Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics

by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer

Study about politics and character.

634 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1952

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

[Shawn · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not entirely worthless or w/out value but 1) wordy & long 2) old & dated 3) presumptuously analytical. A fossil from the library for bibliophilic nerds with down-time. There’s a lotta psychology going on, a lotta reading—of people. It’s a collection of interviews, the format of questions does not change, and the intention is to gauge the engagement of ‘the people’ with political affairs to the extent of their seeming affect, that is, how worked up they get about certain issues and how impassioned & emotional they are on select topics. The interviewers, admittedly inexperienced, had a peculiar framework of designating a person as ‘other-directed’, ‘innner-directed’, ‘inside-dopester’, & ‘anomic’. And I still can’t really say what they mean: The terms stretch a bit past intro/extrovert and yet fail to be of any real application, the author confesses as much in the preface. There’s a phenomenal fascination amongst people, then & now, for drawing lines of difference and for typecasting.

I liked a few bits here & there. The use of Rorschach expertise in some cases was interesting. The author is intelligent: sometimes he reads too much into one thing, and sometimes he is spot on. But as a reading experience it comes off as invasive: the guy’s gone and crafted questions to interview people with, then he’s gone on home to his desk to pick apart every utterance of each interviewee in a slightly grating, pedantic, psychological analysis/diagnosis. Thus, this 741 page (yes! 741) hardcover from the depths of my public library. I should mention that he composed “The Lonely Crowd”, and I’d sought this more renowned book of his but couldn’t find it, so I settled, disappointingly, for this hefty, illustration-less hardcovered book. It’s tinged w/dated -isms and biases. For instance, Wallace (the former vice president and presidential candidate of the 1940s) is brought up endlessly, so too w/Communism. This was a dud for me, it began alright but then gradually bored & weighed down on my skin like some oppressively humid weather.

[aldo zirsov]

beli di IBF Oktober 2010