The Lonely Crowd

by David Riesman

  13. I think at once of those Americans today who argue that, if we gave Chiang his head and hardly more men than that, he could take China; but those Americans do not realize that all the world is now in on what were once the white man’s secret weapons: his character, his values, and his organization.

  14. Cf. Talcott Parsons and Winston White, “The Link between Character and Society,” in Lipset and Lowenthal, eds., Sociology of Culture. Parsons and White draw a clarifying distinction between goals (the direction toward which) and the agents (those who give directions).

  15. Many ethnographers and students of peasant society have pointed out the enormous variety of cultures sharing the characteristics of nonliteracy and high birth and death rates. Any reader of ethnographic reports can sample this variety for himself. In The Lonely Crowd, however, the concept of tradition-direction was primarily useful as a metaphorical background, setting the stage for what we term the “characterological struggle” between inner-direction and other-direction.

  16. See Margaret Mead, “National Character and the Science of Anthropology,” in Lipset and Lowenthal, eds., Sociology of Culture.

  17. Only in later writings have we clearly drawn the distinction between “civic” activity (e.g., concern with the schools, zoning, playgrounds) and “political” activity on the larger scene, commenting on the attraction of the manageable and seemingly “nice” civic realm as against the opacity, repulsiveness, and controversiality of politics. See Riesman, “Work and Leisure in Post-Industrial America,” in Eric Larrabee and Rolf Meyersohn, eds., Mass Leisure (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1958), pp. 363–388.

  18. I share the anxieties that led Mills to write The Causes of World War III, but not the hopefulness we would dimly glimpse if we thought there was someone in charge who could negotiate effectively without fear of what Mills’ middle-level politicians might say and the guerillas they could mobilize within the agencies, as well as the easily aroused jingoism and bellicosity of what Veblen spoke of as the underlying population.

  19. See, e.g., the revealing account by Saville Davis of the Christian Science Monitor, “Recent Policy-making in the United States Government,” Daedalus (Fall 1960), Vol. 89, pp. 951–966.

  20. For further discussion, see David Riesman and Michael Maccoby, “An American Crisis: Political Idealism and the Cold War,” New Left Review (January 1961), no. 5, pp. 1–12. Reprinted in Arthur Waskow, ed., The Liberal Papers (New York, Random House, 1961).

  21. Even before the rise of advertising, Tocqueville saw Americans, somewhat as Veblen later did, as competing with each other in the race for and display of possessions. Americans were ready for the mass media even before the mass media were ready for them.

  22. Hilde T. Himmelweit, Television and the Child, in collaboration with D. Blumenthal and others. Published for the Nuffield Foundation by Oxford University Press, 1958.

  23. In Ethics, January 1952.

  24. Work and Its Discontents (Boston, Beacon Press, 1956) has been reprinted in Bell, The End of Ideology (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1960), pp. 222–262.

  25. Financial pressure often leads men on a short work week to take a second job, sometimes as in Akron even a full-time second job, but it is the lure of the paycheck and not of the work itself that is responsible for moonlighting.

  26. See Talcott Parsons, “A Tentative Outline of American Values,” unpublished manuscript, 1958. See also Clyde Kluckhohn, “Has There Been a Change in American Values in the Last Generation?” in Elting Morison, ed., The American Style: Essays in Value and Performance (New York, Harpers, 1958).

  27. Kenneth Keniston, “Alienation and the Decline of Utopia,” American Scholar, XXIX (Spring 1960), 1–40.

  28. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York, Rinehart, 1955), p. 362.

  29. See Riesman and Glazer, “Criteria for Political Apathy,” in Alvin Gouldner ed. Studies in Leadership (New York, Harper, 1950).

  1. “Observations on the Yurok: Childhood and World Image,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, XXXV (1943), iv.

  2. “Individual and Social Origins of Neurosis,” American Sociological Review, IX (1944), 380; reprinted in Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, edited by Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry Murray (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1948).

  3. The terminology used here is that of Frank W. Notestein. See his “Population—The Long View,” in Food for the World, edited by Theodore W. Schultz (University of Chicago Press, 1945).

