David Riesman Reconsidered
Mailer, Norman
The only review of Individualism Reconsidered by David Riesman (The Free Press, 1954) which I have seen up to this writing is a dithyrambic piece of Granville Hicks' in The New Leader of July...
...The edges of conflict become rounded...
...The style of his insights is reminiscent of any number of novelists who tend to place too much emphasis upon too little, until whole systems of good and evil are elaborated out of the nuances of the drawing room...
...Apart from his proudly eclectic approach to experience, ". . . . the pluralism which is one of the glories of liberalism," which I intend to discuss later, Riesman's ideas in The Lonely Crowd revolve around the terminology he coined of the "tradition-directed," "the inner-directed," and "the other-directed...
...put another way it is men's actions which make history and not their sentiments, but the actions of a man, particularly his social and historic actions are comparatively minute in relation to the whole man...
...But even that judgment has to be madein terms of the wider social context—in this case, a judgment that the lot of Negroes, let alone Jews, in America is not always so utterly desperate as to call for the ruthless sacrifice of protective prejudices...
...The productive speed-up tends to be replaced by "mood" engineering and "feather-bedding...
...There are essays on popular culture, on individualism and its values, on minority problems, on totalitarianism, on the problems of method of the social sciences...
...But it is quite another thing to relinquish one's view of America as a social organism with a capitalist economy whose problems are deep and probably insoluble, and whose response to any historical situation must be a function of its need to survive as that need is reflected, warped, aided and impeded by countless smaller social organisms, traditions, and finally individuals who cancel one another out or double their force (so far as actions are concerned) until the result of these numerous vectors represents a statement of where the power in America rests and where the necessity...
...Perhaps, if one could make such statistical counts, it would be true or half-true...
...VI Yet, after everything else, there remains the basic core of socialism so deep in Western culture, the idea, the moral passion, that it is truly intolerable and more than a little fantastic that men should not live in economic equality and in liberty...
...A book of five hundred odd pages, it is a collection of thirty essays which were published in various magazines in the last seven years with the emphasis on those articles written from 1950 to the present...
...Riesman speaks glibly of the airless conformity of the non-comformist, but what he ignores is that the radical temper is often turned most radically upon onself, and he is far from the first to ask whether one is a socialist because of the easy pride non-conformity may offer...
...Now, I am aware that the argument I have presented is as completely a "fiction" as the world of David Riesman...
...The entertainers exert a constant pressure...
...as he says himself...
...One cannot keep from comparing his remarks to the apologia of the fellow-traveller who dependably will say that in the Soviet Union there is no dictatorship, but rather that the power of government is distributed among the working class, the farmers, the intelligentsia, the Communist Party, the sober industrious management executives, the esteemed public artists, etc...
...He obeys "the process of paying close at-, tention to the signals from others .." and he behaves by...
...In his latest writings one senses, perhaps incorrectly, a certain complacency, as if Riesman has begun to regard himself as a public figure...
...I have sometimes been tempted to point out that the rich are a minority and have rights, too...
...Nowhere in his work does Riesman seem to have the faintest idea that there is an unconscious direction to society as well as to the individual, 354 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 and that, just as many phenomena proceed in society at two levels, so a particular man or as easily all Americans can believe consciously that they are superior to advertising while in fact they suffer an unconscious slavery which influences them considerably...
...Most responsible socialists would discard this notion for its vulgarity, its Stalinoid connotations, and its complete failure to fit more complex facts...
...In that sense, I think it can be said that any ambitious sociological work is created artistically and presents a Weltanschauung which is more comparable to the kind of world a novelist makes than the structures of a scientist...
...As a result, he was bombarded by letters charging that now he, too, was betraying the cause, was giving in to hysteria, was leaving his loyal readers in the lurch...
...D. in Sociology) that the one-hour interview or the twelve-hour interview, or even a thousand interviews, are "scientific...
...Power in terms of control does not exist...
...students who brought us together dreamed up the whole idea, then found the means to implement it...
...They are analogous to the very partial and limited encounters with "experience" which some novelists employ in finding material,—and who can claim that the good sociologist with his technical jargon is ipso facto a better observer than the good novelist...
...Riesman furnishes us the altruistic businessman, the persecuted rich, "the tyranny of the powerless," the benefits of corruption, of prejudice, and the hysteria of the liberal, not to mention numerous others...
