The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, Abridged and Revised Edition

by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, Reuel Denney

Considered by many to be one of the most influential books of the twentieth century, The Lonely Crowd opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the problems confronting the individual in twentieth-century America. Richard Sennett’s new introduction illuminates the ways in which Riesman’s analysis of a middle class obsessed with how others lived still resonates in the age of social media.
 
“Indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand American society. After half a century, this book has lost none of its capacity to make sense of how we live.”—Todd Gitlin

Genres: Sociology, Nonfiction, Psychology, Philosophy, History, Anthropology, Social Science

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

David Riesman was an American sociologist, attorney, and educator.

After graduating from Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review, Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis from 1935-1936. He also taught at the University of Buffalo Law School.

Riesman's 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, a sociological study of modern conformity, which postulates the existence of the "inner-directed" and "other-directed" personalities. Riesman argues that the character of post WWII American society impels individuals to "other-directedness", the preeminent example being modern suburbia, where individuals seek their neighbors approval and fear being outcast from their community. This lifestyle has a coercive effect, which compels people to abandon "inner-direction" of their lives, and induces them to take on the goals, ideology, likes, and dislikes of their community. Ironically, this creates a tightly grouped crowd of people that is yet incapable of truly fulfilling each other's desire for companionship. The book is considered a landmark study of American character. Riesman was a major public intellectual as well as a sociologist, representing an early example of what sociologists now call "public sociology."

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve started this review a couple of times now and I’m not sure this one is going to work any better than the others have. The main problem is that there is so much to say about this book that it is hard to not go on forever.

The key ideas here are that there are three main types of people in the world today: the traditional, the inner directed and the other directed. The traditional type is someone who could have been born at any time over the last 100,000 years or so. They are expected to live lives that will not be too much different from the lives lived by their parents. As such they are expected to model or imitate the behaviours they witness in those around them as they grow. Their ranking in society will be fairly commensurate with their age and experience. Elders, therefore, are important in this kind of society.

The inner directed person is the stereotype we have of the nineteenth century man of progress. He has been brought up with a strong sense of right and wrong, a moral compass, a ‘Protestant work ethic’ and a desire to be part of the great project that is human progress. The inner directed person knows he has the power in his hands to change the world.

The third type is the other directed person. This can just as easily be a she in ways it is harder to think of the other two types as being female. Unlike the inner directed person, who is focused on truth and progress, she is not as certain what progress means. She is much more interested in relationships with those around her. She also does not what to stand out as much as the inner directed person would have been prepared to – if only because being the keeper and advancer of the truth allows one to be much more sure of one's self than modern people are really capable of.

Particularly illuminating in developing this division is the comparison between inner and outer directed people shown in the kinds of stories they choose to tell their children. The inner directed person tells their children fables and fairytales like Little Red Riding Hood. The other directed person is less interested in morality tales and more interested in ensuring their child ‘fits in’. As such their children are more likely to be read stories like ‘Tootle’ – in which a young train has been ‘going off the tracks’ until the townsfolk get together and devise aversion therapy to encourage Tootle to stay on the straight and narrow. Fitting in is all important to other directeds.

This need to fit in has consequences for how modern people go about their lives. In politics, for example, those who are inner directed believe they can change the world and even believe they can be President – modern people are not so confident that we can really change things and also prefer not to stand out quite as much. Life is more about being marginally different from those around you - the world is changing so fast that it is hard to be provided with a moral compass, but encouraging kids to be not too different from those around them seems a fairly safe strategy.

The discussion on work – essentially predicting the movement that occurred in the 1970s in Australia with the massive loss of industrial jobs and the shift toward service industry jobs - is one of the many remarkably visionary (almost clairvoyant) predictions this book makes. There are amusing paragraphs where the author wonders if television will ever catch on or talks about a radio show called Candid Microphone (yes, the forerunner of Candid Camera) – but these just add to the surprise that such conclusions could be made at the time, in the late 1940s.

If I have concerns with this book they are mainly to do with the fact that the author reached much the same conclusion Galbraith reached in The New Industrial State and that conclusion did not end up being a reflection of how Capitalism was to prove to develop. They both noted that the era of the entrepreneur was over and that managerialism would be the new order of the day, however, they underestimated the greed of the new managerial class and also overestimated their willingness to be ‘other directed’. If there is one thing the Global Financial Crisis has proven it is that those at the top of the heap are more than happy to bleed the rest of society white.

Nevertheless, where this book fails is much less interesting than where it succeeds – and as an introduction to the problems those of us living in a post-industrial society find, the conceptual framework provided by thinking of people as ‘other directed’ is a good one.

The prediction that work and play would become increasingly difficult to differentiate was fascinating and one of a string of predictions that are more true today than could they ever have been in 1949.

This book must have suffered lots of criticism when it came out, or shortly after, as it is based on a linking of social population types and a theory of population growth and decline which (at the time) must have seemed to be being contradicted by events (read, the post-war baby boom). However, the population S curve discussed in the early chapters of this book and used throughout seems much more relevant today, just as so many of the conclusions drawn apply to a much broader section of society today than was expected when this book was written.

This book poses some very troubling issues for democracies – problems that are still with us and that have not gotten any easier to solve. In much the same way that I don’t think that having a Human Relations department removes the need for workers to form Trade Unions, I don’t think ‘other direction’ explains all changes in society – however, I do think he makes some very interesting points about how difficult it is to define a ‘ruling class’ today and how hard it is to engage people in politics.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across Reisman’s Lonely Crowd while searching for a more “meaningful” life after leaving the computer industry. I think I stumbled on the “pop sociology” books of Edward Hall first (undoubtedly still worth reading). Then I dug deeper and wider, eventually hitting the important but oft-neglected (but very dry and dense) writings of Max Weber and Thorstein Veblen, as well as Organization Man: The Book That Defined a Generation — I remember I was reading the delightful essays of economist John Kenneth Galbraith as I was taking International Political Economy classes from a brilliant teacher.

Of all of these classic social studies, the one that seemed most prescient was The Lonely Crowd, with the discussion of social identification shifting from “inner-directed” to “other-directed”. The radicals and revolutions starting in the sixties seemed to belie Riesman’s thesis, but the trend again became apparent by the early eighties.

If I recall correctly, the definition was that inner-directed people judged themselves and acted in accordance to an internalized “compass”, moral and otherwise. An other-directed person, meanwhile, based their morality and identity on their social group.

A further implication that Riesman identified was the concurrent trend from a production-oriented society (“I am what I produce”) to one oriented towards consumption (“I am what I consume”).

Importantly, both of these trends are very apparent in the ‘net generation’, and the rise of the internet seems to be accelerating both the shift to other-directedness and social identification aligned with consumption. I don’t recall much discussion in the 1969 book of the long term implications of these trends, but they could be deep tectonic shifts in the nature of civilization, as profound as the shift from the days of a pre-industrial society based mostly on agricultural production.

(It is quite possible that I have forgotten essential details of this book’s message, or even fundamentally misunderstood them — in which case I hope someone will post a comment to my review alerting me to my mistake).

I hope to find time to re-read the Revised Edition and see if the Foreword, at least, has much to say about current evidence for these trends, but a browse of the book (via Amazon Reader’s preview) doesn’t show much commentary.

The Lonely Crowd is definitely relevant to our twentieth-century world, but so much of the subject matter, style and examples are antiquated that most people will find the book’s lessons difficult and obscure.

  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •

In examining other, more recent books, a disturbing possibility has brought my attention back to Riesman. Americans are widely believed to be increasingly “anti-scientific” (e.g., viz. Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future). Related trends include the shift of desirable professions from the “thinking” towards the “feeling” (e.g., viz. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future).

The shift to an “other-directed” mindset could be the underlying cause of much of this. As I remember Riesman’s thesis, the basis of this is the shift from an economy of production to one of consumption. As we get farther from an economy of scarcity, more people focus their attention away from “how to make and get stuff” and towards their social status. This isn’t a crude “keeping up with the Joneses” thing; its more like what the well-fed monkeys do: they study the more popular monkeys and spend more time grooming monkeys they think are cool and interesting (that is, “friending” them).

