Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

This is a sophisticated qualitative psychological analysis of American character: One deeply rooted in the ways of not just American history, but also world history. It attempts to trace the development of our nation's character as those aspects of history that most affected it, such as changes in demographics and going from a frontier to an industrialized nation, unfolded. As the typology developed draws on the history of other societies as much as it does on American history, it is argued to be generally applicable to almost any society.

Reisman's analysis depends heavily on the three-part assumption that connects the kind of forces and conditions that are seen as producing societal conformity with the types of conformity a nation enforces upon its people, and the national character types and behavior such conformity eventually produces. The key to this three-part assumption is that certain societal pressures such as industrialization, militarization, and various forms of oppression, all can compel certain kinds of behavior that would otherwise run counter to the natural inclinations of the people involved.

For instance, the author argues that prior to industrialization, the pressures for conformity on the frontier, the "every man for himself" mentality, forced people to pursue their own set of private goals. Such people according to Reisman were required to be more "inner-directed." As the nation industrialized, and the demographics became dominated by younger people, society enforced a kind of conformity that the author describes as "tradition-directed." As industrialization matured and middle-aged people dominated, the pressures for conformity then produced "other-directed" people.

It is these three character types that often overlap and become blurred in their distinction that Reisman discusses for the rest of the book. He uses them in a wide variety of examples to demonstrate why his typology has general applicability.

When I read this book in college, I was greatly impressed with its arguments and the claims of general applicability of its typology. Now that I am older, I can see its flaws better. Still, the description of the character types and the personalities that they suggest continue to resonate with what one can see every day in the characters that grace American culture. Five Stars

I first read The Lonely Crowd in the `60's. It was not an assignment, which is almost certainly a strong plus for enjoying a book. In fact, I've never had a sociology course in my life, and therefore have avoided the opacity of the field's jargon and the efforts to "harden" its scientific credentials by constructing equally opaque mathematical formulas that "model" human behavior. David Riesman says in the introduction that he only expected a few thousand copies would sell, and was astonished by its much wider reception. Indeed, if more sociology books were written in Riesman's style, that is, with carefully selected instructive anecdotes, coupled with incisive observations on human interactions, and then placed in a meaningful overall framework, the valid work in the field would reach a much wider audience. I was duly impressed with his observations, style and formulations the first time; on the re-read none have lost their power, but in addition, his prescient insights into the workings of American society are as topical as today's headlines on our economic situation.

My copy of the book was first written in 1947, and it was updated, with an introduction, in 1960. Riesman admits in the 1960 introduction that he was wrong about a key aspect of his social character paradigms. He postulated three principal character types: tradition directed; inner directed; other directed. The types correspond roughly to how an individual derives his / her values. In traditional societies they are instilled in a relatively unchanging environment, in which roles are easily understood. The inner directed personality is installed in one's youth, and Riesman uses the metaphor of a gyroscope that a person must relay on in a changing environment. That personality type is giving way to the other directed, and Riesman's metaphor is "radar"; they pick up signals from other people on how they should act in a changing environment. Riesman ties this structure to three stages in a society's population, which roughly correspond to an "S" curve. The first stage, traditional society, is characterized by high births, and high deaths. Inner directed is the transitional phase of high births, low deaths. And that is eventually superseded by low births, low deaths in the other directed phase. And already by 1960, he had the courage to change his opinion, and say that the evidence did not support the correlation of character types with population stages.

In the second part of the book, Riesman examines the impact of the changing character paradigms on politics. As structural types, he proposes "Indifferents," "Moralizers," and "Inside-Dopesters." His descriptions of the moralizers could be used, word for word, to describe the individuals who have been drawn to the various American "cultural wars" of the last 20 years. And the Inside-Dopester? Perfect descriptions of various individuals I have know who have to be the most up-to-date on the latest political or organizational gossip. Riesman ventures onto weaker ground, as any of us would, in his proposals about character-types for the future, and these include the Adjusted, the Anomic (a word derived from the French, which he describes) and the Autonomous. The last term at least sounds like what we should be striving for, and Riesman held out somewhat utopian hopes 60 years ago that we might get there.

For me the real relevance of this work today is Riesman's observations of the nature of work in our society. With the basic means of production resolved, through the scientific revolution, and our essential needs, food, clothing and housing, easily met, what do people actually DO all day long. He decries much "work" as simple busy-work. He expanded this subject in a lesser known, but equally excellent work Abundance for What? Consider a few quotes from the author, which haunt all too many Americans today: "He needs to combat the notion that he himself might not be so scarce- that he might be dispensable. And surely, in the world as it is now, this fear of being considered surplus is understandably frightening." "It is significant that we have now taken full employment, rather than full non-employment, or leisure, as the economic goal to which we cling in desperation." "If the other-directed people should discover how much needless work they do, discover that their own thoughts and their own lives are quite as interesting as other people's..." Riesman references and quotes from Paul and Percival Goodman's seminal work, Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life on the nature of work.