...In the first uncritical acceptance of these categories, intellectual excitement is generated and one has the feeling that much is about to open, much sociology, much about life...
...352 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 There are many elements I have omitted, and Riesman, despite his infatuation with the economy of abundance, is not entirely uncritical of American life...
...If one is to take the trend of other-direction seriously, it makes equal sense to argue that the increasing anxiety of American life comes from the covert guilt that abundance and equality remain utterly separated, and we have reached the point where socialism is not only morally demanding but unconsciously obvious—obvious enough to flood with anxiety the psyches of those millions who know and yet do nothing...
...But it is far more ridiculous to assume that "power" is distributed equitably between General Motors as an entity, and a given number of small town lawyers who go to Congress...
...Surely the great mass-media artists, including the directors, writers, and others behind the scenes who create and promote the artists, make an important contribution to autonomy...
...For so long as we can choose our myths, I prefer this to Riesman's essential if unstated fiction which finally revolves around the old saw that the rich are miserable and the poor lead simple happy lives...
...there is a condescending evaluation of Veblen with a psychoanalytical interpretation of his character added to prove why in Riesman's opinion Veblen has now become a "poor, if often amusing and provocative guide to America...
...So there are lags, disappointments, rather astounding conclusions which seem constructed out of nowhere, unbelievable naivetes, repetitions of the early excitement, and finally on an exhortative note, for Riesman is nothing if not hortatory, the curtain is lowered and one waits for the flag in the background...
...His variety is to be praised if his treatment can not be, yet despite the gamut of the articles, and ignoring his ideas for the moment, what is distressing in Individualism Reconsidered is his style, overburdened with modern sociological jargon (individuate, marginality, personality ideals, and pluralistic), and what compounds the boredom is that Riesman says so little in so many words and like so many sociologists gives little feel or sense of life itself...
...Indeed, since the greater part of the essays in Individualism Reconsidered are merely 350 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 points of departure or extensions of discussion from the thesis of The Lonely Crowd, it is natural to relate the themes in Individualism Reconsidered to the structure of his thought in The Lonely Crowd...
...By the time Individualism Reconsidered appears, the expectation is justified...
...and Max Lerner...
...if one cannot create "works" one may dream at least of an era when humans create humans, and the satisfaction of the radical can come from the thought that he tries to keep this idea alive...
...the text of a long speech on the relationships between technical progress and social progress is reprinted...
...While the problem of who has the power in America is undoubtedly more difficult to answer than it is in the Soviet Union (although certainly not astronomically so), there is no reason to assume that there is no power, or put somewhat differently, no resultant of power from its vectors...
...Riesman does not always sound like a Life editorial...
...Riesman does not really seem to have ever considered seriously whether it is any small town lawyer who can go to Congress...
...There is an essay in Individualism Reconsidered called "Some Observations on Social Science Research" where Riesman states quite nicely that the present dichotomy in sociology between the data-collectors and the theorists is very great...
...To the left liberal—for want of a better classification—who like everyone else has become progressively more exhausted by the neurotic intellectual demands of the Cold War, there is peace and an attractiveness in the endlessly varied world of what-is where finally everything can be seen inside-out or right-side-backagain if so the need arises...
...our creativity, stimulated by such conferences as this, is one element...
...At last all things are equal, are justifiable— one is drawn to quietism and acceptance...
...In essence they are re-reviewing The Lonely Crowd, which is a better book and a more important one...
...He has become concerned with what he calls "reversals of emphasis," and I believe they can best be illustrated by a number of quotations...
...The current attempt to unify the country against municipal patronage and bossism seems to me dangerous, because by enforcing an ideological unity on politics we threaten with extinction a few men, soaked in gravy we can well spare, who protect our ideological pluralism...
...It is difficult for us to approach the liberal, to attempt to convince him, when we can offer no place to go, no country, no cause, no movement, no thing, and are ourselves exposed to all the temptations of circular thought, of reversals of emphasis, until far from obtaining the satisfaction of thinking ourselves martyrs, we are more likely to torture ourselves with such questions as our own neurotic relation to life...
...Riesman approaches the problem of power in America in almost the same way...
...With the exception of his article on the legal profession Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 349 which contains fascinating observations about the social character of lawyers, the life and elan of law review students, etc., I believe I can say with no conscious smugness that I learned almost nothing else in these five hundred pages...