The problem with this happening in humans is that the worry over production concentrates us on the material world and its consequent attention to science and engineering. A shift to a consumption mindset could derail the very thing that made it possible, as people’s votes, purchases and career choices change. And the many crises facing humanity in the coming decades make this an especially inopportune time for such a transformation.

  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •

I hadn’t noted this at the time, but the Economist pointed out that Riesman’s analysis also applies to the emerging and huge middle classes of China, India, and the rest of the developing world. See The Middle Class In Emerging Markets: Two Billion More Bourgeois.

  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •

I was perusing the New York Times and concurrently reading about sociology, and so I idly searched for Riesman at nytimes.com and discovered two essays, one of them excellent. The first, The Last Sociologist , is an obituary written by a protege and explains how the field of sociology has, in its struggle to be treated as a “real” science, focused on quantifiable phenomena and in doing so lost its ability to be relevant to any non-academic’s intellectual life (much as Economics is boring whereas the neglected field of Political Economy is fascinating).

The second essay, How Our Crowd Got Lonely was written just a few years before Riesman died and examines how important The Lonely Crowed was at the time, albeit harder to understand by more recent generations, since they have been raised completely within a world of “outer-directedness” and have trouble perceiving how fundamentally different the world might be to someone with an “inner-directed” mind.

Both are worth reading.

  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •

Update, April 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

An article, COVID-19 is Crowning New Celebs in a Culture of Competence , drew me back to this book and my belief that it effectively predicted a lack of respect for competence.

I think that this points to the ultimate problem for the human species.

We evolved in small tribes, and that is deeply engrained into our social psychology. Through most of history, the most important needs were existential ones: find potable water, adequate food, and shelter. Those problems tend to reward people who pay fairly careful attention to objective reality.

As our societies meet those needs, our attentions turn elsewhere. There doesn’t seem to be any real deep goals that must be met (psychologists have long-since debunked Maslow’s hypothesis that there are universal “needs” beyond those basics) so what emerges is often oriented towards our desires to understand our society and do better within it. So tribal social psychology plays a greater role, but those small-tribe heuristics remain central.

Not only do we end up with the problems of other-directedness I explored above, but we also add increasing amount of tribal enthusiasms, such as those documented by the academic Lilliana Mason (Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity) or journalist Ezra Klein (Why We’re Polarized).

Personally, I don’t believe we’ll overcome this while we remain human.

Update, September 2020.

I was mentioning aspects of this book to a friend, did a quick online search for a key phrase, and discovered this essay: ‘The Lonely Crowd,’ at 60, Is Still Timely. It was written ten years ago, so that means this book will turn seventy years old this October. And, yes, it is still timely. As the essay points out, it was prescient regarding many of the changes seen as the post-industrial age advanced. I strongly recommend reading it.

­

[joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

truly describes our generations character. the fact that we're all on a website with our 'other-directed' receptors attune to see what books we should read next, pretty much proves the substance of this book - although it was written more to describe the new upper middle class mindset of the 1950s.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), co-authored with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, remains one of the most influential sociological analyses of American character and social change in the mid-twentieth century. First published at the onset of the Cold War and the consolidation of consumer culture, the book situates itself at the intersection of sociology, cultural criticism, and psychology. It is both a diagnosis of American social transformation and a broader meditation on the shifting patterns of human motivation in modern societies.


At the core of Riesman’s argument is a typology of social character: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Tradition-directed individuals, guided by customs and inherited norms, belong to pre-modern societies where communal continuity predominates. Inner-directed individuals, whose compass is shaped by deeply internalized parental authority and discipline, typify modern, industrializing societies in which autonomous pursuit of goals is valued. Other-directed individuals, by contrast, derive their orientation from peers and social networks, adapting constantly to shifting cultural expectations and the approval of others. For Riesman, this last type was increasingly dominant in postwar America, where affluence, urbanization, and mass media reshaped the contours of personality.


The book’s central claim is not merely descriptive but critical. Riesman suggests that the prevalence of other-direction produces a society at once flexible and adaptive but also conformist and anxious, where individuality risks being subordinated to the need for acceptance. While tradition-directed and inner-directed characters exhibit stability—sometimes rigidity—other-directedness encourages a perpetual responsiveness to changing trends, resulting in what he identifies as “the lonely crowd.” This paradox of social connectedness accompanied by existential isolation is, in Riesman’s analysis, the defining dilemma of modern American life.


Methodologically, The Lonely Crowd combines sociological theorizing with a distinctive interpretive approach, drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural history, and empirical observation. Rather than relying on formal surveys or quantitative data, Riesman and his collaborators construct an interpretive framework that seeks to capture broad cultural tendencies. This interdisciplinary orientation gave the work resonance beyond sociology, influencing debates in political science, cultural studies, and social psychology.


Critics have noted both the strengths and limitations of Riesman’s analysis. On the one hand, his typology offered a compelling vocabulary for understanding the transformation of American society in the age of suburbanization, corporate bureaucracy, and mass communication. On the other hand, the absence of systematic empirical grounding has led some scholars to dismiss the work as impressionistic or overly speculative. Moreover, Riesman’s framework risks reifying cultural archetypes, leaving little room for accounting for the complexities of class, race, and gender that shape individual experience.


Nevertheless, the book’s impact has been enduring. The Lonely Crowd became a bestseller, unusual for a sociological treatise, and shaped public discourse about conformity, consumerism, and identity in the 1950s and 1960s. Its critique of the “other-directed” character resonated with subsequent critiques of mass society offered by writers such as C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, and it anticipated later concerns with identity formation in a media-saturated environment.


The Lonely Crowd is best read as both a product of its historical moment and a prescient exploration of themes that continue to preoccupy contemporary social theory. Its conceptualization of “other-direction” remains salient in understanding the pressures of social media, globalization, and the new forms of conformity generated in digital culture. While its typologies may appear schematic, Riesman’s central concern—the tension between individuality and social integration in a changing society—retains significant analytical power.

GPT

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published in 1950, this fascinating sociological analysis was one of the assigned readings for a college course I once took on the intellectual history of twentieth-century America, and has - despite its flaws - been very influential in shaping my own ideas about conformity and independent thinking. An examination of the various "character types" to be found in the American middle class, Riesman, Glazer and Denney's magnum opus tackles the difficult topic of conformity, seeking to determine what type of person is most dominant in society, and the implications this has for autonomous thought and action.

The authors lay out three basic character types, comprising: the "tradition-directed" person, who takes his or her behavioral cues from long-established social patterns; the "inner-directed" one, who is motivated largely by internal moral/ethical concerns and standards; and the up-and-coming "other-directed" type, who is zealously tuned in to the behavior of their group (whatever that might be). While all of these "types" represent ways of being in the world that allow the individual to integrate into society, and are thus all, to one extent or another, encouraging of conformity (there being, thankfully, no cartoon-like Ayn Rand characters in The Lonely Crowd), Riesman et. al. note that it is the third and final character type alone - the "other-directed" - that emphasizes behavioral conformity for its own sake.

Paradoxically, it is this same type - the one the authors believed was rapidly coming to dominance in the American culture at the time they were writing - that also seemed to offer, through its emphasis on self-analysis, the possibility of a shift toward a more autonomous "inner-directed" type. That shift toward greater autonomy, and the seeking after it, was something the authors envisioned as occurring in a number of counter-cultural arenas (notably: "Bohemia," "sex," and "tolerance"), although it is instructive to note that they also observed that supposedly rebellious enclaves could be as rigidly conformist, internally, as anything they opposed externally.


Although it has been some years since I last picked it up, I can still call to mind the mixture of admiration and frustration I experienced, when first reading The Lonely Crowd (a memorable title, if ever there was one). On the one hand, I found the authors' character-type analysis very persuasive, particularly as I think that the "other-directed" type has continued to dominate the American scene. On a personal level, as someone raised in a progressive home - someone who had always been willing to champion unpopular causes - I found the discussion of conformity within counter-cultural groups very enlightening. It seems self evident to me now, but the idea that rebellion might go hand in hand with obedient conformity, that the mores of the dominant society might simply have been replaced by those of a smaller group, was revelatory.

