The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  The other-directed man is socialized in a peer-group of children who resemble him in such visible indexes as age, color, and class but who may not resemble him at all in his more private temperament, interests, and fantasies. He has learned, if he is adjusted, to look like those others with whom he has been brought up, with whom he has learned cooperation, tolerance, and restraint of temper. In this process he has learned to forget aspects of his character that are not “social,” not other-directed. As long as he continues to remain in a peer-group of his happenstance neighborhood, his occupational colleagues, his status equals or would-be equals, the chances are that he may not notice, or notice only in boredom and other vague unrest, any discrepancies between his image of himself and his image of the “others.” Conversely, if he should begin to find himself among people who welcome and appreciate or at least do not punish expression and exploration of these buried parts of the self, he may be able to move toward greater autonomy.

  To make this move, however, requires the ability, psychological and institutional, to find one’s way to the new friends, the new or overlapping peer-group.

  As matters stand, however, greater freedom of choice in friendship is hardly the most fashionable remedy offered today for the problems modern urban people find in their sociability. Many critics of contemporary life would move in the exactly opposite direction, on the assumption that people have not too little freedom but too much. Some of these critics speak from a religious platform, others out of a preoccupation with urban anomie. Greatly troubled by the fact that Americans move their households every few years, they do not seek to make this movement easier by developing, for example, trailers or Buckminster-Fuller-type houses that possess a relative freedom from particular sites. Rather, they would like to freeze people into communities in which friendship will be based largely on propinquity. They are apt to share the outlook of the city planner who said that he thought the ideal communities in America were to be found among the rural Negroes of the deep South and the French Canadians of the Quebec villages. It was disclosed later in the conversation that his own friends were scattered over two continents. Here we find the classes attempting to force “roots” upon the masses just as the Dobuans try by magical incantations to keep their yam tubers in place!

  We might term those critics the neotraditionalists. They seem to want to deny to others the privileges of modern society which, however, they themselves take as a matter of course. Their own choice is for French food one day and Italian the next; they select their ideas from all ages and their friends from all places; they enjoy primitive African and Renaissance Italian sculpture and read books in four languages. These are felt as advantages, not liabilities; and it is ironic that many sophisticated other-directed people, out of fear, impatience, fashion, and boredom, express nostalgia for a time in the past in which they could not have had such choices. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court indicates a greater awareness of the irony; and Twain, with all his bitterness, expresses a sounder sentiment about the road back.

  Despite such critical voices, however, American sociability, i.e. the friendship market, like the American goods market, is in many ways the freest and largest in the world. Parents can monitor their children’s social relations only at the class and ethnic fringe, and this they are still free to do assiduously. In adolescence, however, the automobile frees many Americans from parentally supervised sociability. By adulthood, ease of transport, unity of language, and plenty of spending money release people for vacations, parties, and trips in search of many and varied friends.

  Nevertheless the friendship market is beset with many tariffs, economic, political, and cultural. First of all, there are the grosser inequities in the distribution of income that limit individual access to consumer goods, leisure, and play. Although floors are built under the consumption of some farmers and workers, many of them fancy featherbedders, other farmers and workers remain unprotected by subsidies or wage contracts and are therefore excluded from the “4-H Club Culture” or “UAW Culture” variants of taste, sociability, and play. These exclusions and privatizations have complex results for the excluders and, in general, for the more privileged groups. In particular, the other-directed may find their paths to autonomy twisted by guilt for the excluded, by the limitation of their own choices that exclusion entails, and by the over-all reduction of the potentialities for play of the economy that is the consequence of such reduction in any of its subsectors.

  On the other hand, sociability is sometimes subtly and paradoxically limited by the very efforts undertaken, in the name of tolerance, to cross the tariff walls and to establish associations that the general culture may still call guilty ones. The other-directed man, moving with a tolerant peer-group, is not permitted to expand his friendships to wider social strata at his own pace. He may be asked suddenly to drop not only one barrier at a time—say, the caste barrier—but two—say, the class barrier as well. For example he may be asked to meet Negroes of a class position lower than his own, while the moral issue is posed for him simply in terms of color. This can happen to him at precisely the time when he has cut himself off from the customary sources of his morality and, thereby, from the personal forcefulness he needs in order to live up to his new equalitarian values. One possibility here is that he will feel sudden panic at the forcible dropping of tariffs on the friendship market to which his psychic economy has grown accustomed, and react violently in favor of his older standards.

