The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  Murphy, Gardner, 16n.

  Music, 76–78, 108, 120, 153–54, 194. See also Jazz

  Myth, 62, 85–87, 92–93, 99–101

  Negro Worker, The, 94

  Negroes, 32, 34, 50, 68, 109, 140, 197, 272; and learning, 88; and Booker T. Washington, 94; and politics, 166–67; white tolerance of, 259, 279–80; privatization of, 278, 283–85

  Neotraditionalists, 278, 280

  New York Daily News, 193

  New York Herald Tribune, 188

  New York Times, 91, 150

  New Yorker, The, 22

  Newsweek, 46

  Notestein, Frank W., 8n., 14

  Orwell, George, 98

  Other-directed character, 8; defined, 19–22; compared with other types, 22–25; role of parents, 45–55; and teacher, 57–64; and peer-group, 70–73; socialization of taste, 62, 73–76; socialization of performance, 76–78; and opinion leader, 78; consumption preference of, 70–82; and mass media, 96–108; and work, 126–40; and consumption, 141–58; and food, 142–45; and sex, 146–48, 258–59, 280–87; compared with inner-directed, 159–60; political style of, 163, 167–71, 180–87, 223–24; tolerance and sincerity, 188–97, 200, 202–04; and power, 206, 209–10, 214–17, 219, 222–23; and autonomy, 108, 248–49, 255–60ff. See also Children; Mass media; Peer-group; Play; Politics; Work

  Parents, 5–6, 37, 38–57, 71, 138. See also Character; Family

  Peabody, Rev. Endicott, 123

  Peer-group: as agent of socialization, 21, 37, 47–48; in Athens, 27; in inner-directed society, 55–56, 66–70; in other-directed society, 21, 30–31, 66–82; in progressive schools, 61–62; in consumption, 73–76, 77–87, 302; and standardization of performance, 76–77; as object of consumption, 81–82; and language, 83–84; and mass media, 84, 107–08; effect on business, 134; in professions, 135; and goals, 138; ana sex, 147–48, 233; in politics, 170–71, 187; tolerance of, 196; and temper, 72, 232–33; and J. S. Mill, 255–56; and autonomy, 279–80, 289, 297

  Personality, 3–4, 29, 46, 155n., 194. See also Other-directed character

  Play: and enforced “realism,” 62; of inner-directed child, 68; of other-directed child, 73, 301–02; of tradition-directed adult, 116; of inner-directed adult, 110, 116–23, 207–08; of other-directed adult, 141–48, 261, 276–301, 304. See also Avocational counselors; Consumption; Enforced privatization; Leisure; Popular culture

  Polanyi, Karl, 113n.

  Politics: method of analysis, 163–65; in nineteenth century, 173–75; incomprehensibility of, 176–77; and character formation, 179–80; veto groups and, 213–17; indifferent, political style of: in tradition-directed society, 165–67, 170–71; new-style, 167–70, 185, 100–91, 193–94, 214, 243–44; moralizer, political style of: 172–80, 182, 187, 188, 197–204, 206–09, 210–11, 214–15, 217; indignant, 177–80, 182, 193, 195, 200–04, 217; enthusiast, 178–79; inside-dopester, political style of: 180–87, 190–91, 195–96, 201–04, 214–15, 224, 230–40, 305. See also Tolerance

  Popular culture, 79, 97, 149–51, 153, 158, 188–89, 193–95, 199. 285, 299, 303n. See also Leisure; Literacy; Literature; Mass media; Play

  Population, phases of growth: described, 7–9; and character structure, 8, 31–32, 241–42; in Athens, 25–26; and dwellings, 67–68; in US., 109–10; and adult work and play, 127–29; and politics, 178–80; high growth potential, 7, 9–11, 13–14, 38–40, 67, 109–10; of Indian tribes, 231; and character types, 243, 246–47; transitional growth, 8–9, 13–17, 38–45, 54–55, 67, 87–88, 91–93, 27; and sex, 145; incipient decline, 7–9, 17–19, 45–46; and other-directed character, 17–24, 54–55; and urbanization, 19–20; and social mobility, 40–41, 67, 74–75; and standard of living, 73–74; and the mass media, 84; and service trades, 127; change in goals, 128, 248; and leisure, 141, 145; and abundance, 143; and birth rate, 145; and politics, 179–80

