The Lonely Crowd
Page 44
Contemporary forms of social determinism, on the other hand, tend to assume that our civilization is running down, a view we find in the nineteenth century only in a few observers, like Brooks Adams, who could hardly believe their own prophecies—even the pessimists of the last century could not envisage how terrible politics might become in the twentieth century. But today men feel politically impotent, and their philosophizing reinforces die mood that befits their character and situation.
6. Compare the valuable discussion in Robert K. Merton, “Patterns of Influence: a Study of Interpersonal Influence and of Communications Behavior in a Local Community,” Communications Research 1948–1949, ed. Lazarsfeld and Stanton, pp. 180–219.
7. Taken from the pamphlet, Four Americans Discuss Aid to Europe, Study No. 18 (Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Survey Research Center, 1947), p. 13.
1. The Park Forest study is the work of Herbert J. Gans (“Political Participation and Apathy,” unpublished Divisional Master’s Paper, University of Chicago. 1950).
2. At the University of Chicago a graduate student studying the movement away from craft preoccupations to selling and customer-relation preoccupations among retail furriers, found the word “sincerity” being used in a similar way, as in the case of one man who observed, explaining how he defended himself against competition: “You got to be able to talk to the customers … when a customer comes in you can turn her one way or the other … the customers can tell if you’re sincere.” Success for this man was defined not in terms of money alone but in terms of “a personal following” and “a better class of people.” See Louis Kriesberg, “The Relationship of Business Practices and Business Values among Chicago’s Retail Furriers” (Master’s thesis, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, 1949).
3. I am much indebted to Howard C. Becker for analysis of these interviews. I have profited greatly from the penetrating discussion of sincerity as applied to reactions of the audience to a Kate Smith War Bond Drive in Robert K. Merton, Mass Persuasion (New York, Harper, 1946).
4. All this, of course, was written before the 1952 election, which offers some good examples of these attitudes.
5. An excellent example of an inner-directed attitude toward the evaluation of sincerity and skill is to be seen in Lincoln’s relationships to his wartime generals. As in the case of Grant’s drinking, he wanted to know whether these men could do a job, not whether they were nice, or nice to him.
6. Cf. Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” The Communication of Ideas, ed. Lyman Bryson, p. 95, on the “status-conferral” function of the media.
1. See the excellent article by Leo Lowenthal, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” Radio Research, 1942–43, ed. Lazarsfeld and Stanton (New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1944), p. 507. Dr. Lowenthal links the shift from “heroes of production” to “heroes of consumption” to major social changes in American life.
2. It should be clear that monopolistic competition, both in business and politics, is competition. People are very much aware of their rivals, within and without the organization. They know who they are, but by the very nature of monopolistic competition they are seldom able to eliminate them entirely. While we have been talking of fair trade and tolerance, this should not obscure the fact that for the participants the feeling of being in a rivalrous setup is very strong. Indeed, they face the problem of so many other-directed people: how to combine the appearance of friendly, personalized, sincere behavior with the ruthless, sometimes almost paranoid, envies of their occupational life.
3. “Manager Meets Union: a Case Study of Personal Immaturity,” Human Factors in Management, ed. S. D. Hoslett (Parkville, Missouri, Park College Press, 1946), p. 77.
4. Ironically enough, but typically enough, Samish craves the one power he does not have: social power in the society-page sense. A poor boy in origin, he can make or break businessmen and politicians but cannot get into the more exclusive clubs. And while consciously he is said to despise these social leaders whom he can so easily frighten and manipulate, he cannot purge himself of the childhood hurts and childhood images of power that make him vulnerable to their exclusion of him. In this, of course, he resembles other and better-known dictators.
I have drawn on Carey McWilliams, “Guy Who Gets Things Done,” Nation, CLXIX (1949), 31–33; and Lester Velie, “Secret Boss of California,” Collier’s, CXXIV (August 13, 20, 1949), 11–13, 12–13.
1. Patterns of Culture (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1934; reprinted New York, Pelican Books, 1946).
2. The remark is quoted by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in “The Soldier’s Faith,” 1895, reprinted in Speeches (Boston, Little, Brown, 1934), p. 56.
3. Mary McCarthy’s fine article, “America the Beautiful,” Commentary, IV (1947), 201, takes much the same attitude as the text.
4. Robert S. Lynd, Knowledge for What? (Princeton University Press, 1939), pp. 54–113
1. See Robert K. Merton, “Social Structure and Anomie,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1949).
2. “The Psychology of Apathy,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, X (1949), 290; see also Nathan Leites, “Trends in Affectlessness,” American Imago, Vol. IV (April, 1947).
3. For fuller discussion of this now dormant freedom, see my article, “Legislative Restrictions on Foreign Enlistment and Travel,” Columbia Law Review, XL (1940), 793–835.
4. Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry C. Greene (New York, Macmillan, 1927), pp. 102–103. Freud, whose attitude was remarkably similar, gives us as one of his favorite quotations, a similar passage from Ferdinand Lassalle: “A man like myself who, as I explained to you, had devoted his whole life to the motto ‘Die Wissenschaft und die Arbeiter’ (Science and the Workingman), would receive the same impression from a condemnation which in the course of events confronts him as would the chemist, absorbed in his scientific experiments, from the cracking of a retort. With a slight knitting of his brow at the resistance of the material, he would, as soon as the disturbance was quieted, calmly continue his labor and investigations.” See Freud, Wit and Its Relations to the Unconscious, trans. Brill (New York, Moffat, Yard, 1916), p. 115.
1. The term “productive orientation” is that used by Erich Fromm in Man for Himself for the type of character that can relate itself to people through love and to objects and the world generally through creative work. I have drawn freely on his discussion for my concept of autonomy.
2. Hanns Sachs, Freud, Master and Friend (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1945), pp. 46–47, tells one of Freud’s favorite stories, which seems as relevant to social as to individual structure: “Many years ago an old professor of medicine died who had ordered in his will that his body should be dissected. The autopsy was performed by a renowned pathological anatomist and I functioned as his assistant. ‘Look here,’ the anatomist said to me, “these arteries! They are as hard and thick as ropes. Of course the man couldn’t live with them.’ I answered him: ‘All right. But it is a fact that the man did live till yesterday with these blood vessels.’”
3. Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1947), p. 120.
1. Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York, William Morrow, 1949); see also the very perceptive observations in the article by Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” American Sociological Review, VII (1942), 604–616; reprinted in Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture, ed. Kluckhohn and Murray.
2. Food, of course, is only a symbol or instance of the way in which styles of play in America are greatly dependent on the post-Protestant (Jew or Catholic) and pre-Protestant (Negro) immigration. From the 1880’s to the 1920’s, for example, the white Protestant majority waged an increasingly unsuccessful war to maintain its dominance not only in the sphere of work, where it was well skilled, but a
lso in the sphere of play, where it was constantly having to fight for a precarious competence. Hence it resisted any new potentialities for consumership offered by the work-disfranchised ethnics, ranging from Italian food to the borsch-circuit comedy and the Negroid Charleston. Prohibition was the last major battle in that war. Its bad effects were blamed on the “Sicilian gangster.” Now obviously the fact that Jews and Negroes could climb, and even avoid the ethnic affronts, most easily in the arts and entertainments, put them in a good position of leadership when the larger society itself shifted to embrace the values of consumption. Thus it is that the ethnics are the ones who liberate the majority. Increasingly, play and leisure in America may suffer from the lack of a customary though under-recognized stimulus and Élan when there are no more immigrants or people close to immigrant culture.
1. See “The Hot-Rod Culture,” by Eugene Balsley, in the American Quarterly, II (1950), 353.
2. The war experience seemed to establish that there was little practical need for such hardship therapies in the interests of production or warmaking. It turned out that characterological other-direction and political indifference did not imply an inability to stand physical hardships. Efforts were made to treat the soldier as if he were in America, with cokes, radio programs, and entertainments from home. Apparently such “softness” did not impede fighting power. The tractability of Americans made it possible to build an army less on hierarchy than on group-mindedness. The tractability, the familiarity with machines, the widespread social skills, and the high educational level made it possible to train men quickly for the fantastically varied services and missions of modern warfare.
3. Charles Livermore, formerly a CIO official, recently called my attention to the extremely rapid disavowal by Detroit auto workers of overstuffed, Grand Rapids furniture. Many in the last several years have gone in for modern design.
3. The closest existing analogy to this “commodity library” is perhaps the neighborhood librarian, who can help children find their way to books because she seems to be out of the direct line of school and home authority, because her interest often actually is in helping rather than in forcing children, and because being typically of an inner-directed background, she does not insist on personalizing the relationship with the child.
