The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Physical living patterns are an important factor in this setting. Houses consist typically of one room, without walls to separate the age groups and their varied functions. The households are often also economic units; the man does not go off to office or factory—and he does not go far. People are not yet so worried about saving time that they feel children are a nuisance; indeed, they may not feel themselves to be so very different from children anyway.

  Furthermore, societies in the phase of high growth potential are characterized by a very low degree of social mobility. The parents train the child to succeed them, rather than to “succeed” by rising in the social system. Within any given social class society is age-ranked, so that a person rises as a cork does in water: it is simply a matter of time, and little in him needs to change.

  The upper social groups in such a society mature almost as quickly as the lower ones; the roles to be learned by children in both ranks of society differ only slightly in complexity. Even so, it is likely that a greater degree of individualization occurs at an earlier historical point in the upper strata than in the lower—as seems to have been the case in the Middle Ages when nobles, wandering artists, and priests were often closer to inner-direction than to the peasant’s type of tradition-direction. Yet while the training of the leaders is of course somewhat more prolonged and their characters are more individuated, the young at all social levels take their places quickly in work, ceremony, and sexual role.

  In summary: the major agency of character formation in societies dependent on tradition-direction is the extended family and its environing clan or group. Models for imitation are apt to be generalized in terms of the adult group as a whole rather than confined to the parents. What is imitated is behavior and specific traits such as bravery or cunning. The growing child does not confront problems of choice very different from those he watched his elders face; and his growth is conceived as a process of becoming an older, and therefore wiser, interpreter of tradition.

  PARENTAL ROLE IN THE STAGE OF INNER-DIRECTION

  Character and social mobility. With the onset of the transitional-growth phase of the population curve, opportunities open for a good deal of social and geographical mobility. People begin to pioneer on new frontiers: frontiers of production, of colonization, of intellectual discovery. Although this affects only a few directly, society as mediated by the primary group no longer proclaims unequivocally what one must do in order to conform, Rather, the growing child soon becomes aware of competing sets of customs—competing paths of life—from among which he is, in principle, free to choose. And while parentage and social origins are still all but determinative for most people, the wider horizon of possibilities and of wants requires a character which can adhere to rather generalized and more abstractly defined goals. Such a character must produce under its own motive power the appropriate specific means to gain these general ends.

  To be sure, the goals and ideals that are held up to children and exemplified for them by their parents’ own goals and ideals differ between, on the one hand, the confident, secular man of the Renaissance, glorying in his individuality and freedom from old restraints, and, on the other hand, the God-fearing puritan, driven by conscience and anxious about his salvation.1 Yet both types are very much individuals, both are internally driven, and both are capable of pioneering. Finally, a society in which many people are internally driven—and are driven toward values, such as wealth and power, which are by their nature limited—contains in itself a dynamic of change by the very competitive forces it sets up. Even those who do not care to compete for higher places must do so in order not to descend in the social system, which has become a more open and less age-graded and birth-graded one.

  All these tendencies are reinforced when roles become more complicated as the division of labor progresses. The acceleration of the division of labor means that increasing numbers of children can no longer take their parents’ roles as models. This is especially true on the male side; characterological change in the west seems to occur first with men. Mothers and grandmothers could until very recent times train daughters for the feminine role on the basis of tradition alone. Thus in the recent movie, House of Strangers, the Italian-born banker who, like Giannini or Ponzi, rises out of an immigrant setting and departs from his own father’s pattern, sets for himself ambitious goals of power and money such as he believes to be characteristic of a true-born American, while his wife is a stereotype of the woman who clings to the tradition-directed ways of her early background.

  Yet, while parents in the stage of transitional growth of population cannot be sure of what the adult working role and mode of life of their children will be, neither can conformity to that role be left to chance and behavioral opportunism. To possess the drive that is required to fulfill demanding and ever more demanding roles calls for greater attention to formal character training. Especially in the Protestant countries character training becomes an important part of education, though of course this does not mean that most parents consciously undertake to produce children to meet new social specifications.

  The new situation created by increased social mobility implies that children must frequently be socialized in such a way as to be unfitted for their parents’ roles, while being fitted for roles not as yet fully determined. Homing pigeons can be taught to fly home, but the inner-directed child must be taught to fly a straight course away from home, with destination unknown; naturally many meet the fate of Icarus. Nevertheless, the drive instilled in the child is to live up to ideals and to test his ability to be on his own by continuous experiments in self-mastery—instead of by following tradition.