...The latter categories are explained at length...
...Riesman himself would not make such claims...
...I believe that generally this is true, but since Riesman would probably argue that it is the economy of abundance which is the prime fact, and the war economy is superficial and capable of being replaced by American improvisation and the acceptance of new challenge and so forth, I would prefer to bypass these arguments which like most economic colloquies between liberals and socialists resolve themselves inevitably into a Keynes-Marx imbroglio, and try to go at the matter in another way...
...Is this not his basic appeal to the liberal who wants precisely to have thought which elicits an aura of excitement but does not force him to relinquish to his ideas any important part of his ambitions or his comforts...
...there has been a certain movement, and, from my point of view, regression in Riesman's thought since the Forties...
...Not to mention the energy and ambition...
...Moreover, one wonders how new a phenomenon is other-direction—merely think of the gallery of female characters in the Victorian novel...
...IV In Individualism Reconsidered another tendency becomes apparent in Riesman's ideas...
...we understand tacitly that its view of the world is a compound of the novelist's prejudices, instincts, and sensitivity, and we learn from the novel in degree as our own prejudices and intuitions are exercised, confirmed or confuted by the art-work...
...356 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 Wealthy students often act as if ashamed of their wealth...
...I will not try to tell you all of them...
...an excep . tional sensitivity to the actions and wishes of others...
...Why not agree that everyone is indifferent to the power of advertising and that it is all a huge hoax, perpetuated only because it is an institution...
...Even those intellectuals, for instance who feel themselves very much out of power, and are frightened of those who they think have the power, prefer to be scared by the power structures they conjure up than to face the possibility that the power structure they believe exists has largely evaporated...
...There is truth of course in many of these insights, but to what degree and of what kind...
...these men act in obedience to their self-image as proper businessmen, no matter how strenuously they insist (as, depending on mood, most Americans will insist) that they act only out of self-interest...
...His main objections concern the anxious joylessness of the other-directed, and in a liberal parallel to the radical dream in the Thirties of a renovated super-proletariat, Riesman looks for a development of what he calls the autonomous individual, a concept very close to the analyst's norm of a "genital" member of the middle class...
...The sharpest critics of American movies are likely to forget this too easily...
...Again and again there is a truly ingenuous quality to Riesman's statements...
...The forms of power are taken for the content, and there is no attempt to distinguish between those who lead and those who are led...
...are slandered as appeasers...
...For example, if Stevenson had been elected, could one imagine him making peace in Korea against the happy anguish and hypocritical storms of the Republicans that American lives had been lost in vain...
...For instance, girl students at some of our liberal universities need occasionally to be told that they are not utterly damned if they discover within themselvesanti-Negro or anti-Semitic reactions—else they may expiate their guilt by trying to solve the race question in marriage...
...No one dreams of considering a novel, at least a good novel, as a document...
...One feels Riesman's desire to find something justifiable, something functional, in all aspects of society...
...They exemplify the new generation of American entrepreneurs who engage in team-work, are not profit-minded, and seek outlets in the world beyond our borders...
...He did give in tohysteria—to his reader's—and decided to publish no more such articles...
...If Riesman were not considered so seriously, I doubt whether Individualism Reconsidered could have found an eager publisher, let alone sympathetic reviewers, let alone even the desire in himself to collect his essays and present them in a book...
...Nonetheless it is that fraction which can be and is affected by the media, and it is that fraction which unfortunately makes history...
...the tyranny of the powerless' over their group—the tyranny of beleaguered teachers, liberals, Negroes, women, Jews, intellectuals, and so on, over each other...
...and I should say that one can admire Riesman's honesty and his capacity for work, the number of his projects, the range of his interests...
...As I say, this is the only review I have read, but I can imagine the others, and it takes no talent for prophecy to assume that Hicks' review is typical...
...Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 357 Let me quote from "Winesburg, Ohio," where Sherwood Anderson says it as well as as anyone could: The old man listed hundreds of the truths in his book...
...It may be true, and I would guess it is true, that no group in America nor any individuals believe consciously that they wield really important power...
...conspicuous spending within production (committee management, incentive systems, etc...
...For I would say that we live in a climate so reactionary that the normal guides to understanding contemporary American politics are reversed like the controls of a plane which bursts through the sound barrier...