But although there is no denying the importance of this book, as a means of understanding 20th-century American culture, it is not without significant flaws. The limitations inherent in an analysis that focuses exclusively on the middle class, however dominant that class might be, leap immediately to mind, all the more so given the racial divisions that run alongside class ones, in the American model. Prescient in some ways, and oblivious in others, The Lonely Crowd is still a book that I would recommend to all readers with an interest in group and identity formation, and issues of independence and conformity.

[David Jenkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

When this book was published (in 1950, in paperback three years later, and a condensed version in 1961), it was not only widely admired by intellectuals but also a best-seller. Today, however, in the humble opinion of one reader who was blown away by it in 1954, it seems deplorably banal, full of meandering musings, murky abstractions, unsupported opinions and tiresome platitudes. Because of what I saw to be a fearless examination of the conformity and monotony of American society, it had an enormous impact on my own personal life; it was partly to escape the deadening stigma of the "outer-directed" (i.e., conformist) existence, as described by Riesman, that I abandoned steady employment for a life as a free-lance writer, living in various European countries and constantly scratching for income - which was my lifestyle for more than thirty years. Rereading the book now, I can't imagine why I was so impressed. You can open the book almost at random and find long stretches of utterly meaningless analyses. For example, Riesman at several points (e.g., on p. 110) solemnly categorizes his favorite personality types - the inner-directed, the outer-directed - and even tells you during what periods and in what regions the different types flourished. None of this is supported by any evidence whatever. The author states that he arrived at these opinions simply by observing American society. Here is a sample (on the following page) of the author's vapid jargon: "The inner-directed man tends to think of work in terms of non-human objects, including an objectified social organization, while the other-directed man tends to think of work in terms of people - people seen as something more than the sum of their workmanlike skills and qualities." One weakness is the fact that none of this pompous description is backed up by any empirical evidence. But besides that, what is it supposed to mean and why is it important? And on the next page, we find this supposedly vital comment regarding some unspecified past era: "The problem of marketing the product, perhaps even its meaning, receded into the background before the hardness of the material - the obduracy of the technical tasks themselves." Here the statement not only appears to have to discernible significance, but you are left wondering whether this vaguely described situation is supposed to be good or bad.

[J.D. Steens · Rating 2 out of 5]

Riesman, who wrote in 1950, anchors US character traits in a “S” demographic and economic curve. At the bottom of the “S,” lies the tradition-bound character that reflects a long-term, stabilized and largely static economic era. Individuals take on the traits of their forefathers. The culture is profoundly conservative. Life is decided for the individual. When population growth and economic activity expands, cultures move into the middle part of the “S” curve. Population growth and economic activity reinforce each other. More population growth spurs economic demand; economic production supports more population. Forced to move beyond the tradition-bound world, individuals become what he calls “inner directed” characters. While they become strongly entrepreneur and goal-directed, they also retain the belief and value systems of their homes. In time, economic production stabilizes and population growth (and economic demand) slows down. This is at the top of the “S” curve. Now, the inner-directed character morphs into the “other-directed” character who takes on the belief systems and value systems of peers and society at large. In contrast to the entrepreneur stage that was production oriented, the prevailing mores center around consumption. Since economic production is more than enough to satisfy a slower growth population, life becomes comfortable. Activity is no longer driven to improve one’s lot. Now, it is about something else entirely. It is to display oneself as successful, much along the lines that Veblen argued years before. The other-directed character is preoccupied with the symbols of success because that character cares about how it appears to others.

The other-directed person is a sad state of affairs. Whereas the tradition-bound and inner-directed characters have meaning built into their existence (respectively, the unquestioned belief systems of tradition; the drive to succeed in a population-and growth-spurt economy), the other-directed has jettisoned its past and opted instead to take on the persona as defined by the impersonal “other.” Internally, there’s no there there. The self is defined by externalized standards solely and thus, it bounces off the prevailing sideboards of those around itself. Life, characterized by anomie, is for some profoundly meaningless and this, as I interpret Riesman’s argument, must be what the title, The Lonely Crowd,” means. (1)

In contrast to the anomic self, Riesman at the end of his book proposes an emancipated autonomous character type. While the autonomous self may adhere to the prevailing value sets of modern-day society, it does so by conscious choice and departs from them when it deems it necessary. This self, thus, transcends the “S” curve and the externalized drivers of cultural mores, and population and economic growth to become the fully autonomous self. That self no longer escapes from freedom in Fromm’s sense, but embraces it. Freedom, now untainted by all other-direction, is purely free. (2)

Riesman picked up on the then emerging notion of anomie. As the modern world transitioned from production to consumption, meaning in life increasingly became hollow. Life became easier. Survival - which had meaning built into itself - was no longer a challenge, and people had to figure how to spend their time. It was the Age of Boredom. Individuals pursued things and filled their time with entertainment but these, compared to life on the edge, really meant nothing very much.

There is no doubt that economic development changes the way the self relates to the world and, generally, perhaps along the lines that Riesman suggests. (3) But there is some mixing of apples and oranges in what he puts forward. The self adapts to the world as it changes. So in that sense, there’s no permanent self at all and you end up with the various character types that Riesman puts forward. But who is that self that changes and is it not a core (permanent) self? (4) A major theme in Darwin’s body of work is the importance of group life for individual survival. The self is designed by evolution to merge with its group. So it makes sense that the self would be in tune with its group, whether that would be that of the tradition-, production-, or consumption-based societies that Riesman covers. And we know from Hume that “approbation” (seeking approval) and “disapprobation” (avoiding disapproval) were the primary drivers of behavior. So the other-directed self (5) seems to be more or less a natural part of who humans are in a generic sense. But there is this “more or less” caveat. It is likely that human nature is highly variable between two poles. In one, the self is totally dependent on its group surrounding and is constitutionally prohibited from deviating from group norms. Conformity is its mantra. At the other pole, are those autonomous individuals in Riesman’s sense who are most comfortable charting their own course through life. Such variability is consistent with Darwinian theory; both work as survival strategies and both, likely, have been part of the “human condition” since or before we split from the other ape lines. Whereas Riesman makes a linear progression from the tradition-bound character to the autonomous character, it is highly likely that the latter applies to a few, not the many, and that they have been there all along.

1. I did not see a reference to the title in the book. I read that the title was provided by the publisher, not Riesman.

2. There seems to be a common impression about this book that the other-directed self is to be avoided, and it is the inner-directed self that is to be admired. After reading this book, this is not Riesman’s argument at all. The tradition-bound character type is referenced only as a historic baseline and it no longer applies to contemporary society. In contrast to the autonomous individual, the inner-directed (largely rural dwellers) and other-directed (largely city dwellers) characters are both not free. The autonomous character is what many may think is what is meant by the “inner-directed character. Given that autonomy is what Riesman is after, it is surprising that he gives very little attention in this book to this character type.

3. In subsequent editions, I understand that Riesman discarded his population “S” curve demographic that determined his national character types. It’s not clear immediately whether or how this affects his overall thesis.

4. Riesman allows this possibility when he writes that “when someone succeeds in the same overt setting in which others have failed, I myself have no ready explanation of this, and am sometimes tempted to fall back on constitutional or genetic factors….Certainly, if one observes week-old infants in a hospital creche, one is struck with the varieties in responsiveness and aliveness before there has been much chance for culture to take hold. But, since this is a book about culture and character, I must leave such speculations to others.”

5. Riesman contrasts the autonomous self with the adjusted self. The adjusted self reflects, largely unconsciously, its surroundings. The autonomous self has the capacity to transcend its surroundings and make choices for itself. Elsewhere, Riesman notes that both the inner- and other-directed selves have internalized the expectations of its group, with such internalization occurring later for the inner-directed self (“direction in both cases [inner- and other-directed] comes from outside and is simply internalized at an early point in the life cycle of the inner-directed”). The other-directed self also, of course, reflects its group surroundings.

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admire Riesman trying to assay the "American Character" with three pigeonholes of inner-, outer- and tradition-directed. I find the meat here beyond the triptych taxonomy of character to the plumbing of the post-Puritan American soul:

...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.