  II. Sociability and the Privatization of Women

  As with other “minorities,” the education and partial emancipation of women puts the “majority” (in this case, the men) in an ambiguous position. They are no longer protected against women by a rigid etiquette or other formal arrangements. Moreover, as we saw earlier, women make sexual demands and offer sexual potentialities that their mothers would never have dreamed of, or would only have dreamed of. By the same token, they make demands for understanding and companionship. But men, already anxious among the antagonistic cooperators of their own sex, do not always welcome the cooperation and companionship from the opposite sex that the dropping of an older tariff permits and in a way requires. While the inner-directed man, who could still patronize women, complained to his mistress that his wife did not understand him, the other-directed man in effect complains that his women understand him all too well.

  These uneasinesses caused by the newly liberated are one source of the current attempts to re-privatize women by redefining their role in some comfortably domestic and traditional way. Many people, both men and women, are troubled by the so-called disintegration of the family and look longingly back to the family structure of societies at an early point on the curve of population. They usually fail to see that the current divorce rate is, in part, an index of the new demands made upon marriage for sociability and leisure by sensitive middle-class couples; that these demands not only begin high, in the choice of a mate, but, as Margaret Mead has observed, include the expectation that each partner grow and develop at approximately the same rate.1

  To be sure, many divorces are the result of wildcatting on the sex frontier that our leisure society has opened up for exploitation by others than aristocrats and bums, and by women as well as men. Yet clearly, any effort by the neo-traditionalists to close the sex frontier, while it might help restore the glamor sin had in the earlier era, would be irrelevant to the problems created by the greater demands a leisure-oriented people put upon their choice in companionship, sexual and otherwise. What is obviously demanded is the development of a new model of marriage that finds its opportunity precisely in the choices that a free-divorce, leisure society opens up. Because women are less privatized than they have traditionally been, marriage offers more for millions of people than ever before in its long history.

  Nevertheless, we have quite a way to go before women can associate with men at work and play on any footing of equality. Today men who find it easy and natural to get along with women and pre
fer mixed company both at work and play have to fight the residues of the older privatization. For one thing, they are hardly able to avoid many stag occasions, into which some men retreat from the liberations forced on them by the new intersex ethics. As the latency period in childhood gets shorter and shorter, so that boys can be boys only from six to ten, adult males try to create or retain artificial latency periods in which they will not be under pressure from women—or, worse, from male judgments as to how they are succeeding with women. Thus, both sexes experience the limits, pressures, and guilts of emancipation.

  Hence, we should not be surprised to see in the social strata where other-direction prevails that very considerable privatization even of the women of higher economic class still goes on, and that these women, often compulsory players and consumers, have not solved the problems of competence in play. The heroine of “Let’s Go Out Tonight,” for example, is frozen into her suburban cottage, cut off from the whole friendship market of both men and women—except those she can meet socially with her husband. Many suburbanites, not to speak of farm wives, are much worse off. The husband drives to work in the only car and leaves his wife a prisoner at home with the small children, the telephone, and the radio or television. Such women can easily become so uninteresting that they will remain psychological prisoners even when the physical and economic handicaps to their mobility are removed. And this privatization in turn limits the friendship choices and increases the guilts of everyone else.

  As we saw earlier, the war helped deprivatize many women who welcomed work in industry or other war work as a real increase in their sociability. Even in those cases where earnings are not vital to the established living standards of a family, the working woman frequently does find her way to an independence that would hardly be recognizable by the middle-class woman of the nineteenth century. This independence lays the groundwork for some autonomy in play, even when the work remains, as it does for most working women, routine.

  Of course, some middle- and upper middle-class women do have time to play. Such women can move into the peer-groups of the bridge players, the garden clubbers, any of the other groups of pastimers. The transition sounds easy. The difficulty is that women are being driven out of many of the areas in which they formerly occupied their leisure with amateur competence. For example, they are no longer welcome as ladies bountiful; the social workers have so professionalized the field of helping people that any intrusion by benevolent amateurs is deeply resisted and resented. Likewise, amateurs can no longer help such people, unless they are willing, as nurse’s aids, to help registered nurses be professionals by doing all the dirty work for them. They cannot help others enjoy themselves, because settlement work and recreational activities have also been professionalized. While local chapters of the League of Women Voters and the Y.W.C.A. have a good deal of leeway in developing programs and have an opportunity to relate these to local needs, there is considerable reluctance to try out innovating programs that have not been tested elsewhere or suggested by the national offices.

  Thus, although with important exceptions, everywhere women turn to put their part-time energies to work, they face a veto group and its insistence that, to participate, they must go through channels or become slaveys and money-raisers for those who control the channels. And money-raising itself is now increasingly professionalized, with only the money-giving left to the “participants.” Reacting to this situation, the women either sink back into indifference or conclude, like their working-class sisters, that only through a job, a culturally defined job, will they be liberated. Instead of moving toward autonomy in play, an autonomy toward which they could also help their men, they often simply add to their own domestic problems all the anxieties men endure at work.

