The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  In the first part of this chapter we look at the meaning of work for the inner-directed man of the nineteenth century in America; is arbitrary because the paths of work and pleasure are deeply intertwined. Moreover, the argument in this and the next two chapters advances in a somewhat dialectic fashion: the inner-directed and other-directed patterns are occasionally stated in their most extreme forms, in order to bring out sharply the contrast between them. Since, however, the problems of the inner-directed are no longer problems many of us face, the reader as well as the writer must be on guard against a tendency to over-idealize inner-direction and to be overcritical of other-direction.

  I. Men at Work

  THE ECONOMIC PROBLEM: THE HARDNESS OF THE MATERIAL

  Our task in this and the following chapter is to compare the meaning of work in the epochs depending on inner-direction and other-direction respectively. The change is one of degree, like most historical changes. The inner-directed man tends to think of work in terms of non-human objects, including an objectified social organization, while the other-directed man tends to think of work in terms of people—people seen as something more than the sum of their workmanlike skills and qualities. Thus for the inner-directed man production is seen and experienced in terms of technological and intellectual processes rather than in terms of human cooperation. Human relations in industry, as well as relations among industries and between industry and society as a whole, seem to the inner-directed man to be managed by the anonymous cooperation brought about through the “invisible hand”—Adam Smith’s wonderful phrase for economic planning through the free market.

  Men were of course aware, in the period most heavily dependent on inner-direction, that the achievement of cooperation in the organization of work was not simply automatic. There was much talk of the need for discipline, sobriety, integrity. Yet it is fair to say that the human mood of the work force was not yet felt to be a major problem. Labor was still too numerous—it spilled over into the factory from the prolific farms and could easily be moved elsewhere in an age before passports. Moreover, labor’s work force was disciplined by the new vaiues as well as some kept from the era of tradition-direction; in addition, by evangelistic religion in the advanced industrial countries. The managerial work force, on the other hand, was not felt as a problem either, because the size of the administrative staff was small and because inner-directed types could cooperate with each other on physically and intellectually evident tasks whether or not they liked or approved of each other. Their inner-directed code, rather than their cooperative mood, kept them from constant sabotage.

  As a result, even in large and bureaucratized organizations people’s attention was focused more on products (whether these were goods, decisions, reports, or discoveries makes little difference) and less on the human element. It was the product itself, moreover, not the use made of it by the consumer, that commanded attention. Despite what Marx called “the fetishism of commodities,” the inner-directed man could concern himself with the product without himself being a good consumer: he did not need to look at himself through the customer’s eyes. The problem of marketing the product, perhaps even its meaning, receded into the psychological background before the hardness of the material—the obduracy of the technical tasks themselves.

  The opening frontiers called people to a seeming oversupply of material tasks in industry and trade, geography, and scientific discovery. This is especially clear if we look at the geographical frontier. While the frontiersman cooperated with his sparse neighbors in mutual self-help activities, such as housebuilding or politics, his main preoccupation was with physical, not with human, nature. The American frontiersman, as Tocqueville encountered him in Michigan, was, though hospitable, uninterested in people. He found physical nature problematical enough: to alter and adapt it required that he become hard and self-reliant.

  The same thing was true in other fields of enterprise and pioneering. Missionary zeal, with its determination to carry the gospel to such far distant lands as India, China, and the Pacific isles, reflected the nineteenth-century pioneering spirit fully as much or more than it did any religious impulse of brotherhood. The missionary and his family frequently—as, for example, in Hawaii—became the nucleus of a European element which was finally to gain economic and financial control. So also were the numerous communistic experiments the product of imaginative individualistic thinking. Likewise, intellectual entrepreneurs staked out fields of knowledge and threw themselves with passionate curiosity into discovering the secrets of nature. Though they might be as jealous and competitive as Newton, their contacts with co-workers remained on the whole impersonal; they were in communication with one another through very simple channels of papers and congresses and without much formal organization of team research. Here, too, the invisible hand seemed to rule, and work was felt as a mode of relating oneself to physical objects and to ideas, and only indirectly to people.

  It is apparent to us today that, in the economic field at least, the invisible hand was partly a fact, though its historically temporary nature escaped people, and partly a myth.1 Government did a good deal of planning even after mercantilism waned—planning nonetheless forceful for being relatively unbureaucratized and nonetheless systematic for being operated through such time-honored levers as the tariff, the judiciary, and canal and railroad subsidies. Moreover, the impersonality of economic life against which moralists and socialists complained in steady chorus from Sir Thomas More to R. H. Tawney was never quite so great as it seemed. Business was often paternal; as we can see in such a novel as Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, it relied heavily on values that survived from feudalism. Tradition-directed tones of personalization survived in many situations, despite the ideology and, to some degree, the existence of free competition. These personalizations undoubtedly ameliorated some of the severities and abuses of inner-directed individualism.

