Lonely Crowd

* Book: The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. By David Riesman, with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer. Yale University Press, 1950

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Review

Diane Barthel-Bouchier:

"Writing in the post–World War II (1939–1945) period, Riesman sought to understand what kinds of character structures were being encouraged by the social institutions of modern society, including capitalist corporations, political institutions, and the mass media. He proposed three different character types. The tradition-directed type was the product of unchanging societies in which social patterns were rooted in the past. The traditional character was rigid, insular, and not open to innovation. The development of industrial society, however, required a new character type. The nineteenth century saw the rise of what Riesman called the inner-directed type. This character received its essential structure in its youth, through strong family and community socialization. Unlike the traditional type, the inner-directed person could change and develop, but only following the direction of his or her inner gyroscope, whose essential pattern had been determined in youth.

Riesman argued that in the mid-twentieth century the inner-directed type was being replaced by a new character type. Modern organizations demanded people who took their cues from what other people expected of them. These other-directed individuals used their social radar, rather than an inner gyroscope, to guide their values and actions. They preferred to be loved rather than esteemed. Their character was not shaped primarily by family or religion, but rather was strongly influenced by peer culture and the mass media.

When it was first published, The Lonely Crowd received many critical reviews, but nonetheless resonated widely in American society. Readers could appreciate the social changes within twentieth-century American society; they experienced firsthand the growing power of corporations and the greater presence of the media, including television, which was then in its infancy. They could—or thought they could—identify inner- and other-directed people among their relatives and friends, and detect differences between generations. Riesman himself, of course, proposed these terms as ideal types, with most people in modern society combining elements of the different character types.

The popularity of the book was also due to the clear, declarative writing style that artfully mixed interview data with evidence culled from magazines, movies, and even children’s books. The Lonely Crowd was a jargon-free, wide-ranging analysis of the sort that sociology has largely since abandoned. To some extent, it is a period piece. Many of its assertions have since proved wrong, most notably a demographic hypothesis that tied the rate of population growth to national character type, a hypothesis that Riesman himself abandoned in the 1969 edition. But other hypotheses about the tenuous balance between the social conformity demanded by society and desires for autonomy among individuals continue to demand attention, even as the paradoxical phrase, “the lonely crowd,” has entered into public discourse as an image of anomie within affluent society."

(https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/united-states-and-canada/us-history/lonely-crowd)