  Power, images of: and character, 165; through press and radio, 192; and veto groups, 206, 211, 222–24, 239; amorphousness of, 163, 206, 214–15, 217, 222–23; of industrial leaders, 208–09, 212; and indiffÉrents, 214; of ruling class in U.S., 217–23, 225; of army officers, 220; state and national, 221–22; in future US., 222–23; students’ images of, 234–35. See also Ruling class; Veto groups

  Press. See Literature; Mass media

  Privacy: of children, 43–44, 49, 51, 56, 76, 95–96, 108, 277, 287–88, 302; of adults, 123, 171, 176, 251, 288

  Property, 114, 133–34, 141

  Pueblo Indians, 225–27, 231–33

  Puritan (Protestant) ethic, 14–15• 17, 40–41, 43, 79, 92–93, 114, 120, 124, 157, 284n., 287

  Radio, 97, 103, 142. See also Mass media

  Rand, Ayn, 156

  Ranulf, Svend, 27, 179n.

  Realism: in play, 62; in fiction, 92–93, 153; in comics, 102; in children’s stories, 104–06; in politics, 185

  “Rebellion of Willy Kepper,” 151–52

  Rebels, 58–59, 60, 86–87, 98, 122, 241–42

  Reformation, the, 6, 14–15, 43, 145

  Religion, evangelical revivalism, 120, 180. See also Catholic Church; Puritan ethic

  Renaissance, 6, 13–15, 40, 145

  Riesman, Evelyn T., 85n.

  Ritual, 233, 235, 287, 306

  Roosevelt, Franklin D., 191, 210, 212

  Ruesch, Jurgen, 19n.

  Ruling class, 163, 206–07, 217–18, 225. See also Power; Status

  Russia, 17, 114, 183, 187, 222, 250–51

  Sachs, Hans, 269n.

  Samish, Artie, 221–22

  Santayana, George, 3

  Sartre, Jean Paul, 250, 255

  Saturday Evening Post, 55n.

  Schachtel, Ernest, 85n.; Scientific American, 201

  Service Trades, 20, 127, 133–34, 271–72

  Sex, 39, 50n., 68, 76n., 106; inner-directed and, 145–46; other-directed and, 146–48, 258, 280–81; as area of competition, 148; attitudes toward, 233; inequality between sexes, 280–83

  Simmel, Georg, 126, 136

  Sincerity, 189, 193–97

  Slocombe, Lorna, 151

  Smiles, Samuel, 92, 149

  Social mobility, 39–40, 42–43, 45, 60, 122–23, 127, 138, 149, 229, 283–84

  Spaulding, Sheila, 26n.

  Spectator, The, 22

  Status, 13, 134, 145, 148, 190, 198–200, 228. See also Class

  Sullivan, Harry Stack, 30n.

  Superego, 30n., 44, 244

  Superman, 83, 98, 90, 103

  Taste exchanging, 289, 298–99

  Taste socialization, 63, 71–72, 73–76, 97–98

  Tawney, R. H., 45, 113

  Teachers, 37, 57–65

  Television. See Mass media

  Temper, 72, 151, 232, 234

  Temple, Willard, 151

  Thomas, W. L, 30, 66, 88

  Thoreau, Henry David, 274

  Time magazine, 46, 197

  Tocqueville, Alexis de, 19, 23, 112, 141, 163, 202, 206, 219, 225, 235, 304

  Tolerance, 64, 73, 152, 163; in poli-tics, 189–90, 192–93, 193–95, 200, 202–04, 206, 211; among veto groups, 214–15; and autonomy, 259–60; of other-directed, 234, 280. See also Sincerity

  Tolstoy, Leo, 22, 183, 296

  Tootle the Engine, 105–07, 119

  Tradition-directed character, 8; defined, 11–13, 16; role of parent and, 38–39, 42; communication among, 85–86; and the peasant, 88; and standard of living, 89; in America, 109–10; work and play, 116; and orientation of individual, 149; deviants, 241–42; and autonomy, 246–47. See also Myth; Population

  Trilling, Lionel, 49, 93n., 296

  Truman, Harry S., 191, 202

  Twain, Mark, 97n., 230, 278

  Urbanization, 19–20, 93, 179–80

  Vehlen, Thorstein, 47, 118, 153, 208–09, 226, 249

  Velie, Lester, 221n.

  Veto groups, 163, 192; in politics, 211–17, 219–23; as barriers to action, 306; and enforced privatization of women, 282–83; and ethnic minorities, 284–85

  Villains, 99–100, 103 />
  Vincent, E. L., 105n.