  Nevertheless, as compared with today, the economy was quite loose-jointed and impersonal and perhaps seemed even more impersonal than it actually was. This encouraged the ambitious labors of men who could attend to society’s expanding capital plant, to the bottlenecks in the technology of agriculture, extractive industry, and manufacturing. The capital goods industries were of decisive importance; internally, they were needed to bridge the gap between population and subsistence; externally, they were needed to support war-making and colonization. Indeed, the over-steered men of the period, especially in the regions touched by Puritanism or Jansenism, went far beyond the specifically economic requirements and rewards held out to them. They cut themselves off from family and friends, often from humanity in general, by their assiduity and diligence.

  Work, one might add, provided a strategic protection for those who could not live up to all the requirements of the prevailing character ideal. For we have no right to assume that even the successful men of the period were in complete adjustment with the social character imposed on them. Many apparently well-adjusted men of an older time in American life must have been aware that their acceptance of inner-direction involved their own efforts to conform—that their conformity was far from automatic.

  The linkage between work and property in an era of private competitive capitalism (as compared with the later capitalism described by Berle and Means in The Modern Corporation and Private Property) reinforced the possibilities of isolation from people. Property, for the inner-directed man, became freely transferable; the individual was not attached to it as in the earlier era by sentimental and traditional ties, but he attached it to himself by his choices, by his energetic actions. No longer an affair of the extended family, property became an extended part, a kind of exoskeleton, for the individual self.2

  Yet private property of this sort, though useful as a safeguard and testing ground for the inner-directed man, is probably not an essential condition for his rise in our time. On the frontiers of the expanding Russian economy of the early five-year plans, there were entrepreneurs very much like European and Ameri
can types of many decades earlier: ambitious, energetic, self-reliant men engaged in transforming physical nature, instituting large-scale formal organization, and revolutionizing technology. The inner-directed man—sometimes models of him were imported from America and Germany—made his appearance at Dneprostroi, Magnitogorsk, and the Turk-Sib railroad.

  Even today we can watch similar types emerging in India among the leaders of industry and government. It looks as if, in any large and differentiated population, reservoirs of potential inner-direction exist, only awaiting the onset of a western-oriented type of industrialization in order to come to the fore.

  AD ASTRA PER ASPERA

  The ambitious note in the inner-directed person’s attitude toward work in the phase of transitional growth of population was expressed in the schoolbook proverb: ad astra per aspera. The stars were far away, but still he aimed from them, in terms of a lifetime of effort. He could afford such a long-term commitment because of the generality of the aim: he wanted money or power or fame or some lasting achievement in the arts or the professions. He wanted to leave a reputation, a memorial, something as tangible as Mr. Darling’s tombstone inscription, still fairly legible after one hundred and fifty years of New England weather.

  But there was another, a social, reason why long-term ambition of this sort could be afforded. The beckoning frontier of colonization and industrialization, the beckoning frontier of intellectual discovery, too, required long-term investment. To build a railroad or an Indian civil service or the intellectual system of a Comte, a Clerk Maxwell, or a Marx was not an affair of a few months. Competition was keen. Still, the number of competitors in any single field was small, and if a man was bright and energetic, he could hope that his invention, capital investment, or organizational plan would not be rendered rapidly obsolete by others. For, although the invisible hand of technological and intellectual change moved immeasurably faster than it had done in the still earlier population phase of high growth potential, it moved slowly nonetheless in comparison with today. Change was on the scale of a working lifetime; that is, an individual could hope to keep up with the others, even without paying special notice to them: they were not likely to repeal or revise overnight what he knew or did on his own.

  As recently as 1920 an American boy of the middle class was not too worried about the problem of committing himself to a career. If he came of good family, he could count on connections; if not, he could count on the credit of his social—that is, his visibly inner-directed—character. He could dream of long-term goals because the mere problem of career entry and survival was not acute; that he might for long be out of a job did not occur to him. He could orient himself, if he chose a profession, by his daydreaming identification with the stars in his field. A young doctor might think of Osier, a young lawyer of Choate or Elihu Root or Justice Holmes, a young scientist of Agassiz or Pasteur, a young painter or writer of Renoir or Tolstoy. Yet there is often tragedy in store for the inner-directed person who may fail to live up to grandiose dreams and who may have to struggle in vain against both the intractability of the material and the limitations of his own powers. He will be held, and hold himself, to his commitment. Satirists from Cervantes on have commented on this disparity between pursuing the stars and stumbling over the mere earthiness of earth.

  II. The Side Show of Pleasure

  The sphere of pleasure and consumption is only a side show in the era of inner-direction, work being of course the main show. This is truer for men than for women. Some men diminish attention to pleasure to the vanishing point, delegating consumption problems to their wives; these are the good providers. Others turn consumption itself into work: the work of acquisition. Still others, perhaps the majority, are able to use the sphere of pleasure as an occasional escape from the sphere of work.