It may take a long time before the damage done to play during the era depending on inner-direction can be re paired. In the meantime other-direction has added new hazards. The other-directed man approaches play, as he approaches so many other areas of life, without the inhibitions but also without the protections of his inner-directed predecessor. Beset as he is with the responsibility for the mood of the play-group, he might like to fall back on fixed and objective play ceremonials, and to some extent he does so it is a common mistake to assume that American city dwellers are wholly without rituals. Our various drinks, our various card and parlor games, our various sports, and our public entertainments-all can be arranged in a series from the less to the more intimate, the less to the more fluctuating, innovational, and subjective. Even so, the responsibility of all to all, that each join in the fun and involve himself at a similar level of subjectivity, interferes with spontaneous sociability in the very effort to invoke it.

Riesman sees the distractible even gullible other-directed ... basically I feel Riesman has identified the born-consume-spawn-die American:

In my scheme of values, persuasion, even manipulative persuasion, is to be preferred to force. There is the danger, in fact, when one speaks of the "softness of the personnel," that one will be understood to prefer hardness. On the contrary, one of the main contentions of this book is that the other-directed person, as things are, is already too hard on himself in certain ways and that his anxieties, as child consumer-trainee, as parent, as worker and player, are very great.

As I review in my mind this book, I can't be appreciate the author's review here of The Fountainhead:

A movie or book occasionally comes along that departs from this formula. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, a popular book and movie, pictures its architect hero as standing out, in violent integrity, against the pressure for group adjustment and, in the end, successfully bringing the jury of his peers along with him. He does take all: the heights of fame, his rival's wife, the death of his rival. What is most striking in all this, however, is the unintended caricature, both of group adjustment and of group resistance. The group is made out not tolerant but mean, inartistic, and corrupt. And group resistance is seen in terms of nobility on the part of the sadistic hero, who wants to deny any ties to humanity, any dependency. This superman for adults is the very apotheosis of the lonely success, to be ad mired perhaps by the reader but too stagey to be imitated.

In all likelihood, moreover, the Ayn Rand audience that applauds fiery denunciations of group-mindedness and sub mission to others is quite unaware of its own tendencies to submission in the small, undramatic situations of daily life. In that sense The Fountainhead is escapist.

There are here keen observations, including the malleability of the American mind to what it reads:

Words not only affect us temporarily; they change us of leisure they socialize or unsocialize us. Doubtless the printing press alone cannot completely assure any particular form of social coercion-and of course not all children, even in the inner directed middle class, were readers. But print can power fully rationalize the models which tell people what they ought to be like. Reaching children directly as well as through their parents and teachers, it can take the process of socialization out of the communal chimney corner of the era depending on tradition-direction and penetrate into the private bedrooms and libraries of the rising middle class: the child is allowed to gird himself for the battle of life in the small circle of light cast by his reading lamp or candle. To understand this more fully we must realize that the rise of literacy affects not only the content and style of the literary and journalistic genres but also their audience reception. The increased quantitative flow of content brings about an enormous increase in each child's power to select, as compared with the era of tradition-direction. As a result, more and more of the readers begin to see messages not meant for them. And they read them in situations no longer controlled and structured by the teller-or by their own participation. This increase in the number, variety, and "scatter" of the messages, along with the general impersonalization in print which induces these specific effects, becomes one of the powerful factors in social change. The classic instance in Western history, of course, is the translation of the Vulgate into the spoken languages, a translation which allowed the people to read a book which only the priests could read before. Some of the difficulties of discussing the shift from the era depending on tradition-direction to that of inner-direction arise from the teleological drift of the language we are likely to use. For example, we are prone to overlook the unintended audience...

I have been beginning to feel that Gutenberg led to the bloody Reformation wars, Marconi's radio gave us Hitler and have we seen the worst social media will deliver? Even back during this writing, a 'dullification' of American life was observed:

'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 willing nesses, 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, "Satur day 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."

All of this leading to the stultifying conformity:

...other-direction is the dominant mode of insuring conformity. It would be premature, however, to say that it is already the dominant mode in America as a whole. But since the other-directed types are to be found among the young, in the larger cities, and among the upper income groups, we may assume that, unless present trends are re versed, the hegemony of other direction lies not far off. If we wanted to cast our social character types into social
class molds, we could say that inner-direction is the typical character of the "old" middle class-the banker, the trades man, the small entrepreneur, the technically oriented engineer, etc.-while other-direction is becoming the typical character of the "new" middle class-the bureaucrat, the salaried employee in business, etc. Many of the economic factors associated with the recent growth of the "new" middle class are well known. They have been discussed by James Burnham, Colin Clark, Peter Drucker, and others. There is a decline in the numbers and in the proportion of the working population engaged in production and extraction-agriculture, heavy industry, heavy transport-and an increase in the numbers and the proportion engaged in white-collar work and the service trades. People who are literate, educated, and provided with the necessities of life by an ever more efficient machine industry and agriculture turn increasingly to the "tertiary" economic realm. The service industries prosper among the people as a whole and no longer only in court circles. Education, leisure, services, these go together...

This strikes me as an insightful even incisive observation that is even more true now in the social media age:

The more advanced the technology, on the whole, the more possible it is for a considerable number of human beings to imagine being somebody else. In the first place, the technology spurs the division of labor, which, in turn, creates the possibility for a greater variety of experience and of social character. In the second place, the improvement in technology permits sufficient leisure to contemplate change—a kind of capital reserve in men’s self-adaptation to nature—not on the part of a ruling few but on the part of many. In the third place, the combination of technology and leisure helps to acquaint people with other historical solutions—to provide them, that is, not only with more goods and more experiences but also with an increased variety of personal and social models.

And, with all this decades even centuries of productivity increases, why are we not living in a Utopian state of increasing leisure when we work and strive as hard as our great-grandparents did? Reisman asks the same and believe such Arcadian visions may yet be realized:

Is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will some day wake up to the fact that they overconform? Wake up to the discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an inescapable social imperative but of an image of society that, though false, provides certain secondary gains for the people who believe in it? Since character structure is, if anything, even more tenacious than social structure, such an awakening is exceedingly unlikely—and we know that many thinkers before us have seen the false dawns of freedom while their compatriots stubbornly continued to close their eyes to the alternatives that were, in principle, available. But to put the question may at least raise doubts in the minds of some.

Occasionally city planners put such questions. They comprise perhaps the most important professional group to become reasonably weary of the cultural definitions that are systematically trotted out to rationalize the inadequacies of city life today, for the well-to-do as well as for the poor. With their imagination and bounteous approach they have become, to some extent, the guardians of our liberal and progressive political tradition, as this is increasingly displaced from state and national politics. In their best work, we see expressed in physical form a view of life which is not narrowly job-minded. It is a view of the city as a setting for leisure and amenity as well as for work. But at present the power of the local veto groups puts even the most imaginative of city planners under great pressure to show that they are practical, hardheaded fellows, barely to be distinguished from traffic engineers.

However, just as there is in my opinion a greater variety of attitudes toward leisure in contemporary America than appears on the surface, so also the sources of utopian political thinking may be hidden and constantly changing, constantly disguising themselves. While political curiosity and interest have been largely driven out of the accepted sphere of the political in recent years by the focus of the press and of the more responsible sectors of public life on crisis, people may, in what is left of their private lives, be nurturing newly critical and creative standards. If these people are not strait-jacketed before they get started—by the elaboration and forced feeding of a set of official doctrines—people may some day learn to buy not only packages of groceries or books but the larger package of a neighborhood, a society, and a way of life.

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, that, indeed, they no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drinking sea water, then we might expect them to become more attentive to their own feelings and aspirations.

This possibility may sound remote, and perhaps it is. But undeniably many currents of change in America escape the notice of the reporters of this best-reported nation on earth. We have inadequate indexes for the things we would like to find out, especially about such intangibles as character, political styles, and the uses of leisure. America is not only big and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable Chinese. By the same token, what my collaborators and I have to say may be very wide of the mark. Inevitably, our own character, our own geography, our own illusions, limit our view.

But while I have said many things in this book of which I am unsure, of one thing I am sure: the enormous potentialities for diversity in nature’s bounty and men’s capacity to differentiate their experience can become valued by the individual himself, so that he will not be tempted and coerced into adjustment or, failing adjustment, into anomie. The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

Like Debord's spectacle, Riesman decades ago seemed to predict the modern realities of social media and streaming services:

Education, leisure, services, these go together with increased consumption of words and images from the new mass media of communications.

