The Lonely Crowd, Revised edition: A Study of the Changing American Character [Paperback]

David Riesman (Author), Nathan Glazer (Author), Reuel Denney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2001 | Series: Yale Nota Bene

The Lonely Crowd is considered by many to be the most influential book of the twentieth century. Its now-classic analysis of the 'new middle class' in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political, and economic problems that confront the individual in contemporary American society. The 1969 abridged and revised edition of the book is now reissued with a new foreword by Todd Gitlin that explains why the book is still relevant to our own era.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"After half a century, this book has lost none of its capacity to make sense of how we live." -- Todd Gitlin

[T]he best-selling book by a professional sociologist in American history . . . [with] the widest influence on the nation at large. -- Orlando Patterson, New York Times

About the Author

David Riesman is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University. Nathan Glazer is emeritus professor of education and sociology structure at Harvard University. Reuel Denney was emeritus professor of English at the University of Hawaii. Todd Gitlin is professor of culture, journalism, and sociology at New York University and the author of The Sixties, The Twilight of Common Dreams, and two novels, most recently Sacrifice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 315 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (March 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300088655
• ISBN-13: 978-0300088656
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #69,935 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

56 of 63 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How We Got Here, April 13, 2001

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lonely Crowd, Revised edition: A Study of the Changing American Character (Paperback)

A classic of American sociology, Riesman's book still rings true to a great extent in its preternatural sense of the (then) coming break between the modern and post-modern era. These days Reisman's characterological framework of social personality types -- tradition oriented, inner-directed, other-directed -- seems too pat, too simplistic, too culturally bound. Nevertheless, whether one believes in it or not, the framework remains so compelling that the reader begins to group all one's friends and acquaintances in one or another of the categories. It's the power of imaginative writing that holds our attention in spite of the too neat framework, proving once again that fiction is always more compelling than sociology. Crisp and evocative metaphors work every time! Two memorable metaphors -- the inner-directed person has a "gryoscope" implanted in him by his parents and his society, while the later other-directed personality is equipped with radar to seek out social cues, are deservedly famous. So are his distinctions between the way these different cultures control their members through negative self-assesment: tradition-oriented = shame; inner-directed = guilt; other-directed = anxiety.

To his credit, Riesman bends over backwards to say that people can belong to all categories at once through various manifestations of their characters. Nevertheless, the categories are so simple, and feel so descriptively true, that the tendency to believe in the categories and Riesman's historical sketch of how each comes about almost our overwhelms skepticism. Almost. But as Todd Gitlin points out in the foreward, Riesman's theories are tied to a population theory (other-directed societies could supposedly be distinguished by their lower birth rates in combination with economic prosperity) that was almost immediately overturned by the baby boom in the years immediately following the publication of the book. Riesman himself in the reprint of his introduction from a previous edition points out the flaw in the population projection, recanting this part of his theory. And although the flaw is minor in the sense of the meat of the book -- psychologizing various populations at certain stages in their economic development, it does began after awhile to discredit even the psychologizing. For so tightly does he link the other-directed to a phenomenon which is almost immediately proved wrong, that it calls into question everything else he contends. Remember the book "The Population Bomb" which predicted in the 60s that world would soon be overrun with humanity? It didn't take into consideration famine, disease, war -- the usual plagues of humanity. There is nothing so humbling as building a theory on bad demographic predictions.

Whether or not the theories about social character are true, they were extraordinarily influential at the time, shaping ideas about the American character and American society that persist fifty years later. There are parts of this book -- most of it in fact -- that feels vital and true to this day. The question is, however, is this because the ideas contained herein have become so dissolved into the cultural discourse that they have become true in the retelling, or are they literally true for their time and so remain?

That's part of the fun of reading this old chestnut -- deciding for yourself!

32 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Indispensable guide to the modern American character, February 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Study in National Policy) (Paperback)

This is a superb book, a masterpiece of American sociology. Riesman's eye for detail and his capacity for historical sweep are prodigious. This is not a dry book, though it is probably more academic than your average customer can stomach; but Lonely Crowd stands with the work of Dwight MacDonald, C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell as a vade mecum to the character of our country. Don't be fooled by this other review --Riesman added to the language with his descriptors "inner" and "outer" directed; if you are raising children, fending off Disney and Time Warner, these are critical weapons in your arsenal.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Unrepeatable Brilliance, July 11, 2009

By 

Valjean (Orcas Island, WA, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Paperback)

For good or ill a great many books from several decades ago wouldn't be published -- or probably even written -- today. In most cases, the reasons for this state of affairs can be fairly guessed, e.g., historical racism and sexism, advances in technology and language, and lessons learned from recent history. With this as a preamble, I earnestly believe `The Lonely Crowd' would also not find a publisher in 2009 -- but for an especially curious reason: it had the gall to name and examine the "social character" of an entire society. Mr. Riesman's ambition alone would doom this work to a graduate school thesis -- and even then I doubt it'd pass muster.

To be sure, a few other reasons might damage its cause: namely, some truly impenetrable jargon and an occasional tendency to confuse correlation with causation. This latter is really only inexcusable due to the breadth of the subject: since the author attempted to explain -- in my opinion, successfully -- the fundamental nature of how individuals relate to others in society he clearly needed to toe a rigorous scientific line. But he slips in a particularly important area: naming an underlying cause for how social character shifts in a society from "inner-directed" (receiving unchanging values at a young age, typically from parents, and applying them consistently throughout life) to "other-directed" (being socialized by schools, peer groups and the media to orienting your ethical world around direction from others): Riesman curiously links this change to a population curve, deriving different social characters for traditional societies (little population growth), those in transition (rapidly growing) and post-industrial (leveled off) to fixed, inner-directed, and outer-directed behaviors, respectively. This might work as well as anything else, but no causal links are shown, much less explained.

The jargon might be a bigger problem: this is plainly a hard book to read for a sociological novice. If a term like "social character" gives you pause, you'll probably have a harder time with "moralizer-in-power", "cult of sincerity" and my favorite: "false personalization". Riesman at times appeared to have an insatiable desire to avoid writing clearly - and mores the pity, since his conclusions are often brilliant.

"Outer-directed" might sound like any other pseudo-psychological term from our therapeutic culture, but when this book first appeared in 1961 Riesman applied it to a character type he noticed just coming into its own. His descriptions of this type might sound familiar to a 2009 audience in, say, the world of work: "... the other-directed manager ... is compelled to personalize his relations with the office force whether he wants to or not because he is part of a system that has sold the white-collar class as a whole on the superior values of personalization." Or politics: "... many of the values [of politicians] are the same as those we like in our friends." As for socialized entertainment, his descriptions seamlessly apply to the use of today's always-connected technologies. Simply put, Riesman was bizarrely prophetic about the rise of these ethics -- and the commensurate decline of the lonely, value-driven inner-directed type.

Even for its faults, I can't recommend `The Lonely Crowd' highly enough to anyone interested in how collective ethics have radically shifted -- at least in the United States -- over the past century or so. Whether the rise of outer-direction at the expense of inner-direction bodes well Riesman has reason to equivocate; various updated prefaces at the start of this edition give him space to downplay his snarls at modern ethics. But as a lonely voice -- maybe the *last* voice -- warning us against the excesses of "socialization", he needn't have softened his blows: most of them hit square anyway.