The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  But even in this field, where speculation must reign in the absence of probing, we refused in The Lonely Crowd and we still refuse to join the undifferentiated assault against the shoddy symbolic goods carried by the media. The vast amount of time most Americans spend with television is appalling, but the pre-TV alternatives, such as driving aimlessly about, sitting vacantly, attending sports events, or playing canasta, are hardly more “real” or less appalling.

  Yet there is certainly the danger that The Lonely Crowd could be read as an invitation to intellectuals to go slumming in the mass media, and to patronize rather than to seek to alter the folksy pursuits of the semi-educated. Nevertheless, we think that the book might help those who want to reform the media to go about it in a more intelligent way. For one thing, we encouraged people to discriminate among the media; and today we would point out that the movies are less cowardly than they were when we wrote, partly because, beaten like radio by TV, they have the relative freedom of a small power. Even in television, the networks differ among themselves in their sense of responsibility, and individual stations have sometimes shown courage in the topics chosen for a few dramas and documentaries, even if they have seldom shown imagination in the tone of treatment (a theme Reuel Denney deals with in his book The Astonished Muse). Furthermore, the veto groups operate with particular potency in the field of the media, so that a single irate letter to a network or a sponsor or a congressman can affect a whole program—usually adversely.

  Our gravest concern about the media, however, is not their long-run impact on culture, but the fact that the press, the news magazines, and particularly the newsreels have become far more ethnocentric if less parochial than in 1948; they cover somewhat more foreign news, if only to smother it in the self-serving slogans and misleading rhetoric of the Cold War. In this perspective, we are forced by events and by our own developing thought to view the mass media more soberly and less hopefully than we did when we wrote The Lonely Crowd.

  Autonomy and utopia. In a review of The Lonely Crowd, Richard L. Meier and Edward C. Banfield wrote:

  What kind of a person is the autonomous man in a predominately other-directed society likely to be in the future? This is a question which the authors treat fleetingly. We suggest that—if our children and our students are any criteria—the new autonomous type will be very much affected by the tremendous quantities of information that are open to him, and by the comprehensive quick-acting, and relatively unbiased institutions which he can use. His relationship to the machine, will be that of designer or diagnostician, but not slave. His logic will be multi-valued, often with concrete statistical formulations. When probabilities are equal for all alternatives, he will choose spontaneously. His loyalties will not be intense; however, internationalism as an ideal will appeal to him. Play of the imagination will be more varied, but plans for the future will be more prominent (the present vogue of science fiction may be symptomatic of this). His moral outlook will be inquisitive and pragmatic: unfortunate circumstances lead to antisocial actions. Sin, therefore, will have been explained away when its causes are understood. But antisocial action will remain the one thing these otherwise independent personalities will have to avoid. What the consensus establishes as the social good will still be sacred.23

  The attitude of these reviewers is markedly different from that of most reviewers and, so far as we can tell from correspondence and discussion, most articulate readers of The Lonely Crowd, who, as already stated, tended to regard inner-direction and autonomy as much the same thing, and who would regard with horror the fluid and perhaps overloaded sensibilities hopefully viewed by Messrs. Meier and Banfield. Partly, I suppose, the confusion between autonomy and inner-direction that many readers fell into reflects our own inability to make the idea of autonomy a more vivid and less formal one—to give it content, as inner-direction gained content because the concept called to mind many historical exemplars available to everyone’s experience. Beyond that, a strand of nostalgic thinking has always been strong in America despite the waves of boosterism and progress-oriented optimism that have often been more dominant.

  Indeed, in the 1950’s, as we have said, it sometimes appeared that many educated young people saw only two possible roles for themselves: that of the well-heeled organization man (other-directed), and that of the well-shod cowboy (inner-directed); it was in this period that “togetherness” joined “do-gooder” as a term of contempt. In this shrinkage of alternatives, little gestures of personal assertion—or a solipsistic lack of concern for others— have often masqueraded as autonomy. The degeneration of individuality into egocentrism and eccentricity is an old American story.

  We were not entirely blind to these possibilities when composing The Lonely Crowd, and we sought in writing the last chapter on “Autonomy and Utopia” to modify the emphasis on “freedom from” and to give a picture of human relatedness that would be visionary without being too formal or sentimental. Our imaginations proved unequal to the task of inventing a utopia in line with our analysis.