Much of that media is about superhero movies today and I wish Riesman was around commenting on their CGI-drenched visions:

...if other-directed child comic fans read or hear stories that are not comics they will read them as if they were comics. They will tend to focus on who won and to miss the internal complexities of the tale, of a moral sort or otherwise. If one asks them, then, how they distinguish the "good guys" from the "bad guys" in the mass media, it usually boils down to the fact that the former always win; they are good guys by definition.

But of course the child wants to anticipate the result and so looks for external clues which will help him pick the winner. In the comics this is seldom a problem: the good guys look it, being square-jawed, clear-eyed, tall men; the bad guys also look it, being, for reasons of piety, of no recognizable ethnic group but rather of a generally messy south European frame oafish and unshaven or cadaverous...

One correlate is that the comic book differs from the fairy tale in several important respects. In the fairy tale the protagonist is frequently an underdog figure, a younger child, an ugly duckling, a commoner, while the villain is frequently an authority figure, a king, a giant, a stepmother. In the comics the protagonist is apt to be an invulnerable or near-invulnerable adult who is equipped, if not with supernatural powers, at least with two guns and a tall, terrific physique. Magical aid comes to the underdog—who remains a peripheral character—only through the mediation of this figure. Thus, whereas Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk gains magical assistance chiefly through his own daring, curiosity, and luck, a comic-book Jack would gain magical assistance chiefly through an all-powerful helper. While vaguely similar themes may be found in the stories of Robin Hood and Sir Galahad, the comics show a quantitative increase in the role of the more or less invulnerable authority-hero.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually read a first-edition copy, not this revised version, but close enough. Riesman believes that personal autonomy has declined in the other-directed society that industrial capitalism has produced. The push to fit in damages inner traditions of morality and philosophy. He does not recommend going back to an inner-directed society entirely. Good can come from being other-directed; internal ideas, such as the invisible hand of capitalism, can be restraining or terrifying. If one is to be other-directed, however, one should contribute something unique to society, rather than conforming to the latest fad and sacrificing personal autonomy. Riesman basically calls for a balance of inner- and other-directed attitudes. People should marry an inner "gyroscope" of values with "radar"-like concern for others. Politics should not be based on popularity or transactions. Such a balance of inner and outer attitudes would steer American character away from the excesses of consumption, popularity, and "glad-handing." The warning against conformity is passionate, and the assessment of tradition-based, inner-directed, and other-directed societies is more nuanced than one might expect. Riesman anticipates Paul Goodman's 1960 book "Growing Up Absurd," in which Goodman recommends arts-based and individualized education, so that students can develop free from a stale, commercialized, and morally shallow culture.

One can connect Riesman's critique of conformity to Joseph Campbell's inner-directed "follow your bliss" philosophy. The big difference between Riesman and Campbell is that Campbell loves traditions such as heroic mythology. Campbell thinks modern Americans need to reclaim some "primitive" ways of conceiving the world. Riesman describes societies based on tradition as pre-industrial and fairly static; he tosses all of India, Africa, and Latin America into the "traditional" category. In this way, Riesman (like Marx before him) suggests that those parts of the world are static, lacking relevant history. He does not want to emulate the traditional.

Riesman's research sample is based on the Northeast and the middle to upper classes. To his credit, Riesman admits these limitations. He cautions the reader not to assume that his argument is Gospel for all Americans (many popular readers assumed this, anyway). He sympathizes with persons of color who suffer from the other-directed prejudice of white Americans. He sides with past philosopher-scholars such as Herder and Lewis Henry Morgan in recognizing the way that environment affects development, while advancing anthropologist Franz Boas's model of relativistic cultural development (every group develops differently). Such laudable aspects of the text clash with Riesman's omission of women and dismissal of whole continents and ethnic groups as "traditional."

I can't say this was the most engrossing text.

[Elly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good book that leaves you with a new look on society and looooots of questions. Basically the author's point is that poor people who have to work hard, have other worries than what other people think of them, and that this is actually the problem of the educated, sophisticated urban folks in affluent societies. This was something I figured out myself when I was 19 or so, so I almost jumped when I read it in one of the greatest sociology books of all time. Because most people today think about people in affluent Western societies as cold, materialistic, selfish etc.

Riesman draws a much more complex picture. Certainly he gives a different image of our industrial-era ancestors that the one we often have, that of boring people deprived of individuality. He described the industrial era as individualistic yet also ascribes to it things that most people would consider anything but individualistic. Some words/phrases I remember: unquestioning obedience to one's parents, the school's one-sided focus on intellectual matters, monotonous, brutalization, character-building, cold to other people, impersonal, homogenous, predictable, discipline, material scarcity.

The consumerist society of today he describes as other-directed, i.e. people's lives are shaped by short-lasting, shallow contemporary fads rather than heavy, abstract principles learned in childhood. Keywords: consumption, fun-morality, child-centered, permissive, pluralist, unlimited choice. The inner-directed people of the industrial era were driven by a single-minded sense of duty to make themselves as useful and virtuous as possible, be they protestant, atheists or builders of socialism. Today's other-directed people are driven by an anxiety that they are constantly missing something in life and that they are not likeable and interesting enough to others.

His thesis is very mysterious and contradictory though. He describes inner-directed people as hardworking and able to live with very little comfort, but bragging with newly acquired wealth is also inner-directed. Even though he describes the other-directed society as obsessed with other people, he seems to say that this is a superficial and fake kind of sociability. All in all a very interesting book that makes you think think think....

[Steve]

Professor Riesman’s effort carried a rich enough academic tone to make large portions of his message difficult to absorb. Much passed by without a visit to my consciousness, a condition I have reported from similar reading experiences in the past. This work felt dated and of slim relevance today because our culture appears to be changing so dramatically, a thought I have also previously shared more than once. Take labor unions, for example. When was the last time we suffered a major strike in this country? So long ago that I cannot remember. Numerous references to once popular, now forgotten, books and films added to the mustiness.

Using a framework of tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed groupings, the author filters several currents running through American society. He also used the labels “high potential growth,” “transitional growth,” and “incipient population decline,” associated with an S-shaped curve of historical population development, to describe further the behaviors of those basic groups with particular attention to consumption patterns. This all might be captivating to the mind of a professional sociologist, but as a window shopper to the discipline, I quickly disengaged. I did find pockets of interesting remarks, however. The discussion of “veto groups” was a memorable nugget. I have personal experience with such groups, whether they constitute the minority or majority of past cohorts. It is too easy to disrupt the accumulation of momentum toward fundamental change in a democracy, or any institution, with a veto group exercising its will, always ready to throw sand into the gears of progress. The autocrat has a simple remedy for these unwelcome inconveniences, one reason many yearn for that style of rule.

Perhaps this work should best be considered as a snapshot of American culture in the years immediately following the Second World War than as an architecture that persists through time. How might I consider our culture today if I were asked? To begin, despite frequent use of the phrase “middle class,” I am unsure that there is a middle class in this country. Maybe the middle class is more of an illusion than an actual social group. We have poverty, certainly – the American variety, that is. We have wealth, yes, and in varying degrees, for there is the hyper-wealthy and the mere wealthy. And then there is everyone else. To go further, to create a social model that incorporates inputs from ethnicity, education, entertainment, geography, family history and health, employment, personal relationships, financial status, housing, politics, and religion, among others, is to embark on an exercise with limited prospect for success because of an outright complexity coupled with dynamic conditions – the simple electron might be the most important of all if we are to isolate on any one contributor to our development through the last 150 years.

In its ideal form, our democratic system has the ability to construct and maintain the rule of law, create level opportunity for all, and facilitate an equitable distribution of our natural resources, while ensuring our safety, both as individuals and as a nation. What has now become evident is that optimizing those dimensions is impossible, even though they should be appreciated universally and without objection as our obvious collective best interest. We appear to be headed in the direction of selective individual enrichment at the expense of the collective, which feels unhealthy and ultimately unsustainable.

[Pavle Pešić · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mnogo sam razvukao čitanje ove knjige zbog nekih eksternih okolnosti, pa je zbog toga možda utisak ovakav.