  This divergence is characteristic of the shift from tradition-direction to inner-direction. The tradition-directed man does not make a choice whether to work or to play or whether to create a private blend of his own; matters are decided for him by tradition. To some degree play is marked off from work, linguistically and by special costuming and ceremonial. To some degree work and play are blended, for instance in handicraft art applied to articles of daily use or in ceremonials that accompany a socially or economically useful activity. The inner-directed man, however, is freed from the direction of tradition and he is consciously and sharply aware of the difference between work and play. At least where theocratic controls are relaxed, he must decide on his own how much time to allot to play. To be sure, not much room is left for leisure in terms of time: hours are long and work is arduous: the tired businessman is invented. Nevertheless, the width of choice is sufficient to allow us to distinguish between those who work at consumption with the passion of acquisition and those who consume as a more or less licit and occasional escape.

  THE ACQUISITIVE CONSUMER

  In an era depending on inner-direction men who exhibit the desired arduousness in the sphere of work—as shown by their productivity—can afford a good deal of independence in their moments spared for consumption. One result, in the America of the last century, was the crazy millionaire who, having established his status, save in the most exalted circles, by satisfying society’s requirements on the productive front, could do as he pleased on the pleasure front. He could hang the “do not disturb” sign over his play as well as over his work. Once possessed of commanding wealth, he could resist or accept as he chose the ministrations of wives and daughters and even more specialized advisers on consumption, taste, and connoisseurship.

  A period when such men live is, therefore, the heyday of conspicuous consumption, when energies identical with those deployed at work are channeled by the rich into their leisure budget. While the producer dynamically creates new networks of transportation in order to exploit resources and distribute the finished and semi-finished product, the consumer of this period begins to act with equal dynamism on the market. The producer pushes; the consumer pulls. The first stage in his consumership is a passionate desire to make things his.

  Perhaps he lavishes money and energy on a house, to the point where it comes to resemble a department store—recall the wonderful sets and furnishings in the films Citizen Kane and The Ghost Goes West. Perhaps he gathers the treasures of Europe, including titled sons-in-law. Perhaps he goes in for steam yachts or diamonds or libraries or, united with rich cronies in civic spirit, for theaters, planetariums, and zoos. In most cases the activity is as self-justifying as the search for the North Pole, pursued with hardly more hesitation or boredom than the tasks of the production frontier. There is no need to hesitate because in this period most consumer goods, like work commitments, do not become rapidly obsolete but are good for a lifetime.

  The type of acquisitive consumer who is less concerned with building up a private hoard or hobby and more concerned with showing off his possessions with style seems at first glance other-directed in his attention. Yet, if we go back to Veblen’s classic work, we can see, I think, that the consumers he describes are other-directed in appearance only. The Veblenese conspicuous consumer is seeking to fit into a role demanded of him by his station, or hoped-for station, in life; whereas the other-directed consumer seeks experiences rather than things and yearns to be guided by others rather than to dazzle them with display. The conspicuous consumer possesses a standard allowing him readily to measure what others have, namely cash. This standard can penetrate the opacity of objects, even objects unique in their nature, such as a geographical site (so much a front foot) or a beautiful woman (the best money can buy). This gives the consumption of the inner-directed man its relatively impersonal quality—it is as impersonal as his production, of which it is a reflection. Similarly, if he collects old masters, he is taking a standardized step on the gradient of consumption for his social class at the same time that he is buying a good investment or at least a good gamble. Moreover, he is, in a way, a “master” himself, a technical man, and he can admire the technique of t
he Renaissance artist, while few other-directed consumers of today, even though they may know a good deal more about art, dare admire the esoteric technique, or seeming lack of it, of a non-representational artist. The conspicuous consumer is engaged, therefore, in an externalized kind of rivalry, as indicated by Veblen’s use of such terms as “ostensible,” “emulative,” “conspicuous,” and the rest of his beautifully ironic thesaurus. The other-directed consumer may compete in what looks like the same way, but only to the degree that the peers impel him to. His desire to outshine, as I have already tried to show, is muted.

  To be sure, all these changes are changes in degree, and Veb-len’s emphasis on leisure and consumption—like, in a very different way, Keynes’ emphasis on what we might call relentless spending—are indexes of the social changes paving the way for and accompanying the characterological ones.

  AWAY FROM IT ALL

  The acquisitive consumer brings to the sphere of consumption motivations and ideals similar to those he manifests in the sphere of production. The escaping consumer seeks, on the contrary, to dramatize an emotional polarity between work and play.

  Because the whole concept of escape is a very slippery one, we must always ask: escape from what and to what? The inner-directed individual can afford a certain kind of escape since his character and situation give him a core of sufficient self-reliance to permit dreaming without disintegration. He learns this as a boy when he escapes by himself a good deal of the time—playing hooky from the dreary and demanding tasks of home and school. Unlike Tootle the engine, he is seldom worried by the fear that, if he gathers primroses by the river’s brim, he will not make the grade—though he may be punished, since the right to play has not yet been granted school children. Perhaps he will feel guilt when he escapes, but the guilt will lend savor to the adventure, turning escape into escapade. Like the Victorian father, the stability of whose family life often depended on an occasional visit to a prostitute, the inner-directed person can let himself go in “un-socialized” ways because in the ways that count, the ways of work, he has a definitely socialized self to return to.