But he also discusses the power structure: "Power in America seems to me situational and mercurial; it resists attempts to locate it..." "Ruling-class theories, applied to contemporary America, seem to be spectral survivals of this earlier time." "It was often difficult for some Americans to see the difference between the mumbo-jumbo voluntary association such as the Masons, for example, and a social and class conspiracy."

Few books I own are so marked up with memorable passages. And on the re-read, others have been added. There are flaws to the work, certainly those that Riesman readily acknowledges, such as the correlation of his character types with population stages. I also found the strained definitions surrounding the "anomie" type difficult to accept. But for simply raising the question, one that has not been properly answered for 60 years: What is it we do every day? Riesman still deserves 5-stars.

It is impossible to read this and not find yourself somewhere in the pages. I recall vividly learning about the various types of people described in these pages and saw myself -- of the self I wanted to become. This is one of the greatest sociology books ever written.

Learned people knew that the earth was round long before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The ancient Greeks were able to make a good approximation of the earth's circumference. What everyone in the west thought for a long time was that the earth was at the center of the universe. In the Ptolemaic, geocentric model, the stars and the planets and the sun and the moon revolved around the earth. Broadly, this view was reinforced by the dogma of the church. You did not question it.

However, many intelligent men and women could look in the sky and notice that there was something wrong. Most of the stars did rotate as if they were attached to the inside of a giant globe, but others behaved strangely. They would slow down relative to the other stars and even go in reverse. To work with this, the astronomers had to change the model. Instead of sliding along a rail, these stars acted and rotated on a second orbit inside of the larger orbit, known as `epicycles'. The models built on these central tenants were highly powerful. They could use the models to predict the future position of stars, they could navigate with the stars, and they could please the church with the models.

The models, however, were wrong. We are not at the center of the universe, and we have had to refigure our astronomy based off a heliocentric solar system. At this point, I ask: What do we make of the old model? Do we mock it, or can we study it for the elegance it was able to show under the constraints given?

I ask these questions because they come in while studying _The Lonely Crowd_. We have less perspective on the changes tracked by Riesman and his collaborators. In many places they were right. A fundamental change in how people see the world and act and react it was going on. In many ways, the book is prescient, as it foreshadows the whole of the text of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. We are (have) shifting from a work-based definition of the self to a leisure-based definition. Power has in many ways moved from a strict hierarchy to nodes of influence, called by Riesman `veto groups.'

But they were wrong. I am sure much has been written about this, as the text is well known in the field, but they got the `why' wrong. The whole explanatory basis of the book is predicated on the idea that capitalism, especially the upper-middle class American version of the culture created by capitalism, was peaking the population. Impending improvements in the mode of production would make population less necessary. Thus, the framework is based on the idea of `incipient population decline.'

The problem here is that while they were prescient on the cultural changes going about, and that we are heirs of, they missed the reason it was happening. They saw much, but not the baby boom that was happening as they were writing. At this point, I ask: What do we make of their model? Do we mock it, or can we study it for the elegance it was able to show under the constraints given?

I still enjoyed reading the book, but with the causation so easily missed, I did not always follow through on the thread of the argument. Instead, I found myself at length reflecting on ideas presented without the context of the greater argument. Even if they were wrong, I can say at least, `This book makes you think.'

I'm surprised the reader who said Riesman's book was hard to read had the basic skills even to write a review. The Lonely Crowd is not only easy to read, it's extremely easy to read. Hegel and Heidegger are hard to read. Quine's Word and Object and Carnap's Philosophy and Logical Syntax are hard to read. In terms of sociology, I guess Parsons had his moments. But Reisman? Come on. That reviewer must have had a steady diet of Harry Potter books to think that The Lonely Crowd is difficult to get through.

Although the thesis of this book is thought-provoking, the language in which it is written is dull and disengaging. The author uses many references to books and films from the early part of the 20th century, which not many people are familiar with today,and this definitely detracts from the book's quality. Also, the entire book could have been compressed into 100 pages--the same thing is repeated over and over again in different words!

his arguments. Tough to follow all of the points he was trying to make. Couldn't believe the length of the 3 forward's. I was expecting a lot more considering the build up. I had just read the Affluent Society and was blown away by it, so this was a major let down.