  4. Since writing the above I have discovered Gardner Murphy’s use of the same metaphor in his volume Personality (New York, Harper, 1947).

  5. These examples are given by Allan G. B. Fisher, The Clash of Progress and Security (London, Macmillan, 1935).

  6. See Erich Fromm, Man for Himself; C. Wright Mills, “The Competitive Personality,” Partisan Review, XIII (1946), 433; Arnold Green, “The Middle Class Male Child and Neurosis,” American Sociological Review, XI (1946), 31. See also the work of Jurgen Ruesch, Martin B. Loeb, and co-workers on the “infantile personality.”

  7. This picture of the other-directed person has been stimulated by, and developed from, Erich Fromm’s discussion of the “marketing orientation” in Man for Himself, pp. 67–82. I have also drawn on my portrait of “The Cash Customer,” Common Sense, XI (1942), 183.

  8. The “radar” metaphor was suggested by Karl Wittfogel.

  9. The following discussion draws on an unpublished monograph by Sheila Spaulding, “Prolegomena to the Study of Athenian Democracy” (Yale Law School Library, 1949).

  10. In this connection, it is revealing to compare the conceptions of the socialization process held by Freud and Harry Stack Sullivan. Freud saw the superego as the internalized source of moral life-directions, built in the image of the awesome parents, and transferred thereafter to parent-surrogates such as God, the Leader, Fate. Sullivan does not deny that this happened but puts more emphasis on the role of the peer-group—the chum and group of chums who take such a decisive hand in the socialization of the American child. Sullivan’s very insistence on the importance of interpersonal relations—which led him to believe, much more than Freud, in the adaptability of men and the possibilities of social peace and harmony—may itself be viewed as a

  1. Margaret Mead, whose contribution to this whole field has been tremendously stimulating, has pointed out how the Protestant parent passed on to the child the legacy of his own unfulfilled strivings to live up to an ideal and how this drive spurred progress and change even though the statement of the ideal as such did not change. See, e.g., “Social Change and Cultural Surrogates,” Journal of Educational Sociology, 14 (1940), 92; reprinted in Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture, ed. Kluckhohn and Murray, p. 511, and especially pp. 520–521.

  2. Of course there is no law that societies in the stage of incipient population decline have to become top-heavy and bureaucratic. It is conceivable that even more mobility could be opened up by shifting population and other resources rapidly into tertiary services, by greatly expanding leisure and the industries catering to leisure. We shall return to these matters in Part III.

  3. This, too, is a development whose importance Margaret Mead has stressed. See And Keep Your Powder Dry (New York, William Morrow, 1942).

  4. Partisan Review, XII (1945), 381.

  5. Yet the knowingness, particularly in the middle class, has limits that were less important in the tradition-directed family. There the child, knowledgeable for example about sex, could see reflections of it in the daily adult life around him. He would know that if his uncle was particularly gay or particularly cross at work this was connected with what happened in the village the night before. As against this, the other-directed child knows about sex only, so to speak, in the abstract. He cannot reasonably connect the night life he knows exists with the seriousness of the adult world that faces him at school, at the store, or at home. While he has doffed the myths of sex that Freud found among the young of his day, he still fin
ds passion playing a greater role in the comics and the movies than in the life he is able to observe—the latter being a life in which people are trained to hide their passions and to act generally in a disembodied way. Perhaps this is one reason why sex often remains an exciting mystery for the other-directed adult—as we shall see in Chap. VII—despite all his learning, all his disenchantment, and even all his experience of it. And, in general, the other-directed child’s realism about the adult world is hampered not so much by Victorian inhibitions as by the far subtler partitions of adult life itself, such as the shadowy partitions between work and play to be discussed later.

  6. Morris Janowitz has suggested that if one wanted to get a very rough index of homes in which other-direction was being transmitted, as against those in which inner-direction prevailed, one might separate the homes which took only such magazines as Life, Look, the comics, or movie journals from those which took such periodicals as the Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s. The former group is for the whole family, interpreted as easily or more easily by children than by adults. The latter group is mainly for the grownups and not shared with the children.

