David Riesman's book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Culture (1950), coauthored with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, was one of the most influential works of twentieth-century American Sociology. It asserted that the prevailing social character of Americans had changed dramatically since the nineteenth century in response to changing demographics and the emergence of a service-and consumption-based economy. The change was from an "inner-directed" personality type, a self-reliant and purposeful person who was able to navigate through a changing world by relying upon the firm principles implanted by parents, to an "other-directed" type, exquisitely attentive to the cues of others—particularly peer groups, coworkers, and mass media—in finding its way in the world. This change reflected the larger transformation in American life, the causes of which range from the increasingly abstract and corporate structure of the modern economy to the social homogeneity of the postwar suburbs, to the amorphousness of the modern democratic family. The book's popularity derived from a widespread concern that the American ethos of self-reliant freedom was vanishing as the newly prosperous nation became a land of anxious, oversocialized, glad-handing personality mongers and empty suits. Hence the paradox captured in the title: a throng whose individual members nevertheless felt themselves painfully alone, unable to claim independent meaning for their lives.
In fact, the book's actual arguments were more nuanced than many of its readers noticed. Far from calling for a restoration of the past, Riesman readily conceded the highly compulsive quality of much "inner directedness" and saw considerable merit in an "other directedness" that enhanced Americans' capacity for empathy. Nevertheless, the book's most salient message was its warning against the perils of conformism, expressed in a closing admonition that Americans "lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other." That message still resonates today.
Bibliography
McClay, Wilfred M. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994.
Pells, Richard H. The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and1950s. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.
