The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  The autonomous person, living like everyone else in a given cultural setting, employs the reserves of his character and station to move away from the adjusted mean of the same setting. Thus, we cannot properly speak of an “autonomous other-directed man” (nor of an “anomic other-directed man”) but only of an autonomous man emerging from an era or group depending on other-direction (or of an anomic man who has become anomic through his conflict with other-directed or inner-directed patterns or some combination of them). For autonomy, like anomie, is a deviation from the adjusted patterns, though a deviation controlled in its range and meaning by the existence of those patterns.

  The autonomous person in a society depending on inner-direction, like the adjusted person of the same society, possessed clear-cut, internalized goals and was disciplined for stern encounters with a changing world. But whereas the adjusted person was driven toward his goals by a gyroscope over whose speed and direction he had hardly a modicum of control and of the existence of which he was sometimes unaware, his autonomous contemporary was capable of choosing his goals and modulating his pace. The goals, and the drive toward them, were rational, nonauthoritarian and noncompulsive for the autonomous; for the adjusted, they were merely given.

  Obviously, however, as long as tight despotic or theocratic controls of conduct existed, it was difficult to “choose oneself” either in work or play. For, while it is possible to be autonomous no matter how tight the supervision of behavior as long as thought is free—and thought as such is not invaded effectively until modern totalitarianism—in practice most men need the opportunity for some freedom of behavior if they are to develop and confirm their autonomy of character. Sartre, I believe, is mistaken in his notion that men—other than a few heroic individuals—can “choose themselves” under conditions of extreme despotism.

  The autonomous are not to be equated with the heroes. Heroism may or may not bespeak autonomy; the definition of the autonomous refers to those who are in their character capable of freedom, whether or not they are able to, or care to, take the risks of overt deviation. The case of Galileo illustrates both points. In order to accomplish his work, Galileo needed some freedom, such as the freedom to exchange astronomical texts and instruments, to write down results, and so on. Yet he chose a nonheroic course. In the Soviet Union and its satellites today he could not make this choice, since the choice between martyrdom or secrecy is not available under the grisly regime of the NKVD.

  The four centuries since the Renaissance have seen the rise and fall of many periods when theocratic, royal, or other authoritative controls were not as tight as in Soviet Russia today; periods also when economic life for many was raised above mere subsistence, thus providing opportunities for autonomy. And there were loopholes for autonomy even in the earlier despotic periods, since the despots were inefficient, corrupt, and limited in their aims. Modern totalitarianism is also more inefficient and corrupt than it is often given credit for being, but its aims are unlimited and for this reason it must wage total war on autonomy—with what ultimate effectiveness we do not yet know. For the autonomous person’s acceptance of social and political authority is always conditional: he can cooperate with others in action while maintaining the right of private judgment. There can be no recognition whatever of such a right under totalitarianism—one reason why in the Soviet Union artistic works and scientific theories are so Telentlessly scrutinized for “deviationism,” lest they conceal the seeds even of unconscious privacy and independence of perception.

  Fortunately for us, the enemies of autonomy in the modern democracies are less total and relentless. However, as Erich Fromm has insisted in Escape from Freedom, the diffuse and anonymous authority of the modern democracies is less favorable to autonomy than one might assume. One reason, perhaps the chief reason, is that the other-directed person is trained to respond not so much to overt authority as to subtle but nonetheless constricting interpersonal expectations. Indeed, autonomy in an era depending on inner-direction looks easier to achieve than autonomy today. Autonomy in an inner-directed mode is, however, no longer feasible for most people. To understand why this is so requires a glance at the powerful bulwarks or defenses for autonomy that an era dependent on inner-direction provided and that are no longer so powerful today. These include, in the Protestant lands, certain attitudes toward conscience, and everywhere, the bulwarks of work, property, class, and occupation as well as the comforting possibilities of escape to the frontier.

  In the first place, a Protestant or secular-Protestant society of adjusted inner-directed types expects people to conform, not by looking to others but by obedience to their internal gyroscopes or consciences. This affords privacy, for while society may punish people more or less for what they do, it lacks the interest and psychological capacity to find out what they are. People are like the yachts in a Bermuda race, attentive not to each other but to the goal in view and the favoring winds.

  In the second place, there was always available a line of defense in the existence of frontiers of settlement and the right of asylum. The power to move around the globe in the days before passports placed limits on the tyrants’ reach and gave reality to the concept of inalienable rights.3 Roger Williams lighting out for himself; Voltaire shuttling back and forth over Europe; Karl Marx finding refuge in the British Museum; Carl Schurz fleeing to America—these are scenes from an almost vanished past.