...Obviously, I do not wish to say that "Wall Street" or "General Motors" controls America or that mass-communication media determine absolutely the content of people's minds...
...What characterizes all pre-socialist history and may (let us hope not) characterize a socialist history if there be one, is that the mass of men must satisfy the needs of the social organism in which they live far more than the social organism must satisfy them...
...Every man and every institution sees itself through its own eyes, and there are probably few situations on earth whose moral judgments cannot be reversed to provide the illusion of equal truth...
...Again, concerning the mass communications media, one does not need to argue that men's minds are absolutely controlled, but rather that a man's mind, and just a small part of his mind, is affected in a small way—no more is necessary for him to conform socially to the main historical trends...
...He adds that everyone he has talked to declares the same thing, but that they make the mistake of believing that while they are not influenced by advertising, other people must be...
...Still, even a sympathetic reader could hardly be unaware that his writings wander, his emphases shift, his articles are headed by important titles and introduce important subjects only to dissipate them, until time and again the essay comes to a close after pages of decelerated discussion, almost as if he were a verbose and needy lecturer who has lost his point, glances at his watch, discovers he is half an hour over and will be charged for continuing to use the hall and sb comes to an abrupt end by reciting the final dramatic sentences he had memorized before he began...
...That the "power" in any important sense does not belong to nine-tenths of the "people" but rather is embedded in such massive and complementary constellations as management and labor executives, the military and the government hierarchy, the Church and mass-communication media, is more or less self-evident to radicals who would I believe agree that it is not the differences of interest in the groups I have named which are noteworthy (has there ever been a society including the Soviet Union in which there were not deep clashes of interest among the ruling elite...
...Competitive strife begins to disappear and is replaced by the cooperative jockeying for position of the other-directed types who are essentially more anxious to meet approval than to succeed at any cost...
...To the confusion of such relations in politics is added the fact that 358 • DISSENT • Autumn 1954 radical political life in America has become difficult, and to hold the position of a libertarian socialist is equivalent to accepting almost total intellectual alienation from America, as well as a series of pains and personal contradictions in one's work...
...Aufumn 1954 • DISSENT • 353 This, then, seems to me the best way to approach The Lonely Crowd —as a fictional conception rather than a sociological analysis...
...He concludes his appreciation by saying, "What I am sure of, however, is that this culture of ours, even if it should vanish from the earth, would survive in men's minds as an example of what the human race can accomplish...
...Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 359...
...Italics added...
...And one may even attempt to re-shape reality in some small way with the "fiction" as a guide...
...management concedes more to labor than is asked, labor in turn does not demand all that it could...
...One cannot emphasize enough how neurotic is the political climate of our time, and for the liberal who wishes to be active, the situation is not easy...
...than as something "which-should-be," is always so various in its aspects that there are a host of frozen truths...
...Naturally, I would be the last to say that the world a novelist creates is without value in helping us to understand reality (or indeed whether there is Reality) but I do want to insist on the difference...
...The essays vary in quality and in subject matter...
...but rather it is the objectives wanted in common by these powerful groups which can provide the best explanation of the virtually complete conformity in America during the Second World War and in the eight years which have followed...
...11 But, after all, it is not Individualism Reconsidered which the reviewers are writing about...
...Only the essays on Freud are impressive, and this not so much for what is said (the critique will not be new to anyone familiar with Homey or Fromm), as for the considerable work which was done and the honesty of the attempt...
...But the book is reminiscent of a performance which is begun on a high note of excitement where the actor Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 351 has not sufficient reserves to sustain the role...
...I wonder if these "reversals of emphasis" are not essentially intellectual tricks in which a liberal platitude is converted to its opposite, and an illusion of insight is thereby gained...
...Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful...
...Riesman embarks upon such separate topics as the character of law review students, the political implications of Freud's thought, and a socio-historic survey of the growth of football...
...there is a somewhat more sanguine attitude toward American Culture...
...The students would be much better off if they could take a stand against takinga stand...
...add to that early essay his sympathetic review of Communitas by Percival and Paul Goodman which he titles "Some Observations on Community Plans and Utopia," also written in 1947, and one has gleaned almost all of Riesman's now defunct radical temper and almost all that is interesting...