  War, 14, 18, 35, 138, 167, 176, 176, 185, 263, 296

  Warner, W. Lloyd, 145, 148

  Warshow, Robert, 155

  Washington, Booker T., 94

  Washington, George, 94

  We Happy Few, 154–55

  Weber, Max, 18, 45, 92, 124, 243

  West, Patricia Salter, 296

  White, Antonia, 58

  White, William Allen, 130

  White-collar worker, 20, 264–66, 269, 271

  Williams, Dr. William Carlos, 274

  Wilson, Woodrow, 172, 210–11

  Wittfogel, Karl, 25n.

  Wolfe, Katherine M., 83n.

  Wolfenstein, Martha, 144

  Women, as opinion leaders, 80, 116; and food, 142–45; and sex, 148, 258; in contemporary literature, 152–53; dress of, 157; franchise, 175; as workers, 262, 264–66, 271; enforced privatization of, 265–66, 271, 280–83, 286; as salesgirls, 272

  Work: meaning of for inner-directed, 111–15, 134, 207–08, 251–52, 262–63; in other-directed society, 129–31, 134–35, 141; and play interwoven, 149–51, 261–62; in modern literature, 151–52; cultural definitions of, 261–64; personalization of, 264–66; automatization of, 269–75; depression and, 288

  Young, G. M., 148n.

  Znaniecki, Florian, 88

  ZuÑi. See Pueblo

  1. Shallow books may strike up comparable chords in the media, too, but they are more likely to be bought today, shelved tomorrow, and unread forevermore (though frequently alluded to).

  2. If the question of authorship, that is, both credit and responsibility, should arise, partly because various editions of The Lonely Crowd appeared with varying credit lines, it should be noted that there is no dispute among the author and his collaborators. As Nathan Glazer has put the matter, The Lonely Crowd is “David Riesman’s book He conceived it, wrote most of it, and rewrote it for the final version. Contributions from the two listed co-authors in the form of initial drafts and research reports and rewritings of Riesman’s first drafts may have spurred him to expand, revise, and extend his own thinking, but in the end it is his book” (Glazer, “Tocqueville and Riesman: Two Passages to Sociology,” David Riesman Lecture on American Society, October 20, 1999 [Cambridge: Harvard University, Department of Sociology], p. 1.). It would seem that the frequent citation of Glazer and Denney as co-authors without Riesman’s complaint is another instance of his generosity.

  3. Herbert J. Gans, “Best Sellers by American Sociologists: An Exploratory Study,” in Required Reading: Sociology’s Most Influential Books, ed. Dan Clawson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), pp. 19–27.

  4. I borrow some phrases here from my “Sociology for Whom? Criticism for Whom?” in Sociology in America, ed. Herbert J. Gans (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1990), p. 221.

  5. Later published in Faces in the Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).

  6. His few sentences on the impact of print and its profusion (pp. 89, 96) are a concise marvel anticipating some of Marshall McLuhan’s stronger ideas.

  7. Paul Farhi, “Ask a Stupid Question And Millions of People Will Tune Right In,” Washington Post, January 6, 2000, p. C1.

  8. Bell received a Ph.D. from Columbia for his published book, The End of Ideology.

  An earlier version of this foreword appeared as “How Our Crowd Got Lonely,” in the New York Times Book Review, January 9, 2000.

  1. Concurrently, Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal edited a book of criticisms of The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd, to which my collaborators and I were invited to submit a chapter of reconsiderations. Their collection, Culture and Social Character: The Work of David Riesman Reviewed (Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1961), remains in our judgment the best source for the analysis of both the contributions and the limitations of our work. My contribution to the volume was written in collaboration with Nathan Glazer.

  2. See for example Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1965) and Joseph Gusfield, Symbolic Crusade (Urbana, Ill., University of Illinois Press, 1964), especially Chapter 7.

  3. See Seymour Martin Lipset, “A Changing American Character?” Also his The First New Nation: The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective (New York, Basic Books, 1963); also Talcott Parsons and Winston White, “The Link between Character and Society,” in Lipset and Lowenthal, eds., Culture and Social Character.

  4. The concept of authoritarianism as developed in The Authoritarian Personality has perhaps been most fruitful in eliciting replication and reanalysis. But, as many people have observed, the concept is unclear to begin with, lumping together a variety of traits found in a variety of social strata and historical settings. Cf., e.g., Riesman, “Some Questions about the Study of American Character in the Twentieth Century,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 370 (March 1967) 36–47. I am indebted to Michael Maccoby for helpful discussion of this and related questions.