  In the third place, the autonomous in the era dependent on inner-direction had available to them the defenses provided by work itself, in a period when the adjusted people also were mainly work-oriented. Though it was hard to admit that one found joy in one’s work in the puritan countries, it was permissible to regard it as an end in itself, as well as a means to other ends. The “hardness of the material” attracted the autonomous, indeed—again, like their less autonomous fellows—often hardened them to all other considerations. The following passage from Claude Bernard’s Experimental Medicine, first published in 1865, expresses this outlook:

  After all this, should we let ourselves be moved by the sensitive cries of people of fashion or by the objections of men unfamiliar with scientific ideas? All feelings deserve respect, and I shall be very careful never to offend anyone’s. I easily explain them to myself, and that is why they cannot stop me…. A physiologist is not a man of fashion, he is a man of science, absorbed by the scientific idea which he pursues; he no longer hears the cry of animals, he no longer sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve. Similarly, no surgeon is stopped by the most moving cries and sobs, because he seeks only his idea and the purpose of his operation…. After what has gone before we shall deem all discussion of vivisection futile or absurd. It is impossible for men, judging facts by such different ideas, ever to agree; and as it is impossible to satisfy everybody, a man of science should attend only to the opinion of men of science who understand him, and should derive rules of conduct only from his own conscience.4

  Such a man as Claude Bernard looked to his scientific colleagues, not for approval of himself as a person but for the validation of his objective work. He had less need for people, for warm interpersonal response, than the autonomous man who arises among the groups dependent on other-direction.

  In the fourth place, property and class were substantial defenses for those who strove for autonomy. They protected not only the crazy millionaire’s conspicuous consumption but the irreverence of the secluded Bentham and the integrated double life of that fine horseman and industrialist of Manchester, Friedrich Engels. People were protected, too, not only by their work and their property but by their position, be it elevated or humble. If people could manage to fulfill their occupational role, what they did in their off hours was more or less up to them. Charles Lamb as a petty official could write in his spare time. Hawthorne, and many other nineteenth-century American writers, held posts that did not require them to give much of themselves —certainly not the self-exploi
tation on and off the job asked of far better paid writers who hold hack jobs today. The hierarchical chain of occupations, once one achieved a position in it, held people in place with some degree of security, while permitting sufficient tether for the autonomous. Within certain given limits of property and place, one could move without arousing shocked antagonism, traumatic either in terms of one’s feelings or one’s worldly fate.

  Many of these same defenses, however, operated far more frequently as barriers to autonomy than as defenses for it. A society organized in terms of class, private property, and occupation resisted autonomy with all the weapons of family, wealth, religion, and political power: the complaints and protests of political and religious reformers, artists, and artisans against this type of largely bourgeois social organization, now vanishing, were true and just enough. But we must never forget that these barriers could frequently be organized as defenses of the individual; once their flanks were turned by energy and talent, they provided the freedom in which autonomy as well as rentier complacency could flourish.

  In biographies and memoirs of the last several hundred years, we can reconstruct, as it were, the way in which individuals begin their struggle for autonomy within the despotic walls of the patriarchal family. The family operated, much more than the state, as the “executive committee” of the inner-directed bourgeois class, training the social character both of future members of that class and of future servants to it. Print, however, as we have seen, might succor a child in his lonely battle with parents, teachers, and other adult authorities—though a book might also disorient him and increase the pressure on him. But with good luck a book, like a sympathetic teacher or relative, might break the solid front of authority in the home.

  Not until adolescence were other children likely to be of much help, though then, especially when adolescent youth groups later took institutional form, they might assist the break from home. Adolescence, in fact, was usually the period of crisis for the boy or girl who sought autonomy. While even the adjusted had to make the passage from home, they moved thence into a social system that still held them fast, finding such authoritative parent surrogates as were necessary to calibrate their already internalized parental signals. However, the would-be autonomous youth, in breaking with parents, were breaking with authority as such, internalized as well as external. One can trace this process in all its poignancy in the development of John Stuart Mill, who got out from under his father only when well along in life, or of Franz Kafka, who never did.

  Once out in the world, the person struggling for autonomy faced directly the barriers of property—if he was without it; of hierarchy—if he sought to climb or oppose it; of religion—if he contravened its controls on expression. In strongly Protestant communities in particular, one’s discreet overt behavior could not assure to oneself the freedom Erasmus or Galileo had made use of. The result was that between the oversteered and the under-steered there was little room for autonomy. The struggle to turn these obstacles into defenses was often too tough, and the individual was scarred for life, as were Marx, Balzac, Nietzsche, Melville, E. A. Robinson, and many other great men of the era dependent on inner-direction. Still others, however—John Dewey, wiry Vermonter, was a magnificent example and so, in a very different way, is Bertrand Russell—more favored by fortune, could live lives of personal and intellectual collision and adventure with little inner conflict.