...and to the liberal's dismay and confusion it is the Republicans who can make peace in Korea, who are obliged to fight with McCarthy no matter how reluctantly, who can accept an armistice in Indochina, who may even come to recognize Communist China with the possibility that presents of splitting China from Russia—who can in sum effect the policies which normally belong to the Democratic Party, even as it will be the Democratic Party, I would venture, which will carry out the complete reaction if and when it comes...
...But, after all, the question of happiness is related not to politics, nor to action, nor to morality...
...True, much of its material has been gathered by interviews, and other forms of sociological apparatus are used to bolster it now and again, but no one can seriously pretend (except perhaps a Ph...
...V In the enormous reversal of emphasis which characterizes Riesman's work—the absence of ruling classes, the replacement of competion by cooperation, the change in American character from the stereotype of the brash aggressive man to the other-directed man, one may well wonder whether Riesman, despite his sincere intentions to invigorate thought and to make people "see" reality, is not really encouraging thought in circles, passive thought, but thought which gives the illusion of making strides, emitting energy, and approaching discovery...
...But one may choose the particular "fiction" which most satisfies the sum of one's knowledge, experience, biases, needs, desires, values, and eventually one's moral necessities...
...Viewed as a "novelist" or better as an "artist," Riesman lacks real stature in my opinion...
...The only review of Individualism Reconsidered by David Riesman (The Free Press, 1954) which I have seen up to this writing is a dithyrambic piece of Granville Hicks' in The New Leader of July 19, 1954...
...One feels almost embarrassed to remind Riesman of something so basic as this...
...Add to his credit some remarks on what he calls "The Nerve of Failure" written in 1947, ". . . the courage to accept the possibility of defeat, of failure, without being morally crushed," and, "What kind of authority has laid down the rule that it is wrong to be critical or negative if one cannot also be constructive...
...The techniques and the resources of sociology permit factual research on very limited topics, and the theorists who wish to construct more elaborate syntheses of society must do so mainly on the basis of their intuitions and perceptions...
...Intellectual penetration of this sort can never fail, but on the other hand it can never succeed for it is merely a flipping of switches, a change bf polarities, and the platitude turned on its head is still a platitude...
...Riesman's concept of the other-directed which is recognizable in one's friends or in oneself, suffers nonetheless from our suspicion that he is extrapolating upon the vast American canvas a view of life which too closely corresponds to the generally tender and anxious world of the middle-class intellectual in or out of academic life...
...I do not think I speak only from my prejudices, although in justice I must admit that I approached Riesman's work with animus...
...For Riesman predicated the development of the other-directed personality as a response to something unique in history—an economy of abundance...
...The M.I.T...
...but it is one thing to think one has no power and another for it to be so...
...The inner-directed man—the nineteenth century business man would be a prototype—is essentially self-directed, "gyroscopic," production-minded, set for life from early childhood in pursuit of certain built-in goals, and therefore rigid, strong, compulsive, capable of sustaining loneliness, opposition, and strife, yet moved in his circuits by guilt...
...There was the truth of virginity and the truth of passion, the truth of wealth and of poverty, of thrift and of profligacy, of carelessness and abandon...
...For there is no mistaking that Riesman is the professional liberal's liberal, and while I happen to have met no particular person who has been influenced by him, I have seen his name in many references, blurbs, and occasional columns, all exceptionally laudatory, by such intellectual deacons of the liberal body as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr...
...my later writings are less acrid and satiric...
...When he comes to discuss the power for influence of the advertising media, he says in effect that he, personally, has never been influenced by advertising, but merely annoyed and disgusted by it...
...By contrast, the other-directed man is flexible, anxiety-ridden, oriented not toward such goals as success or moral probity or serious work, but toward the approval of whichever group or groups he finds congenial...
...Among the forces which have forged that conviction must be included the writings of David Riesman...
...In the style of socialist polemic one could declare Riesman's structure to be sheared at a stroke because the economy of abundance is artificial, grown from a war economy, and subject either to crisis in the event of no war, or subject to war itself for continuing health...
...Why assume this, asks Riesman...
...A neurotic general overcome with work may believe he has the power to effect nothing...
...And in the business world where Riesman places so much emphasis on the emergence of other-directed cooperation instead of inner-directed competition, one can say that it would be surprising indeed if human relations at work were as ugly, as brutal, and as competitive now as they were let us say in the Thirties...