  5. See McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, N.J., Van Nostrand, 1961).

  6. See John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1958); see also my essay, “Leisure and Work in Post-industrial Society,” in Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn, Mass Leisure (Glencoe, Ill., The Free Press, 1958), reprinted in Riesman, Abundance for What? and Other Essays (Garden City, N.Y., Double-day, 1964), pp. 162–83; cf. David Riesman and Donald Horton, “Notes on the Deprived Institution: Illustrations from a State Mental Hospital,” Sociological Quarterly (Winter 1965), pp. 3–20.

  7. See my article, “America Moves to the Right,” The New York Times Magazine (October 27, 1968), p. 34 ff.

  8. Cf. for example Leonard A. Lecht, Manpower Needs for National Goals in the 1970’s (New York, Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), a publication of the National Planning Association.

  9. For some, the rejection of the physical sciences reflects the fear that they are irrevocably linked with military domination, but the revolt against modernity extends to subjects like economics, and in some measure to any quantitative rational work.

  1. See “Democracy and Defamation,” Columbia Law Review, XLII (1942), 727–780; 1085–1123; 1282–1318; see also “The Politics of Persecution,” Public Opinion Quarterly, VI (1942), 41–56.

  2. See “The Meaning of Opinion,” reprinted in Individualism Reconsidered (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1953), pp. 492–507.

  3. Readers who would like to pursue in more detail the accomplishments of and criticisms against the “culture and personality” school can consult Alex Inkeles and Daniel J. Levinson, “National Character: The Study of Modal Personality and Sociocultural Systems,” in Gardner Lindzey, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology (Boston, Addison-Wesley, 1954), pp. 977–1020; and Bert Kaplan, “Personality and Social Structure,” in Joseph Gittler, ed., Review of Sociology, Analysis of a Decade (New York, Wiley, 1957), pp. 87–126. Some of the criticisms of The Lonely Crowd are both represented and discussed in S. M. Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, eds., The Sociology of Culture and the Analysis of Social Character: The Work of David Riesman Reviewed (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1961); this preface draws in some part on Mr. Glazer’s and my contribution to that volume.

  4. In The Varieties of History, Fritz Stern, ed. (New York, 1956), p. 362.

  5. In lamenting the good old days of not so long ago, when large error and large enthusiasm went hand in hand, I do not intend to overlook the meticulous work currently being done by a number of psychoanalytically oriented anthropologists (for a review of such work, see John J. Honigmann, Culture and Personality [New York, Harpers, 1956]). However, as the other neighboring disciplines and the sub-fields of anthropology have built up their bulkheads, a somewhat smaller leakage occurs from this work into neighboring compartments.

  6. This typology is indebted both for concrete suggestion and in its mode of approach to Robert K. Merton’s essay, “Social Structure and Anomie,” in his Social Theory and So
cial Structure, rev. ed. (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1957).

  7. By defining terms carefully and by intensive work with a small sample of college freshmen, Elaine Graham Sofer developed an ingenious projective test for social character; her study is, so far as I am aware, the most searching attempt to use the concepts of The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd in empirical work with individuals. The opportunities and complexities of such work are illustrated by her paper, “Inner-Direction, Other-Direction, and Autonomy,” in Lipset and Lowenthal, eds., Sociology of Culture. This study also brought to light the fascinating possibility that those individuals who were found, on the basis of psychological tests, to be inner-directed were also men of “gravity,” i.e., physiologically gravitationally-directed, capable of seating themselves bolt upright in the Witkin tilting-room-tilting-chair experiment, while those who were found to be other-directed were also outer- or environmentally-directed in being influenced by the tilt of the room as well as by gravity.

  8. See, for an interesting example, Michael S. Olmsted, “Character and Social Role,” American Journal of Sociology, LXIII (1957), 49–57, describing a small study where a group of Smith College students were asked to say whether they considered themselves more inner-directed or other-directed than their parents, their friends of both sexes, and the “average” girl at Smith. Most considered themselves more “inner-directed” than other students.

  9. “A Changing American Character?” in Lipset and Lowenthal, eds., Sociology of Culture. See also, in the same volume, an argument by Talcott Parsons and Winston White that American values have remained approximately the same from the beginning, “The Link between Character and Society.”

  10. Cf. Eric Larrabee, The Self-Conscious Society (New York, Doubleday, 1960).

  11. For a brief discussion of the paradox in the concept of individualism, see John W. Ward, “Individualism Today,” Yale Review (Spring 1960), pp. 380–392.

  12. Compare the illuminating discussion of social and psychological change in Communist China by Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism (New York, Norton, 1961).