4. My emphasis throughout on the mass media and the commodities turned out by mass production should not be taken as an implicit denial of the importance of the more traditional fine arts. My effort rather has been directed to closing the gap generally believed to exist between high culture and mass culture. The relation between high culture and popular culture seems to me filled with hopeful possibilities in spite of the fear, snobbery, and anti-intellectualism that now so often operate to inhibit easy movement between them.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Todd Gitlin
Twenty Years After—A Second Preface
Preface to the 1961 Edition
PART I: CHARACTER
Chapter I. Some Types of Character and Society
I. Character and Society
High Growth Potential: Tradition-directed Types
A Definition of Tradition-direction
Transitional Growth: Inner-directed Types
A Definition of Inner-direction
Incipient Decline of Population: Other-directed Types
A Definition of Other-direction
The Three Types Compared
The Case of Athens
Some Necessary Qualifications
II. The Characterological Struggle
Chapter II. From Morality to Morale: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation
I. Changes in the Role of the Parents
Parental Role in the Stage of Tradition-direction
Parental Role in the Stage of Inner-direction
Character and Social Mobility
Character Training as a Conscious Parental Task
Passage from Home
Parental Role in the Stage of Other-direction
Character and Social Mobility
From Bringing up Children to “Bringing up Father”
The Rule of “Reason”
II. Changes in the Role of the Teacher
The Teacher’s Role in the Stage of Inner-direction
The Teacher’s Role in the Stage of Other-direction
Chapter III. A Jury of Their Peers: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation ( Continued )
I. The Peer-group in the Stage of Inner-direction
II. The Peer-group in the Stage of Other-direction
The Trial
“The Talk of the Town”: the Socialization of Preferences
The Antagonistic Cooperators of the Peer-group
Chapter IV. Storytellers as Tutors in Technique: Changes in the Agents of Character Formation ( Continued )
I. Song and Story in the Stage of Tradition-direction
Chimney-corner Media
Tales of Norm and “Abnorm”
II. The Socializing Functions of Print in the Stage of Inner-direction
The Whip of the Word
Models in Print
The Oversteered Child
III. The Mass Media in the Stage of Other-direction
The Child Market
Winner Take All?
Tootle: a Modern Cautionary Tale
Areas of Freedom
Chapter V. The Inner-directed Round of Life
I. Men at Work
The Economic Problem: the Hardness of the Material
Ad Astra per Aspera
II. The Side Show of Pleasure
The Acquisitive Consumer
Away from It All
Onward and Upward with the Arts
Feet on the Rail
III. The Struggle for Self-approval
Chapter VI. The Other-directed Round of Life: from Invisible Hand to Glad Hand
I. The Economic Problem: the Human Element
From Craft Skill to Manipulative Skill
From Free Trade to Fair Trade
From the Bank Account to the Expense Account
II. The Milky Way
Chapter VII. The Other-directed Round of Life (Continued): The Night Shift
I. Changes in the Symbolic Meaning of Food and Sex
From the Wheat Bowl to the Salad Bowl
Sex: the Last Frontier
II. Changes in the Mode of Consumption of Popular Culture
Entertainment as Adjustment to the Group
Handling the Office
Handling the Home
Heavy Harmony
Lonely Successes
Good-bye to Escape?
III. The Two Types Compared
PART II. POLITICS
Chapter VIII. Tradition-directed, Inner-directed, and Other-directed Political Styles: Indifferents, Moralizers, Inside-dopesters
I. The Indifferents
Old Style
New Style
II. The Moralizers
The Style of the Moralizer-in-power
The Style of the Moralizer-in-retreat
III. The Inside-dopesters
The Balance Sheet of Inside Dope
Chapter IX. Political Persuasions: Indignation and Tolerance
I. Politics as an Object of Consumption
II. The Media as Tutors in Tolerance
Tolerance and the Cult of Sincerity
Sincerity and Cynicism
III. Do the Media Escape From Politics?
IV. The Reservoir of Indignation
V. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”
Chapter X. Images of Power
I. The Leaders and the Led
Captains of Industry and Captains of Consumption
II. Who Has the Power?
The Veto Groups
Is There a Ruling Class Left?
Chapter XI. Americans and Kwakiutls
PART III: AUTONOMY
Chapter XII. Adjustment or Autonomy?
I. The Adjusted, the Anomic, the Autonomous
&n
bsp; II. The Autonomous Among the Inner-directed
III. The Autonomous Among the Other-directed
Bohemia
Sex
Tolerance
Chapter XIII. False Personalization: Obstacles to Autonomy in Work
I. Cultural Definitions of Work
II. Glamorizers, Featherbedders, Indispensables
White-collar Personalization: toward Glamor
The Conversation of the Classes: Factory Model
The Club of Indispensables
III. The Overpersonalized Society
The Automat versus the Glad Hand
Chapter XIV. Enforced Privatization: Obstacles to Autonomy in Play
I. The Denial of Sociability
II. Sociability and the Privatization of Women
III. Packaged Sociabilities
Chapter XV. The Problem of Competence: Obstacles to Autonomy in Play ( Continued )
I. The Play’s the Thing
II. The Forms of Competence
Consumership: Postgraduate Course
The Possibilities of Craftmanship
The Newer Criticism in the Realm of Taste
III. The Avocational Counselors
IV. Freeing the Child Market
Chapter XVI. Autonomy and Utopia
Index