  III. The Autonomous among the Other-directed

  Lawyers and lawmakers have a technique called “incorporation by reference”; by means of it they can refer in one statute or document to another without full quotation. In the same way I would like to incorporate by reference here the writings of Mill which deal with individuality: the Autobiography, the essays On Liberty and On Social Freedom, and The Subjection of Women. These writings represent an extraordinary foreshadowing of the problems of the autonomous individual when, with the decline of the older barriers to freedom, the newer and far more subtle barriers of public opinion in a democracy arise. Indeed, in reading modern writers, such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Erich Fromm, JosÉ Ortega y Gasset, and Bertrand Russell, who deal with similar themes, one is struck by the degree to which, underneath differences in idiom, their philosophic outlook resembles Mill’s in many important respects.

  Mill wrote: “In this age the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.” But his interest was more in the individual than in the service. He observed two tendencies that have grown much more powerful since he wrote. He saw, as many others did, that people no longer took their cues “from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books” but rather from each other—from the peer-group and its mass-media organs, as we would say. He saw, as few others did, that this occurred not only in public matters but also in private ones, in the pursuit of pleasure and in the development of a whole style of life. All that has changed, perhaps, since he and Tocqueville wrote, is that the actions they saw as based on the fear of what people might say— on conscious opportunism, that is—are today the more automatic outcome of a character structure governed, not only from the first but throughout life, by signals from outside. In consequence, a major difference between the problems of Mill’s day and ours is that someone who today refuses “to bend the knee to custom” is tempted to ask himself: “Is this what I really want? Perhaps I only want it because…”

  This comparison may overstate historical changes; the autonomous at all times have been questioners. The autonomous among the inner-directed, however, were partially shaped by a milieu in which people took many psychological events for granted, while the autonomous among the other-directed live in a milieu in which people systematically question themselves in anticipation of the questions of others. More important, in the upper socioeconomic levels in the western democracies today—these being the levels, except for the very highest, most strongly permeated by other-direction—the coercions upon those seeking autonomy are not the visible and palpable barriers of family and authority that typically restricted people in the past.

  This is one reason why it is difficult, as an empirical matter, to decide who is autonomous when we are looking at the seemingly easy and permissive life of a social class in which there are no “problems” left, except for persons striving for autonomy. These latter, in turn, are incapable of defining the enemy with the relative ease of the autonomous person facing an inner-directed environment. Is the inside-dopester an enemy, with his sympathetic tolerance, but veiled lack of interest, and his inability to understand savage emotions? Are they enemies, those friends who stand by, not to block but to be amused, to understand and pardon everything? An autonomous person of today must work constantly to detach himself from shadowy entanglements with this top level of other-direction—so difficult to break with because its demands appear so reasonable, even trivial.

  One reason for this is that the autonomous person of today is the beneficiary of the greater sensitivity brought into our society, at great personal cost, by his autonomous predecessors of the era of inner-direction. The latter, in rejecting the Philistine norm, were frequently very much preoccupied with taste, with what they liked; in their sensuous openness to experience, their awareness of personal nuance, many of the Romantic poets and other artists of the nineteenth century were strikingly modern. What they put into their poems and other works, in refinement and subjectivity, is part of their legacy to the emotional vocabularies of our own day. These precursors, moreover, had no doubt as to who their enemies were: they were the adjusted middle-class people who aggressively knew what they wanted, and demanded conformity to it—people for whom life was not something to be tasted but something to be hacked away at. Such people of course still exist in great numbers but, in the better educated strata of the larger cities, they are on the defensive; and opposition to them is no longer enough to make a person stand out as autonomous.

  Autonomy, I think, must always to some degree be relat
ive to the prevailing modes of conformity in a given society; it is never an all-or-nothing affair, but the result of a sometimes dramatic, sometimes imperceptible struggle with those modes. Modern industrial society has driven great numbers of people into anomie, and produced a wan conformity in others, but the very developments which have done this have also opened up hitherto undreamed-of possibilities for autonomy. As we come to understand our society better, and the alternatives it holds available to us, I think we shall be able to create many more alternatives, hence still more room for autonomy.

  It is easier to believe this than to prove or even illustrate it. Let me instead point to a number of areas in which people today try to achieve autonomy—and to the enormous difficulties they meet.

  Bohemia. As has just been indicated, among the groups dependent on inner-direction the deviant individual can escape, geographically or spiritually, to Bohemia; and still remain an individual. Today, whole groups are matter-of-factly Bohemian; but the individuals who compose them are not necessarily free. On the contrary, they are often zealously tuned in to the signals of a group that finds the meaning of life, quite unproblematically, in an illusion of attacking an allegedly dominant and punishing majority of Babbitts and Kwakiutl chiefs. That is, under the aegis of the veto groups, young people today can find, in the wide variety of people and places of metropolitan life, a peer-group, conformity to which costs little in the way of search for principle.

  The nonconformist today may find himself in the position unanticipated by Mill, of an eccentric who must, like a movie star, accept the roles in which he is cast, lest he disappoint the delighted expectations of his friends. The very fact that his efforts at autonomy are taken as cues by the “others” must make him conscious of the possibility that the effort toward autonomy might degenerate into other-directed play-acting.