  7. Howard C. Becker (“Role and Career Problems of the Chicago Public School Teacher,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1951) has been observing the classroom consequences of the decline of the practice both of skipping grades and of holding children back who must repeat the grade. The teachers, faced with a group of identical age but vastly different capacities and willingness, meet the situation by dividing the class into two or three like-minded groups. Mobility between groups is discouraged, and children are encouraged to imitate their groupmates. The teacher herself, in the public schools, is probably inner-directed, but she is forced by her situation to promote other-direction among her charges.

  The following quotation from Mr. Becker’s interviews is a poignant example of how a teacher will promote other-direction in her efforts to get the children to have more interesting weekends: “Every class I have I start out the year by making a survey. I have each child get up and tell what he did over the weekend. These last few years I’ve noticed that more and more children get up and say, ‘Saturday I went to the show, Sunday I went to the show’ … I’ve been teaching twenty-five years, and it never used to be like that. Children used to do more interesting things, they would go places instead of ‘Saturday I went to the show, Sunday I went to the show’ …What I do is to give a talk on all the interesting things that could be done—like going to museums and things like that. And also things like playing baseball and going on bike rides. By the end of the term a child is ashamed if he has to get up and say, Saturday I went to the show, Sunday I went to the show.’ All the rest of the children laugh at him. So they really try to do some interesting things.”

  8.Still more paradoxically, it often happens that those schools that insist most strongly that the child be original and creative by this very demand make it difficult for him to be so. He dare not imitate an established master nor, in some cases, even imitate his own earlier work. Though the introduction of the arts into the school opens up the whole art world to many children, who would have no time or stimulation outside, other children are forced to socialize performances that would earlier have gone unnoticed by peers and adults.

  1. A student has written me: “In male bull sessions one can no longer play the gentleman and keep quiet about sexual adventures. He has to furnish names, dates, and all the exact details of the conquest. Where fellows get into trouble is when they have a sincere feeling for a girl and yet are forced to tell. The measure of the peer-group’s strength and their other-directedness is that they can be forced to tell.”

  2. The concept of the opinion leader and empirical methods for spotting him in a community have been developed particularly by Paul Lazarsfeld, Robert K. Merton, C. Wright Mills of the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University, and Bernard Berelson of the University of Chicago. The concept is an important one for our purposes, since the spread of other-directed patterns beyond the metropolitan centers is often due to the influence of opinion leaders who have learned these patterns while away at high school, at college, or on a job and who continue to keep in touch with the newer values through the mass media, which in turn support their efforts with their local “constituency.” The Columbia group has observed this process in the spread of attitudes and preferences; to see how these in turn shape character is a more complex and as yet unaccomplished task. Walter Bagehot has some interesting speculations on the problem. Physics and Politics, ed. Barzun (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), pp. 91 et seq.

  1. Katherine M. Wolfe and Marjorie Fiske, “The Children Talk About Comics,” Communications Research 1948–1949, ed. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton (New York, Harper, 1949), pp. 26–27.

  2. See the remarkable discussion by Ernest Schachtel, “On Memory and Childhood Amnesia,” Psychiatry, X (1947), 1; see also Evelyn T. Riesman, “Childhood Memory in the Painting of Joan MirÓ,” ETC, VI (1949), 160.

  3. W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (New York, Knopf, 1927), II, 1367–1396.

  4. Compare the brilliant discussion by Lionel Trilling in “Art and Fortune,” Partisan Review, XV (1948), 1271.

  5. Certainly the adult literature is more complicated and/or more salacious on its top levels, as compared with the earlier era when both child and adult could read Mark Twain even at his most bitter, Dickens even at his most crude, H. G. Wells even at his most involved.

  6. George Orwell, Dickens, Dali & Others (New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1946), p. 76.

  7. Here, too, the abruptness of the change from inner-direction should not be exaggerated. Eliot Freidson, studying the ability of young children to remember stories, found them much more apt to recall a few traditional fairy tales like Goldilocks or The Three Little Pigs than either Golden Books or comics or movies. “Myth and the Child: an Aspect of Socialization” (Master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1949).