Elem, veoma zanimljiva knjiga o karakteru društva. Glavne ideje su sledeće: Savremeni čovek sve više gubi oslonac u tradiciji i unutrašnjem kompasu. Živi u društvu gde je „gledanje u druge“ postalo osnovni način orijentacije. To vodi u konformizam, ali i u osećaj praznine – ono što Risman naziva „usamljena gomila“ (ljudi okruženi drugima, ali bez pravog identiteta i unutrašnje orijentacije).

Risman je pisao ovu knjigu veoma egzaktno zato što je ova teorija bila nova i morao je da se odbrani od dosta napada koji su dolazi od drugih sociologa, antopologa... Tako da je ova knjiga vrlo stručna i ulazi u neke detalje koji meni nisu bili zanimljivi. To sve čini ovu knjigu veoma suvoparnom.

Iako mi se ideja knjige veoma sviđa i zanima me, meni je ovo delo bilo teško za čitanje i dosadnjikavo. Međutim, preporučio bih svakome koga zanimaju ove teme da obavezno pročita knjigu, ali da bude spreman da peskače delove.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Social scientist David Riesman wrote this important book with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney while on a sabbatical from Yale in 1948. It was published in 1950 and although initially only a small readership was expected, it sold millions of copies and became an important addition to sociological theory. Riesman originally started out trying to understand how the increasing power of corporation and government organizations influenced national character which ultimately led him to create a construct which analyzed, described and named three different cultural types: tradition directed, inner directed and other directed. The creation of this classification system was based on how people of different personality types rose to prominence depending on what was going on around them.

Tradition directed people were the product of societies that experienced little change, with social behavior rooted in the past. People in this grouping did what they had been taught by their parents and survived well in agriculturally based societies where they repeated the successful farming techniques taught to them by their parents and stuck to the traditional values of family, home and religion. Those traditions from the past did not necessarily help them cope in a quickly evolving society in the midst of great change as their characters were were rigid, insular and not open to innovation. The world still exerted its influence on them, with the threat of war calling up warriors and eras of exploration shouting an encouraging call to adventurers, but in the nineteenth century the development of an industrial society required a new type of person and saw the rise of a new character type, Riesman called inner-directed. They made their way in the world not by relying on the what they had been taught by their parents, but by being attentive to the cues of others, especially their peer group, co-workers and the mass media. These people gained their basic character structure in their youth through strong family bonds and community socialization but could change and develop based on what Riesman called their “inner gyroscope”, their essential pattern developed in their youth. They set goals, acted on them and behaved based on their own experience. They were the ones who helped conquer the American frontier and build a new way of life.

In the mid-twentieth century the inner-directed type was being replaced by the other directed, people who were flexible, willing to take their cues from what others expected of them, accommodate them and gain their approval. They used their social radar to guide them, adapting themselves to their peers and conforming to group behavior and attitudes. They wanted others to care about them and so they based their purpose on what others wanted from them, These were the type of people organizations required to thrive. They needed people that valued conformity to their mission to successfully expand and build bigger corporations. The character of people in this grouping was not shaped by their family or religious values, but by peer culture and the mass media, including the effect of television, which although still in its infancy was having a powerful effect as an influencer.

Riesman believed that after World war II American society was largely other directed, a good example being the lives people experienced in suburbia where they sought the approval of their neighbors and feared becoming outcasts in their communities. They abandoned some of their inner-directed tenancies to be like others but that came with a cost. In choosing to be like others, they learned little about themselves and lost much of their individual autonomy and social freedom.

Riesman theorized that societies dominated by other-directed people who knew little about themselves suffered from the loss of human potential, filled with people consumed by their relationships rather than their achievements. Such a group had few leaders.

Riesman was adamant in pointing out that in real life, these grouping had fluid boundaries and most people assumed characteristics of each of the three types. It was not to be seen as a neat rigid framework, but one that spilled over its theoretical limits in real life, with people even belonging to all three characterizations at once.

Having expressed his theories in plain clear language, many readers were able to understand, connect to and identify with this work. He used information culled from interviews, magazine articles and movies, avoiding research jargon and the academic terms that usually fill such work and so made it much more accessible to the common reader. They quickly were able to identify friends and relatives who fit the various groupings and began to have a better understanding of the differences among generations.

Today some of the work has been dated and abandoned but what has remained relevant is Riesman’s thinking about the tenuous balance between the conformity demanded by society and the passion for individuality. The work has become so well known that even after all these years, the term “the lonely crowd” is still used to describe the image of those trapped in an anonymous affluent society, among a throng of people who feel painfully alone and unable to claim any independent meaning in their lives. The phrase even made its way into a 1967 Bob Dylan lyric.

This is an interesting book that is still read, has thought provoking concepts and is still relevant from an author who was ahead of his time.

[Evan Ash]

really interesting insights about the changing patterns of consumption at midcentury. a must for anybody studying midcentury America. Part 1 is most important, Part 2 is still interesting, Part 3 pretty skippable imo.

[Madhab Dwibedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

U know not bad

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

...and the award for the most racist/sexist theory of human social development goes to...

I mean, I know that I'm being presentist and I'm ignoring more deeply-rooted critiques of the actual theory in the book... but some of Riesman's comments are really hard to read around.

[Quang]

The Autonomous Man in an Other-Directed World - Một bài viết mình nghĩ là khá hay dựa trên những ý tưởng từ The Lonely Crowd.

[Marius van Blerck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this a long long time ago ... before the music died.

[Adam Sauriol · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Lonely Crowd is a densely rich collection of ideas about the evolving American character, particularly within the timely context of “incipient population decline”. In the 75 years preceding, the “Other-Directed Type” presented by the text has solidified and evolved into a new type in the current Information Age. Hence, The Lonely Crowd remains an integral piece of sociological literature that defines the evolution of character through the lens of population growth dynamics. That is not to say that the book is without flaw (as I’ll describe later), but its relevance remains integral for understanding fundamental character operations.

As contemporary American society solidifies its transition into population decline, I couldn’t help but feel that a reexamination of the American character
preceding the “Other-Directed Type” is becoming overdue. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence, authoritarian politics, the flattening of culture through social media and online echo chambers combined with the dramatic erosion of play in the ever dominant sphere of work, it is clear that the American character is rapidly evolving to a new type.

While the book’s framework may now seem historically bound, its core typologies still offer a striking lens through which to interpret today’s shifts in values, anxieties, and modes of conformity. For example, even though the book may not name Artificial Intelligence outright, the notion it presents regarding the “conservatism of the craftsman” encapsulates our growing fear of obsolescence in the following line:

“But how many [home craftsman] can retain the spontaneous enthusiasm for craftsmanship in the face of the temptation to have the machine do it better?”
(pg.257)

That is only one of the countless rich excerpts one can find in The Lonely Crowd that provides a foundation of understanding of how American character has developed and how it may continue to evolve. However, The Lonely Crowd is not a comprehensive collection of character types in American society. The Lonely Crowd fails in acknowledging demographics outside of the European American, which serves as a detriment to the diverse makeup of American society. The book makes little to no mention of how race, systemic inequality, or non-white cultural narratives inform or complicate the formation of character — a blind spot that renders its portrait of the "American" incomplete at best. For an extremely dense piece of literature, The Lonely Crowd can only articulate a very narrow definition of character that undermines the nuances of a richly complex and diverse nation.

Nevertheless, The Lonely Crowd still manages to convey compelling notions of character despite its limited demographic scope; providing a solid foundation for further examination of a contemporary American character desperately seeking to be understood.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered The Lonely Crowd as a college freshman in 1972, and I re-encountered it when searching out colleges in advance of my departure from the USN in 1979, via an article by Bard College’s new wunderkind president, Leon Botstein: “The Children of the Lonely Crowd”. That article and the fervency with which Botstein endorsed the liberal arts and humanities as tools of autonomy was all it took to make me a Bard student for my remaining two years of undergraduate work.