  III. Packaged Sociabilities

  These culturally defined tariffs that crisscross the friendship market among the American peer-groups severely limit the choices any given individual has for finding those who can help him become autonomous. Perhaps one other example should be mentioned, namely the tendency toward self-privatization on the part of the various not quite assimilated ethnic groups. For we encounter here a rather paradoxical development, which results from a change in the meanings read into the otherwise admirable doctrine of cultural pluralism.

  What has happened is that the older pressures toward forcible Americanization which we associate with the settlement house have receded. Only recent groups of poverty-stricken immigrants, like the Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, are steadily subjected to such pressures. The lower-class Negro, Italian, Jew, or Slav is permitted to approach the American middle-class norm at more or less his own pace. Under the practice of cultural pluralism this means that the ethnic groups are no longer urged to accept the whole package of work and play as “the Americans” define it. On the contrary, the ethnics are invited to add to the variety of the nation by retaining the colorful flavors of their “racial heritages.” As we saw in discussing food, these are precisely the heritages that are combed over by the dominant groups in search of gastronomical differentiations.2 So far, so good. But at the same time the middle- and upper-class Negro, Italian, Jew, or Slav is not quite assimilated; he remains identifiably, or in his own feeling, an ethnic. He is kept from complete social participation in the dominant groups by subtle and not so subtle barriers. Meanwhile veto-group leaders in his own ethnic group come along to urge him to welcome the autarchy thus partially forced on him from outside, to confine his sociability “voluntarily” to his “own” group, and to obey the group’s norms in the uses of leisure. This, too, is called cultural pluralism, though for the individual it operates to restrict him to a single culture.

  Thus, for example, while lower-class Negroes in the big northern cities are immobilized by poverty and segregation, the upper middle-class Negroes are subject to their race leaders’ definitions of what it means to be a Negro, especially in those fields, like leisure, which, more than the field of work, are under race control. Sociability with whites runs risks not only from the side of the newly liberated whites but from the pressures of the race leaders, who may for instance interpret friendliness as Uncle Tomism.

  Other leisure pursuits may similarly become tainted by race considerations. In some circles middle-class Negroes are forbidden to like jazz because there are whites who patronize Negroes as the creators of jazz; other Negroes may be compelled to take pride in jazz or in Jackie Robinson, as Jews may be required to take pride in Israel or Einstein. Still other middle-class Negroes cannot enjoy watermelon or other foods that are part of the traditional Negro diet and certainly are not allowed to enjoy popular-culture portrayals such as those of Rochester or Amos and Andy. Similarly, while the lower-class Jew is not much bothered by metaphysical definitions of Jewishness, the almost but not wholly assimilated Jew is subservient to the Jewish cultural compartmentalizers who tell him what his leisure should be like and who his friends should be. Sociability in these groups is thus limited by a combination of external pressure from the majority, and cultural dictation from within the minority. Play and sociability are then consumed in guilty or anxious efforts to act in accordance with definitions of one’s location on the American scene, a location which, like a surviving superstition, the individual cannot fully accept or dare fully to reject.

  XV

  The problem of competence: obstacles to autonomy in play (continued)

  For as soon as labor is distributed each man has a particular and exclusive sphere from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in a communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity, but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for one to do one thing today and another tomorrow—to hunt in the morning, to fish in the evening, to criticize after dinner just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.


  Karl Marx, on the amateur

  I can play the lute and the pipe, the harp, the organistrum, the bagpipe and the tabor. I can throw knives and catch them without cutting myself. I can tell a tale against any man and make love verses for the ladies. I can move tables and juggle with chairs. I can turn somersaults and stand on my head.

  Medieval entertainer, on the professional

  I. The Play’s the Thing

  Privatization as an obstacle to play can be thought of as primarily a relic of previous eras of status-dominated leisure; indeed, the immobilization of women, children, and the lower classes harks back to the earlier days of the industrial revolution. Wealth, transport, and education are the great liberators here. But we have also inherited obstacles to leisure from the puritan wing of inner-direction, which succeeded in destroying or subverting a whole historic spectrum of gregarious fun-making: sport, drama, feast days, and other ceremonial escapes. Even those ceremonies that survive, or have been newly invented, such as the Fourth of July or Halloween, have had to meet, if not the critique of puritan asceticism, then the critique of puritan rationalism, from which young children have been precariously exempted. For many adults our holidays make work out of fun-making or gift-giving which we have neither the wit to welcome nor the courage to refuse; we know holidays are calculated steps in the distributive economy and that new holidays, e.g., Mother’s Day, are foisted on us—there are more commercially sponsored “Weeks” than there are weeks in the year. Here puritanism has proved an Indian giver: it not only gives priority to work and distribution but, what is more, takes back the niggardly holidays it gives us. The scars that puritanism has left on the American, and not only on the Philadelphian, Sunday are well known.