  8. M. E. Breckenridge and E. L. Vincent, Child Development (Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders, 1943), p. 456.

  9. It is not made clear in the story what happens to Tootle’s schoolmates in engine school. The peer-group relations of Tootle, either to the other engines or the other citizens of Engineville, are entirely amiable, and Tootle’s winning can hardly mean that others fail. Who can be sure that Tootle would want to be a streamliner if others were not to be streamliners too?

  1. See Karl Polanyi’s excellent discussion in The Great Transformation (New York, Farrar & Rinehart, 1944).

  2. Cf. William James’s definition of the self in Principles of Psychology (New York, Henry Holt, 1896), I, 291–292; and discussion in Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, pp. 135–136.

  1. Professor Everett Hughes of the University of Chicago, who has guided me in the analysis of changing career lines in business and the professions, tells this story.

  1. In Movies (Glencoe, Illinois, Free Press, 1950).

  2. Harper’s, 198 (1949), 19.

  3. See G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age (London, Oxford University Press, 1936), p. 16, n. 1.

  4. W. Lloyd Warner, Robert J. Havighurst, and Martin Loeb, Who Shall Be Educated? (New York, Harper, 1944), e.g., p. 103.

  5. “The American Cult of Success” (Doctor’s thesis, Yale University, 1933); abstracted in American Journal of Sociology, XL (1934), 309–318.

  6. See, for example, Herbert Blumer and Philip Hauser, Movies, Delinquency, and Crime (New York, Macmillan, 1933), pp. 102 et seq.

  7. I have dealt with the implications of this book in more detail in “The Ethics of We Happy Few,” University Observer, I (1947), 19; I draw on this article in what follows.

  8. The reference to warmth is especially significant in the analysis of peer-group preferences in people. In a very interesting set of experiments, Solomon E. Asch has shown that the warm-cold axis is for his student subjects the controlling dimension of personality: people who are said to
be warm are positively valued no matter what other traits they have, while people who are cold are distrusted no matter how honorable and brave they may be. See Solomon E. Asch, “A Test for Personality,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41 (1946), 258–290.

  9. Partisan Review, XV (1948), 240.

  1. While the term “style” is used here in a different sense from that employed by Lasswell in his “Style in the Language of Politics,” in Harold D. Lasswell, Nathan Leites, et al., Language of Politics (New York, George W. Stewart, 1949), pp. 20–39, I am indebted to this essay; and my collaborators and I, in trying to relate politics to character, owe much to Lasswell’s great body of work in this field which began with Psychopathology and Politics.

  2. The interview was one of a number conducted in 1948 by Dr. Genevieve Knupfer among migrants to Harlem from the deep South, the Caribbean, and Italy. It is published in full in Faces in the Crowd, pp. 98–119.

  3. I am not saying that they should resist the draft by becoming conscientious objectors—that requires a rare heroism or fanaticism. It is their subjective attitude of which I speak, not their overt behavior: they have surrendered the privilege to criticize, to respect and express at least their own feelings.

  4. Indignation or hatred of this type is well described in the essay by Svend Ranulf, Moral Indignation and Middle Class Psychology (Copenhagen, Levin & Monksgaard, 1938). Though our emphasis throughout is on character, perhaps we cannot avoid here the bearing of temperament as distinguished from character—for instance, such temperamental distinctions as the ancient one between choleric and sanguine types.

  5. On the face of it this outlook might be thought to resemble that of nineteenth-century political observers who insisted that man was limited and to some extent rendered impotent to effect far-reaching social changes, by his own nature and by the organic nature of society that followed its own laws of development. Edmund Burke and other conservative critics of the French Revolution at the beginning of the century, and the Social Darwinists at its end, represent two strands in this general line of thought. However, these feelings of limitation were not necessarily accompanied by subjective feelings of power-lessness; and, at least in the case of the Social Darwinists and perhaps also in the case of Burke, a positively optimistic view was taken as to the course of society’s organic development. If the world took care of itself—if reformers would only let it alone—one would not need to feel frustrated and helpless: one merely had to acknowledge this limitation and devote oneself to less than apocalyptic changes.