinism which contribute to international anarchy and the likelihood of total and near-total war.

  Nationalism, however, whether in its creative guise as a source of a sense of pride and of effectiveness in overcoming tribalism or in its phase of rigor mortis among the big powers, is more than a tool manipulated by a power elite which itself remains detached and immune: elites are as much the captives as the creators of nationalism. And the failure of American initiatives in 1953, when the death of Stalin made a rapprochement with the Soviet Union conceivable, was not the result of a decision made by such an elite; the causes lie deeper and are still more serious.

  It is when we turn, all too briefly, to these causes that we begin to see the limitations of analysis in terms of veto groups and countervailing power. For these groups, quite apart from the specific economic interests they may draw upon, are inevitably shaped in their ways of perceiving and acting by the climate of a business culture. The old capitalist values have decayed, in ways The Lonely Crowd suggests, but the institutions shaped by them hang on; there is nothing to take their place. We refer not only to the emphasis on individual profit, from which the more sensitive or apathetic escape, but also to the credentials by which institutions survive and are judged. Quite apart from forms of ownership, an industrial society nourishes a certain psychological set or drive: it tends to be expansionist, so that people feel inferior if “their” organization does not grow or progress; certain measurable, calculable, “rational” values are understood, while others can hardly be stated, let alone supported. Here again, the institutions that inner-directed men set going now appear to run, as it were, under their own inertia, foreclosing by their very existence some alternatives while opening others. Men no longer conspire enthusiastically in their own alienation: they are often somewhat disaffected, but they lack the conviction that things could be done any other way —and therefore cannot see, save in a peripheral way, what is wrong with how things are.

  Thus, at this moment of history, men cannot afford to take pride and hope in the release of atomic energy, imaginative and appealing as this may appear to a later age; nor can men take pride in the industrial institutions created by ingenuity and dedication, institutions which now inspire neither devotion nor new visions of what men might do. For the most part, the so-called leaders are only the more pampered and overworked, but hardly less helpless, prisoners. They “have” a greater power than the rest, but are often confused as to how to deploy it. To see the world in the same sterile way, it is not necessary (as we understand Mills to contend) to have attended the same schools, shared the same economic interests, or joined the same clubs. We believe that there are still large reservoirs of imagination and a sense of responsibility among Americans, but political activation of new ways of thought can no longer depend on capturing the leadership of an unorganized non-elite group as the basis for a political movement; with the growth of affluence, it is the malaise of the privileged rather than of the underprivileged that becomes increasingly relevant.20

  In its own emphases and certainly in the minds of its readers, The Lonely Crowd directed attention more to problems of “freedom from” than to problems of “freedom to.” Here, of course, not being Manchester liberals, we regarded the state as an ally, not as an enemy, though one rendered weak and impotent by the veto groups. But we focused primarily on areas outside of formal politics: on group pressures, on the encircling demands for participation, for agreeableness, for emotional and not merely behavioral assent. We contributed to the gnawing fear of conformity—a fear that often has confused cooperative action in pursuit of common ends with duplicitous acquiescence and values imitated from some reference group or accepted out of fear of seeming to be different, whether the issue was important or not or whether it involved a matter of principle or not.

  A quite different concern in the book, namely, “privatization,” had much less impact, perhaps because we were not read by those whose isolated situation cut them off from people and ideas, either because they were members of minority groups, or were subordinated women, or were poor or elderly. (No doubt, privatization has declined, as more women have entered the labor force, as isolated farmers have gained access to town and to the mass media, and as literacy has spread, and leisure also.) While our treatment of an imposed and empty gregariousness was still primarily in terms of “freedom from” (freedom in the older liberal vein from societal pressures and in the newer one from those enforced by “private” bodies), our treatment of privatization was in terms of “freedom to.” Still, we wish we could have said much more concerning the kind of society in which these individual feelings of freedom and effectiveness could flourish, the Utopia which would make of autonomy not only an individual achievement, against the grain of our common life, but an increment to the effectiveness of that life and hence to the individual’s own sense of himself.

  The mass media. In dealing with the mass media, The Lonely Crowd reflected the discovery of researchers, particularly Paul F. Lazarsfeld, that political propaganda and campaigns did not have an easy, conscienceless victory over the isolated and helpless members of an anonymous mass, but that groups and “cells” mediated between the messages coming from the centers of diffusion and the individual, guiding the latter’s interpretation and selection. We emphasized, for example, how the mass media operated in the socialization of young people, by providing an agenda for the peer group as well as ephemeral materials for it to consume. And we saw controllers of the media as themselves vulnerable to group pressure, led by their aspirations to respectability to make politics a more prominent part of the news than strict attention to profit-making might dictate. Thus, we saw the mass media, not as distracting Americans from their political tasks, but as an invitation to politics—one, to be sure, greatly distorted by the cult of personality and by the audience appeal of outbursts of indignation.

  Being not too impressed by the massiveness of the media in short-run campaigns, either to sell goods or to sell ideas—seeing here also the veto groups and countervailing power at work—we concentrated on the problem of long-run effects. We asked, for instance, what was the influence on the political climate of the United States of the fact that the media, whether as advertisers or as vendors of entertainment and news, presented an image of life as smiling, tolerant, urbane, and (save in sports and politics) relatively affectless. Did this increase the inside-dopester orientation, at the expense of a deeper involvement for some, a deeper indifference for others? What was the result for the cultural climate of the fact that the media presented consumer goods so glamorously, in competition with other less touted values—a theme greatly clarified by Galbraith’s argument in The Affluent Society that the private sector mercilessly competes with the unadvertised needs and unshowy goods of the public sector?21 What was the influence on American emotional life and private life (as distinguished from the private sector) of bombardment by the mass media’s emphasis on personal relations, even or especially when this was accomplished with more subtlety than critics steeped in the traditions of high culture were prepared to recognize?

  So far as we can see, it is no easier to answer such questions now than when we wrote. (The advent of television, which arrived with a rush after our book was written, did not lead to much painstaking study of the differences between the pre-TV and the post-TV quality of group life—nothing comparable to the investigation recently done in England by Hilde Himmelweit and her co-workers.22) It is obviously impossible neatly to separate the media from their wider cultural context, just as it is impossible to separate the messages of advertising in the media from the “messages” carried by the goods themselves, displayed in the stores, the streets, and the home. We still believe that the long-run impact of the media on the style of perception, the understanding (or, more often, the misunderstanding) of life, the sense of what it means
to be an American boy or girl, man or woman, or old folk, is immense —more important than the often overestimated power of the media to push one marginally differentiated product or candidate over another.