  The one strongly utopian note that remains in the book now seems to us the least satisfactory, namely, the whole idea that autonomy in the post-industrial culture was to be found in play and leisure, and not in work. We were right to conclude that the old subsistence motives of hunger and gain were evaporating. We were also right to reject the alternative of persuading workers that what they are doing is meaningful by making it chummy and by the pseudo-participation evoked in a corporate happy family. Undoubtedly for many people, perhaps particularly for women whose main concern is their families, a job does not need to be “meaningful,” provided that the hours are short and convenient, transport no problem, and the work itself neither exhausting nor demeaning. The center of gravity, of seriousness, for many people can and does lie outside their occupation. Yet we failed fully to appreciate the costs of that relocation, not only for men trained in a work-driven age but for their descendants in the foreseeable future. The criticism Daniel Bell voices of us as “prophets of play” in Work and Its Discontents seems to us just.24

  Here, too, the problem that faces us is one of imagination, perhaps also of courage. The alternative to drifting toward make-work on the one hand and play on the other, for the millions of people whose work is obviously not socially vital, is so drastic a reorganization of work and hence of society that it is hard to envisage. Not only must we get rid of needless, parasitical work but we must also reduce the scale of the workplace and make the management of it a shared enterprise. For the first time, social wealth and organizational knowledge make it conceivable to move in this direction, so that work becomes more demanding, more varied, more participative, and less compartmentalized from education and politics. Something like this was the goal of the guild socialists; elements can be found—mostly, alas, ideological trim— in the Yugoslav factories; adumbrations occur in a few American corporations, such as Polaroid. In any event, we agree with Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd, that men need to feel adequate: to hold down a job, and then to be related to life through consumership, is not enough. In fact, we soon realized that the burden put on leisure by the disintegration of work is too huge to be coped with; leisure itself cannot rescue work, but fails with it, and can only be meaningful for most men if work is meaningful, so that the very qualities we looked for in leisure are more likely to come into being there if social and political action fight the two-front battle of work-and-leisure.

  The Lonely Crowd tended to minimize the objective pressures that were making work harder for the professional and managerial strata, even while hours were being reduced and grim conditions alleviated for the declining proportions of farm, personal service, and blue-collar workers. A division of labor is hardly ideal that demands a 70-hour week for doctors, top executives, and high civil servants, with little regard for their own personal rhythms (professors and artists may work in spurts for quite as long hours, but under somewhat less outside pressure), while the rest of the population finds its work s
o boring and meaningless that it seeks to cut down the working day and to retire early if finances permit.25

  Although some of the more articulate critics of The Lonely Crowd have attacked it as too sanguine about American leisure and abundance, there are others who have criticized it (notably my colleague Talcott Parsons) for overemphasizing alienation from work and from family life when, as much objective evidence indicates, so many aspects of American life have been upgraded.26 One thing that has happened as the result of the very order of changes The Lonely Crowd discusses is a rise in the expectations held of life by many Americans who have risen above subsistence. This is the American form of “the revolution of rising expectations,” of which the motto is “If things are good, why aren’t they better still?” Alexis de Tocqueville, in his book on the ancien rÉgime, was perhaps the first observer to notice that revolutions occurred, not when people were implacably oppressed, but when standards of living were rising and political oppression becoming somewhat less harsh; the revolution in Hungary and the overturn in Poland in 1956 are only among the most recent illustrations. Kenneth Keniston has recently described the alienation that has been spreading among many privileged young Americans.27 Many are in search of a cause, in search of commitment, and some look for this outside the United States, very rarely behind the Iron Curtain, but in India, Africa, Cuba, or Israel. It would seem that men cannot live for long in a static, sober world drained of ideology—a world of veto groups and countervailing power and modest, commonsensical gains within the system; nor will it be efficacious for the old to tell the young that to try for anything better will bring worse evils in its train: fear can act as a damper on hope only in a static society or for a short period.

  If in the “developing” countries today men see ahead the goal of eliminating poverty and exploitation, in the “overdeveloped” ones men become aware of more subtle frustrations, more indirect alienation. As yet, they see no way to make a political program out of personal demands for meaningful work, unphony personal relations, and unmilitaristic foreign policy. It is only in the field of race relations, where tolerance can be practiced individually and expressed among colleagues and where the issue is clear, that the more sensitive young people have been able to make their views vocal and effective. In the field of foreign policy, the tolerant remain at the mercy of the curdled indignants; and many Americans have no better utopia than a mad return to the epoch of Theodore Roosevelt, imitating both the bravado of our own past and that of the Soviet Union—as if it were possible to make a whole nation inner-directed again by internalizing the arms race under the label of national purpose. If they win out, the fragile chance will be lost that America might offer to the rest of the world some clues to the uses of literacy and abundance.

  Here we find ourselves back at a national boundary, even though earlier, in discussing social character, we agreed that the world is getting more homogeneous, and that enclaves, whether national or regional, are bound to disappear, providing the existing enclaves do not make us all disappear. Contrary, however, to what many nostalgic people believe, the loss of older fixed boundaries of class, caste, and nation does not inevitably mean a growing sameness in the world in terms of the development of personal styles of life. Disappearance of the more exotic differences will only discomfit tourists, provided that the differences that once arose among men due to their geographic location can be replaced by differences arising from the still unexplored potentialities of human temperament, interest, and curiosity. The current preoccupation with identity in this country (notable in the great impact of Erik H. Erikson’s work) reflects the liberation of men from the realm of characterological necessity. The power of individuals to shape their own character by their selection among models and experiences was suggested by our concept of autonomy; when this occurs, men may limit the provinciality of being born to a particular family in a particular place. To some, this offers a prospect only of rootless men and galloping anomie. To more hopeful prophets, ties based on conscious relatedness may some day replace those of blood and soil.28

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the support provided by the Committee on National Policy of Yale University. The Committee invited me to Yale, gave me a completely free hand to do what I wanted, with whom I wanted, and supported the work from funds provided by the Carnegie Corporation, to which my thanks are also due. I am particularly grateful to Harold D. Lasswell and Eugene V. Rostow, now Dean of the Yale Law School, the Committee members most closely concerned with the work.