...In that way, Riesman's appeal is almost as strong—if unconsciously not stronger—to radicals than to liberals, and there are probably few socialists who have not felt the temptation to substitute what-is for the more elusive what-should-be...
...III What is to be said of all this...
...Ultimately, his credo seems to be that what-is must necessarily contain something good, and so an intellectual process which begins by stimulating the mind ends in eclectic monotony...
...How the middle class legions are to move from other-direction to autonomy is left in abeyance, although Riesman finds hope in the mass-communication media...
...Far more important than the data are the attitudes and pre-conceptions with which the artist or equally the sociologist begins his work...
...I recall in this connection a conversation with the energetic editor of a liberal periodical who had suggested in one of his articles that there was something to be said for the investigating committees: they were not all vicious, and after all Communist conspiracies had existed...
...on the accepted peer-groups and suggest new modes of escape from them...
...As serious artistic expression is the answer to the meaning of life for a few, so the passion for socialism is the only meaning I can conceive in the lives of those who are not artists...
...When one reviews the history of the last ten years and takes into account the complete about-face of American public policy toward the Soviet Union in the matter of a year or two (it will be remembered that the Autumn 1954 • DISSENT • 355 USSR changed neither its colors nor its stripes during all of this) I think it is a matter of small importance whether or not there is a ruling class which pulls the strings...
...His movement is "radar-controlled," his happiness acceptance, his social outlook one of consumption rather than production, his "taste" rather than his work the primary concern...
...and again I am not trying to say it has no value because its "reality" is "fictional...
...Italics added...
...Given sufficient genius this can of course be done, but it is obviously very difficult...
...Riesman carries his conclusions to the point of declaring that there is no longer a ruling group or ruling class in America, but that power is distributed among a variety of veto groups: the Church, Jewish organizations, Protestant organizations, lobbies, consumer groups, between management and labor, between the "warring congeries of cattlemen, corn-men, dairy men, cotton men," black-belt whites, ethnic groups, "the editorializers and storytellers who help socialize the young," "the military men who control defense and in part, foreign policy," and "in the hands of the small business and professional men who control Congress, such as realtors, lawyers, car salesmen, undertakers and so on...
...After such a preface, it is little embarrassing to say that I found Individualism Reconsidered more boring than impressive...
...In some colleges, professors who testify before the Velde or Jenner committeeswith dignity and restraint (often educating committee members in the process...
...Briefly, and avoiding the demographic characteristics to which he connects these categories, it can be said that Riesman considers the tradition-directed person (very roughly, the peasant) to be comparatively unimportant in the study of modern American life, and The Lonely Crowd is an attempt to explore the dynamics of American social movement in terms of the growing tendency of the American character to change from inner-directed to other-directed...
...Other-directed man as a social type emerges in his consumer orientation, and capitalism enters the process of becoming something other than capitalism...
...a drunken private on a whore-house tear may have the illusion that all liberty is his possession and all omnipotence, but one would have to be violently antipathetic to the idea of society itself to argue that there were not social and power relations between the general and the private independent of their will or their personal conception of their state...
...There is finally no way one can try to apprehend complex reality without a "fiction...
...airless conformism under the banner of non-conformity...
...it is "situational and mercurial...
...As socialists we want a socialist world not because we have the conceit that men would thereby be more happy—those claims are best left to dictators—but because we feel the moral imperative in life itself to raise the human condition even if this should ultimately mean no more than that man's suffering has been lifted to a higher level, and human history has only progressed from melodrama, farce, and monstrosity, to tragedy itself...
...Life itself viewed statically, seen as something "which-is" rather...
...but I think there is nothing in that quotation which he would not defend as it stands, and the direction of The Lonely Crowd was toward such remarks...
...One may suggest similar criticisms with regard to his idea that there is no ruling group in America...
...It is just as likely that Riesman has been prone to magnify the traces of other-direction which are to be found in government officials and management executives...
...replaces conspicuous consumption, and in short, "In this modern atmosphere of sharing, of geniality, of muted competition and unmuted conspicuous production, who would be the Scrooge who would hoard trade secrets or hoard capital . . . or hoard time (very few top businessmen are actually as inaccessible as their secretaries like to pretend) ." One feels tempted to ask Henry Luce for an appointment...
...What one can always do is to compare the "fictions" and try to see where they may lead...
Vol. 1 • September 1954 • No. 4