  Character training as a conscious parental task. In a society depending on tradition-direction to insure conformity, much of the parent’s effort is directed toward keeping the child from being a nuisance to the adult world; and this task is regularly delegated to older brothers or sisters or to other adults. The child soon learns that behavioral conformity is the price of peace, and he learns to propitiate—or at least not to annoy—those around him. The inner-directed parent, on the other hand, asks more of his child, just as he asks more of himself. He can do this because, with the passing of the extended kinship family, the parent has his children much more under his own undivided and intensive scrutiny and control. Not satisfied with mere behavioral conformity, such a parent demands conformity of a more subtle sort, conformity as evidence of characterological fitness and self-discipline. The Puritan, especially, relentlessly scrutinizes his children as well as himself for the signs of election, that is, of salvation by the predestining God. And with secularization these signs are translated into signs predicting social mobility—signs that indicate a future facility in “passing,” not from hell to heaven, but in the status hierarchy. On the one hand the parent looks for signs of potential failure—this search arises in part from guilty and anxious preoccupation about himself. On the other hand he looks for signs of talent—this must not be wasted.

  In this way begins the process we see in extravagant form in the forced-draft childhood of John Stuart Mill, who studied the classics and wrote long essays under the zealous eye of his father before he was ten. Even when parents are less self-consciously pedagogical than James Mill, they may unconsciously impose their demands on children merely by being forceful, tense, and highly charged themselves. Indeed, the inner-directed man is frequently quite incapable of casual relationships. For one thing, he is preoccupied with his own concerns and therefore worried about wasting time; conversely, by not wasting time he avoids anxious self-preoccupation. For another thing, his relation to people, his children included, is mediated by his continuing, character-conditioned need to test and discipline himself.

  This process, in the Renaissance-Reformation character which we term inner-directed, is less tense in the Latin countries than in the Protestant or Jansenist north, and in the north less tense in Lutheran or Anglican communicants than in the Calvinistic and Pietistic sects. Wherever inner-dire
ction has attained relatively undisputed sway in a significantly large middle class, however, the production of the character structures of the coming generation becomes increasingly rationalized, just as is production in the non-domestic economy. In both cases the task of production is no longer left to an external group sanction or situational pressure but is installed as a drive in the individual, and tremendous energies are unleashed toward the alteration of the material, social, and intellectual environment and toward the alteration of the self.

  The social and spatial arrangements of middle-class life make it hard for the child to see through, let alone evade, the pressures put upon him to become inner-directed. As compared with the one-room house of the peasant or the “long house” of many primitive tribes, he grows up within walls that are physical symbols of the privacy of parental dominance. Walls separate parents from children, office from home, and make it hard if not impossible for the children to criticize the parents’ injunctions by an “undress” view of the parents or of other parents. What the parents say becomes more real in many cases than what they do—significant training for a society in which words become increasingly important as a means of exchange, direction, and control. The conversation between parents and children, interrupted by the social distance that separates them, is continued by the child with himself in private.

  The very pressure applied to the process of socialization by strict child rearing prolongs, as compared with the earlier era, the period in which socialization takes place. Freud has described this situation wonderfully in his concept of the watchful superego as a socializing agency incorporated into the child and accompanying him throughout life with ever renewed injunctions. This concept, while less fruitful in application to other societies, does seem to fit the middle class during the heyday of inner-direction in the west. One might even say that the character structure of the inner-directed person consists of the tension between superego, ego, and id. In a current clichÉ children are “brought up” rather than, as some would have it, “loved up”; and even when they have left home they continue to bring themselves up. They tend to feel throughout life that their characters are something to be worked on. The diary-keeping that is so significant a symptom of the new type of character may be viewed as a kind of inner time-and-motion study by which the individual records and judges his output day by day. It is evidence of the separation between the behaving and the scrutinizing self.

  Passage from home. As the growing child takes over from his parents the duty of self-observation and character training, he becomes prepared to face and meet situations that are novel. Indeed, if he rises in the occupational hierarchy that becomes increasingly elaborated in the phase of transitional growth or if he moves toward the various opening frontiers, he finds that he can flexibly adapt his behavior precisely because he need not change his character. He can separate the two by virtue of the fact that he is an individual with an historically new level of self-awareness.

  This awareness of the self is cause and consequence of the fact that choice is no longer automatically provided—or, rather, excluded—by the social setting of the primary group. Under the new conditions the individual must decide what to do—and therefore what to do with himself. This feeling of personal responsibility, this feeling that he matters as an individual, apart from his family or clan, makes him sensitive to the signals emanating from his internalized ideal. If the ideal, as in the puritan, is to be “good” or, as in the child of the Renaissance, to be “great,” what must he do to fulfill the injunction? And how does he know that he has fulfilled these difficult self-demands? As Max Weber and R. H. Tawney saw very clearly in their portraits of the puritan, little rest is available to those who ask themselves such questions.