What was clear in my re-reading was that Riesman was not overtly ranking/judging any of the typologies, whether tradition-directed, inner-directed, or other-directed. My recollection of the times in 1972—having traversed the 60s and early 70s as a culture-consuming middle-class child (Woodstock, March on Washington, Watts riots, Chicago 7, Manson murders, Vietnam, Watergate, et al.)—maintained there was still an animus towards the glad-handing, consumerist, conforming aspects of the other-directed, even if by then Nixon’s impeachment and the silent majority were its only remnants. What was not clear in 1972 was that this book had helped to define this pejorative perspective of the conformist 50s and early 60s, when few had yet taken note of post-war cultural shifts. And most striking in this latest reading was that Riesman had made his study without benefit of sampling the wealth of sociological data latent in the nascent, but fast burgeoning medium of television.

Riesman’s book is a sociological study along the lines of Durkheim’s classic Suicide, a grandiose compilation and distillation of interviews, surveys, and gleanings from biography, memoir, literature, movies, radio, and other arts and media. The Lonely Crowd was first published in 1950, and its prescience helped to define a generation and set the stage for a second. I believe it’s probably lost any ability to shape further generations, but it remains, like de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, a vivid impressionistic portrait of the period in which it was written, which still retains enough perspicacity to illumine aspects of the present. In particular, Riesman’s discussion of anomie and discontent is especially relevant today, and his very tentative prescription for the development of an autonomous American continues to tantalize.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

The scientific/philosophical outlook known as "Empiricism" came up frequently in this text and in previous texts I have been reading, in particular Noam Chomsky's volume On Language, which suggests I ought to read the introduction to empiricism that I recently acquired as my next text to study. (It appears that I have thirty years left to work at full-capacity, considering that my father was diagnosed with early onset dementia today.) To begin my review properly now: I thought this was a rather academic book which was rather dry at the beginning but, before beginning this book, it should be known -- and maybe it could be a test of one's potential readership -- that this is a book for people who think the Presidential election of 1886 is not something to be sneered at. If in fact you do see the contest between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan as something of vital discussion, then perhaps you too are sufficiently inner-directed enough to appreciate David Riesman's offerings. Reading his diagnosis of the progressively widespread social anomie that characterizes post-World War II American society, I found myself ruminating over my social follies and foibles and my deteriorating work-history and social-life before I found my medication and, when I finished this book, I found out that I was definitely inner-directed in terms of my thoughts, interests and ambitions, up until I played at, and was eventually swayed by, the other-directed form of life, in particular a greed for sexual relations and a self-annihilating desire for 'filthy lucre' -- wealth in all its permutations. I positioned myself in relation to -- but did not play, strictly speaking -- the market, but the market played me instead !

[Agnes Fontana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un grand classique de la sociologie américaine qui explique comment, autour de la transition démographique, les individus d'une population passent de l'état déterminé par la tradition à l'état intro-déterminé (déterminé par les valeurs individuelles, elles-mêmes transmises par l'éducation), puis à l'état extra-déterminé (déterminé par l'opinion d'autrui). Il faut parfois se méfier de cet ouvrage qui manie des idées extrêmement complexes avec des mots simples. D.Riesman y décrit le passage de la valorisation de la compétence à celle de la popularité, le contrôle croissant du groupe sur l'individu et la pression conformiste des sociétés modernes. La sphère politique, auparavant inspirée par une mentalité issue de la production (créer quelque chose de bien) tombe sous l'influence de la consommation (séduire). Si certains passages, notamment ceux relatifs aux médias, ont maintenant un peu datés, la démonstration d'ensemble reste impressionnante , notamment quand elle décrit l'emprise croissante du groupe avec la réduction de la sphère privée qui en résulte, démonstration qui semble anticiper l'impact des réseaux sociaux... dans les années 50 !! A la fin, l'auteur (professeur à Harvard) présente une nouvelle trilogie, qui caractérise trois attitudes possibles dans le monde moderne :anomie-adaptation- autonomie, et appelle l'individu à secouer le conformisme qui au fond ne le rendra pas heureux pour chercher sa voie personnelle : "L'idée que les hommes naissent libres et égaux est à la fois vraie et trompeuse : les hommes naissent différents : ils perdent leur liberté sociale et leur autonomie individuelle lorsqu'ils s'efforcent de ressembler les uns aux autres".

[Yahya · Rating 4 out of 5]

"İnsanların eşit ve özgür yaratıldığı fikri hem doğru hem de yanıltıcıdır. Doğrusu insanlar farklı yaratılırlar ve birbirlerine benzemek adına toplumsal özgürlüklerini ve bireysel otonomilerini yitirirler."
Kitap 1960'lar sonunda yazılmış ama yine de bize hem o zaman hem de şimdiyle ilgili bir şeyler söylüyor. Amerikan toplumunun hem tarihsel hem de siyasi olarak nasıl değiştiğini üç farklı karakter tipiyle anlatıyor. Ama bu karakter yapıları bireyleri değil, daha çok toplumsal karakterleri kapsıyor. Yani aslında tarihsel olarak değişen Amerikan toplumunu birer karakter olarak sunuyor bize. Bu karakter tipleri; gelenek-yönelimli, içsel yönelimli ve dışa-yönelimli olmak üzere üçe ayrılmış. Toplumun tarihsel olarak bu değişimi yaşarken ki yansımalarını siyasette ve çalışma hayatında nasıl olduğunu aktarıyor. Tabii buradaki değişimi kesin çizgilerle ayırmamak lazım. İçe içe bir geçmiş bir yapı ve bunun sancılarını da aktarıyor.
Genel olarak beğendim kitabı. Farklı bir şeyler okumak isteyenler bakabilir.

[Edward Champion · Rating 4 out of 5]

So this is not quite the 20th century classic as advertised. It doesn't help that Reisman often writes in clunky sentences and is far too broad in his attempts to assess the way that crowds have been manipulated in American life. But he does have some cogent points about how it is within the best interest of the elite to stub out distinction and to create all manner of mores and folkways that pressure everyday Joes and Janes to conform. He also unpacks some 20th century cultural examples that show these values in play. Indifference, Riesman argues, tends to come from people who are simply ill-equipped to follow the secret code. I do wish he would have made more of a case for the outsider.

[Julio Pino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Desolation row. An America of conformists, laid low by neighbors, co-workers, cowardly intellectuals and growing political illiteracy, and all this in the 1950s! David Riesman proved that rare breed of a perfect chronicler of his time and prophet of the twenty-first century landscape to come. Riesman's "other-directed people", heirs to those Americans who found their identity through first tradition and later in enterprise and initiative, are rootless, thought-less and without a moral compass outside of their peer group. His account of high school students as rebels without a clue still hurts the bones. But, then, how to explain the student rebels of the decade to come, the Sixties? Where were they seeded?

[Hương Bunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Đám đông ấy có thể lý giải được

Bạn đã bao giờ băn khoăn tại sao mình gần như không có nhiều hội thoại với ông bà, khó ngồi xuống nói được chuyện gì vì ông bà luôn bắt đầu bởi từ “ngày xưa..”, cứ như Once upon a time trong chuyện cổ tích vậy? Hay bạn không hiểu vì sao mình không thể có tiếng nói chung với cha mẹ mặc dù những đấng sinh thành luôn muốn điều tốt nhất cho mình? Tại sao những người sống ngay trong cùng mái nhà cũng không hiểu nổi nhau, chứ đừng nói tại sao xã hội có nhiều loại người và tầng lớp đến thế. Là do môi trường sống, hay do giáo dục, hay do nhận thức????

Cuốn sách tiếp cận vấn đề tâm lý hành vi với một cách tiếp cận có lẽ là độc nhất và ít được ngờ nhất: dân số. Cách tiếp cận quá độc đáo đi khi mà dân số toàn thế giới từ thời kỳ sinh sản nhanh, đến chiến tranh rồi thời kỳ dân số giảm, tức bao quát được cả ngàn năm phát triển của nhân loại, sau đó táo bạo gom lượng dân khổng lồ đó vào ba nhóm chính: Xã hội truyền thống, xã hội nội tại định hướng và xã hội ngoại tại định hướng, hay một cách đơn giản trong gia đình chúng ta chính là thế hệ ông bà, thế hệ cha mẹ và thế hệ những người trẻ chúng ta.