  My indebtedness to my two collaborators is very great. It was with Reuel Denney that I first began to explore the world of the teen-agers, their tastes in music, literature, movies, and so on. The discussion of the socializing and escapist functions of literature in Chapters IV, V, VII, and IX draws heavily on memoranda written by him; and the treatment of work and play in the contemporary middle class in Chapters XIV through XVI draws on his contributions and on the work of students whom we have jointly encouraged in the study of these problems. In 1949, Mr. Denney worked with me in the task of revising and recasting the final manuscript. Nathan Glazer worked with me in the first half year of research at Yale, helping in the planning and carrying out of our initial interviews and in clarifying our joint thinking on the relation between politics and character structure.29 His curiosity of mind and generosity of spirit enlarged our colleagueship. The treatment of the role of character structure and history in Chapter I, of the relation between character and politics in Part II, and of the concept of autonomy in Chapter XIII owes much to drafts written by him. Moreover, the abridgment of the paperback edition originally published by Doubleday and here, with minor editing, republished, was largely his work, and the preface to this revised edition was written in collaboration with him.

  While engaged in writing this book, Mr. Glazer and I were also conducting interviews with Americans of different ages, both sexes, from various social strata, and we were also soliciting interviews from friends and collaborators in other parts of the country. These interviews—plainly not intended to be representative of the enormous diversity of America, but rather to be a source of illustrative data—were drawn on only to a slight extent for the writing of The Lonely Crowd. Indeed, it should be emphasized that this book is based on our experiences of living in America—the people we have met, the jobs we have held, the books we have read, the movies we have seen, and the landscape. However, the fact that we were simultaneously conducting interviews and planning several community studies forced us toward the clarification and systematization of our ideas, which then served in some measure to guide interviewing and the analysis of interviews (some of the later phases of this work are reported in Faces in the Crowd, published by Yale University Press in 1952). The study of a community in Vermont, briefly reported there, was made under the direction of Martin and Margy Meyerson, assisted by Rosalie Hankey (now Rosalie Hankey Wax) who also provided us with many interviews. In collaboration with the Meversons, Dr. Genevieve Knupfer undertook a group of interviews in East Harlem and elsewhere; coding of these interviews was done by Rose Laub Coser; Erika Eichhorn (now Erika Bourguignon) gathered and analyzed a group of Rorschach tests in the Vermont community. Sheila Spaulding assisted with research on American history and on the theory of the population cycle. Among friends who read the manuscript, or portions of it, I want especially to thank Lewis Dexter, Herman Finer, Erich Fromm, Everett Hughes, Nathan Leites, Evelyn T. Riesman, John R. Seeley, Milton Singer, M. Brewster Smith, and Martha Wolfenstein.

  D R

  Cambridge, Mass.

  November 1960

  PART I: CHARACTER

  I

  Some types of character and society

  … nor can the learned reader be ignorant, that in human nature, though here collected under one general name, is such prodigious variety, that a cook will sooner have gone through all the several species of animal and vegetable food in the world, than an author will be a
ble to exhaust so extensive a subject.

  Fielding, Tom Jones

  I speak of the American in the singular, as if there were not millions of them, north and south, east and west, of both sexes, of all ages, and of various races, professions, and religions. Of course the one American I speak of is mythical; but to speak in parables is inevitable in such a subject, and it is perhaps as well to do so frankly.

  Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States

  This is a book about social character and about the differences in social character between men of different regions, eras, and groups. It considers the ways in which different social character types, once they are formed at the knee of society, are then deployed in the work, play, politics, and child-rearing activities of society. More particularly, it is about the way in which one kind of social character, which dominated America in the nineteenth century, is gradually being replaced by a social character of quite a different sort. Why this happened; how it happened; what are its consequences in some major areas of life: this is the subject of this book.

  Just what do we mean when we speak of “social character”? We do not speak of “personality,” which in current social psychology is used to denote the total self, with its inherited temperaments and talents, its biological as well as psychological components, its evanescent as well as more or less permanent attributes. Nor even do we speak of “character” as such, which, in one of its contemporary uses, refers to only a part of personality—that part which is formed not by heredity but by experience (not that it is any simple matter to draw a line between the two): Character, in this sense, is the more or less permanent socially and historically conditioned organization of an individual’s drives and satisfactions —the kind of “set” with which he approaches the world and people.