  The relative uncomfortableness of the more powerfully inner-directed homes—the lack of indulgence and casualness in dealing with children—prepares the child for the loneliness and psychic uncomfortableness of such questions and of the social situations that he may confront. Or, more exactly, the child’s character is such that he feels comfortable in an environment which, like his home, is demanding and which he struggles to master.

  We may say, then, that parents who are themselves inner-directed install a psychological gyroscope in their child and set it going; it is built to their own and other authoritative specifications; if the child has good luck, the governor will spin neither too fast, with the danger of hysteric outcomes, nor too slow, with the danger of social failure.

  PARENTAL ROLE IN THE STAGE OF OTHER-DIRECTION

  Character and social mobility. In the phase of incipient population decline, the conditions for advancement alter significantly.

  The inner-directed person is able to see industrial and commercial possibilities and to work with the zeal and ruthlessness required by expanding frontiers in the phase of transitional growth of population. Societies in the phase of incipient population decline, on the other hand, need neither such zeal nor such independence. Business, government, the professions, become heavily bureaucratized, as we see most strikingly, for instance, in France. Such societies increasingly turn to the remaining refractory components of the industrial process: the men who run the machines. Social mobility under these conditions continues to exist. But it depends less on what one is and what one does than on what others think of one—and how competent one is in manipulating others and being oneself manipulated. To look at it from another point of view, when the basic physical plant of a society is felt to be built, or rather when the building can be rou-tinized by management planning, there begins to be room at the top for the other-directed person who can see the subtle opportunities given in the human setting.2 Though material abundance becomes technologically possible, people continue to work—and do make-work—at a pace more in keeping with the earlier era of transitional growth: drives for mobility are still imbedded in their character. But the product now in demand is neither a staple nor a machine; it is a personality.

  To bring the other-directed personality type and his typical economic framework together it might be observed that there exists in the production of personality the same sort of product differentiation that is characteristic of monopolistic competition generally. The economists apply the term product differentiation to a firm’s effort to distinguish products not by price but by small differences, sufficient, however, in connection with advertising, to take the product out of direct price competition with otherwise similar competing products. Thus one cigarette is made slightly longer, another nearly oval, while still another is given a cork tip or a green box. Time and Newsweek engage in product differentiation. So do the makers of automobiles, streamliners, and toothpastes, and the operators of hotels and universities. So, too, people who are competing for jobs in the hierarchies of business, government, and professional life try to differentiate their personalities (as contrasted with their actual technical skills) —without getting as far out of line, let us say, as a 1934 prematurely streamlined Chrysler. In this study, the social aspect of this competitive procedure, since it will be extended to cover persons and services as well as commodities, will be termed “marginal differentiation,” and thus distinguished from the related concept used by the economists.

  Freud coined the phrase “narcissism with respect to minor differcnces” for the pride which individuals, groups, and nations manifest about small insignia which distinguish them from other individuals, groups, and nations. Marginal differentiation sometimes does have this quality of pride or of what Veblen called “invidious distinction.” But the phenomenon I have in mind is one of anxiety rather than pride, of veiled competition rather than openly rivalrous display; the narcissism is muted or, as we shall see, alloyed with other, stronger elements.

  In these circumstances parents who try, in inner-directed fashion, to compel the internalization of disciplined pursuit of clear goals run the risk of having their children styled clear out of the personality market. Gyroscopic direction is just not flexible enough for the rapid ada
ptations of personality that are required, precisely because there will be other competitors who do not have gyroscopes. Inhibited from presenting their children with sharply silhouetted images of self and society, parents in our era can only equip the child to do his best, whatever that may turn out to be. What is best is not in their control but in the hands of the school and peer-group that will help locate the child eventually in the hierarchy. But even these authorities speak vaguely; the clear principles of selection that once guided people of inner-directed character no longer apply. For example, social climbing itself may be called into public question at the same time that it is no longer so unequivocally desirable in terms of private wish. As some Fortune surveys indicate, a safe and secure job may be preferred to a risky one involving high stakes. What is more, it is no longer clear which way is up even if one wants to rise, for with the growth of the new middle class the older, hierarchical patterns disintegrate, and it is not easy to compare ranks among the several sets of hierarchies that do exist. Does an army colonel “rank” the head of an international union? A physics professor, a bank vice-president? A commentator, the head of an oil company?