Vậy điều gì khiến cho những xã hội khác nhau đến thế? Chính là những điều kiện sống lúc bấy giờ tác động lên con người đến từng hơi thở, nhận thức và hành động, và sau đó đến lượt con người tác động cải tạo lại lên thiên nhiên và xã hội anh ta sống. Hãy xem xét qua về ba nhóm: (1) Nhóm 1: Xã hội truyền thống (Thế hệ ông bà ta), đó là nơi mà con người còn đang sống thành bầy đàn/ làng xã với nghi thức sinh hoạt chung cộng đồng, công nghệ chưa phát triển nên con người rất mê tín để thoát khỏi sự sợ hãi của những hiện tượng thiên nhiên kỳ bí, chiến tranh xảy ra khiến con người buộc phải quen với sự thiếu thốn, mất mát. (2) Nhóm 2: Nội tại định hướng (Thế hệ bố mẹ ta) trải qua những năm đầu thanh niên với chiến tranh, sau đó trở về thời hòa bình cha mẹ ta không mong muốn gì hơn ngoài sự ổn định và yêu thương. Gia đình sống thường gói gọn trong 2 thế hệ là cha mẹ và con cái, bố mẹ lao ra ngoài làm nhiều việc (do trước đây ít được học hành nên khó có nghề cố định) nhưng luôn mong muốn có được sự an toàn và đảm bảo nhất cho con cái, và không tránh khỏi sự bao bọc hơi quá đà và mù quáng. Xã hội nội tại định hướng, vì thế, được hiểu là nội lực thúc đẩy những người giờ đây làm cha làm mẹ từ bên trong thay vì do những truyền thống áp đặt của nhóm người xung quanh(3) Nhóm 3: Ngoại tại định hướng, tức những người trẻ chúng ta, những người được sinh ra khi bố mẹ đặt ra đã hơi bao bọc thì giờ đây bị ảnh hưởng quá nhiều bởi những người cùng chăng lứa, đẳng cấp với những mối quan hệ khác nhau. Công nghệ phát triển hơn bao giờ hết để kết nối chúng ta với quá nhiều cơ hội, bố mẹ cũng luôn cố gắng nguồn tài chính khá dồi dào để cho chúng ta những điều tốt nhất. Cuộc sống với quá nhiều liên kết và cơ hội dường như ở mọi nơi, và tâm trí chúng ta cũng hay bị xao lãng và hay so đo mình với kẻ khác hươn bao giờ hết.

Sau khi xây dựng nên 3 nhóm trên, tác giả đi sâu vào phân tích xu hướng suy nghĩ hành vi của họ ở một loạt các bối cảnh khác nhau: giáo dục, tình bạn, chính trị, … bạn sẽ bị cuốn theo cuốn sách với những lý giải thực sự rất khoa học mà lại dễ hiểu, nơi mà bạn có thể dùng lý luận để soi chiếu ứng xử của những người quanh ta mà trước đây ta đã từng băn khoăn. Cuốn sách thực sự mang lại một sự thỏa mãn lớn về những băn khoăn trước đây của mình.

Và cũng không nhạc nhiên gì khi mà Nhạc đỏ chỉ có thời bố mẹ mình nghe, hay nhạc Trẻm Kpop không lọt nổi vào tai các bậc phụ huynh. Vì ai ai cũng có những xu hướng hành động rất nhất quán và có thể ý giải nhưng lại tiềm tàng bén rễ trong quá trình sống của anh ta. Sau cuốn sách kinh điển về tâm lý này, tôi thực sự chờ đợi một cuốn sách tiếp tục về thế hệ con cháu chúng ta, sẽ hứa hẹn là một cuốn sách rất sâu sắc đây ahihi

https://huongbunny.blogspot.com/2018/...

[Dave Verbatim]

In keeping with my inner-directedness I chose a "to re-read" shelf, freshly created by me for my convenience.
Have just re-read some Riesman articles and essays dealing with generational conflict. It appears to me that we have long since dealt a blow to the other-directed, meaning outer-directed, and arrived at the gates of the under-directed, ambivalent-oriented and thoroughly confused human, not just American, character and society.
Out of a terrible fear that such a state of mind may even remotely be linked to his concept of inner-direction, or justified by it, I am willing to give David Riesman another try in order that I fish out any evidence of a possible reversal in the changing of the American character, you know, toward the violence which accompanied all the sociological aspirations of the nineteenth century.
Good luck wishes are highly appreciated.

[Anthony Defreitas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good book about how we lose ourselves to our culture. The writer makes the argument that we care more about people’s opinions about ourselves than living our own lives. He gives a decent amount of evidence on why this has happened and explains its broader implications and impacts. At times he bites off a little more than he can chew and brings up topics that seem a bit unnecessary but overall he makes valid arguments. I say it’s worth the read for anyone interested in American society, wellbeing, and the evil effects of capitalism.

[D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Inner-directed people vs other-directed persons

The other-directed person has no clear core of self to escape from; no clear line between production and consumption; between adjusting to the group and serving private interests; between work and play.

One interesting index of this is the decline of evening dress, especially among men, and conversely the invasion of the office by sport clothes. This looks like an offshoot of the cult of effortlessness and of course men say ‘it’s too much trouble’ in explaining why they don’t change for dinner or the evening. But the explanation lies rather in the fact that most men today simply do not know how to change roles, let alone mark the change by proper costuming.

Within certain given limits of property and place, one could move without arousing shocked antagonism, traumatic either in terms of one’s feelings or one’s worldly fate.

Many of these same defenses however, operated far more frequently as barriers to autonomy than as defenses for it. A society organized in terms of class, private property, and occupation resisted autonomy with all the weapons of family, wealth, religion, and political power; the complaints and protests of political and religious reformers, artists, and artisans against this type of largely bourgeois social organization, now vanishing, were true and just enough. But we must never forget that these barriers could frequently be organized as defenses for the individual, once their flanks were turned by energy and talent, they provided the freedom in which autonomy as well as rentier complacency could flourish.

A rentier is a person or entity that receives income derived from economic rents, which can include income from patents, copyrights, brand loyalty, real estate...
Rentier capitalism is a term currently used to describe economic practices of parasitic monopolization of access to any (physical, financial, intellectual, etc.) kind of property and gaining significant amount of profit without contribution to society.

In biographies and memoirs of the last several hundred years, we can reconstruct, as it were, the way in which individuals begin their struggle for autonomy within the despotic walls of the patriarchal family. The family operated, much more than the state, as the ‘executive committee’ of the inner-directed bourgeois class, training the social character both of future members of that class and of future servants to it.

Lawyers and lawmakers have a technique called “incorporation by reference;” by means of it they can refer in one statute or document to another without full quotation.

John Stuart Mill: In this age the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.” He saw, as many others did, that people no longer took their cues “from dignitaries in Church or State, from ostensible leaders, or from books” but rather from each other -- from the peer-group and its mass-media organs, as we would say. He saw, as few others did, that this occurred not only in public matters but also in private ones, in the pursuit of pleasure and in the development of a whole style of life.

questions: Is this what I really want? Perhaps I only want it because...

One can conceive of other such model ‘economies of abundance’ in which every effort would be made, on an experimental basis, to free children and other privatized people from group and media pressure.

Market researchers know as well as anyone that their methods need not be used simply to manipulate people into buying the goods and cultural definitions that already exist or to dress them up in marginal differentiations but can be employed to find out not so much what people want but what with liberated fantasy they might want. Without mock-up s and pilot models people rarely enough make this leap in the imagination.

Is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will some day wake up to the fact that they overconform? Wake up to the discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an inescapable social imperative, but of an image of society that, though false, provides certain secondary gains for the people who believe in it?

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, that indeed, they no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drinking sea water, then we might expect them to become more attentive to their own feelings and aspirations.

Inevitably, our own character, our own geography, our own illusions, limit our view.

While I have said many things in this book of which I am unsure, of one thing I am sure: the enormous potentialities for diversity in nature’s bounty and men’s capacity to differentiate their experience can become valued by the individual himself, so that he will not be tempted and coerced into adjustment or failing adjustment, in to anomie.

(Anomie describes a lack of social norms; "normlessness". It describes the breakdown of social bonds between an individual and their community)

The idea that men are created free and equal is both truth and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

[April Raine · Rating 3 out of 5]

While some ideas may feel rather outdated, it still offers much in the way of understanding our culture and cultural problems reflected in the "American character". Perhaps, a reexamination of this book can help shift us the right direction.