Looks at The Lonely Crowd

...This view of subterranean social change was, for Riesman (and some of the others as well), a sharp political shift...

...Instead of seeing society as a space of struggle, of flux and motion, Riesman and other social critics of the 1950s (like Louis Hartz, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Wright Mills) believed it to be the product of nearly inhuman processes...

...Political activism forces one to speak about and act on one's beliefs, instead of keeping them unarticulated and private...

...If that freedom was to survive, governments needed to foster political association, to fight the tendency to retreat into a narrow private sphere...

...ATHOUGH The Lonely Crowd was written only a few years after the political movements and stunning transformations of the 1930s—the strikes and demonstrations, the birth of industrial unionism, the hothouse government agencies—the book reflected the sad withdrawal of the McCarthy years from a sense of the possibilities of political action...

...In the early 1940s, before getting his first teaching job as a law professor at the University of Buffalo, he worked at the office of the Manhattan attorney general, where he wrote briefs for the anticommunist Rapp-Coudert Committee, hunting down reds in the city's schools...

...People lived in a state of eternal expectation and receptivity, waiting to receive signals from their peers about what to do...

...For Riesman, these were deep shifts in psychic structure...

...But (as intellectual historian Rob Gernter has recently written) Riesman rejected the idea that the nineteenth-century world of lonely striving was a happier or freer one...

...Late in his life, Riesman wrote that he had been paralyzed by his stifling awe of his parents until undergoing psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm (although this, too, he undertook at his mother's urging—she was being analyzed by Karen Homey and wanted to share the experience...

...His parents were professionals, German-Jewish in origin, with a blueblood streak...

...As a child, Riesman lived under the shadow of his parents' learned brilliance...

...For Riesman, the country's confident and patriotic unity after the Second World War only hid—indeed, in some ways it reflected—a sad attempt to stave off cultural despair...

...Riesman believed that modern Americans were prisoners without bars, frantically glancing from side to side...

...DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 89 RECONSIDERATIONS In his later sociology, though, culture constrained politics...

...The "right of association" allowed southern whites to keep blacks from voting in all-white Democratic Party primaries...

...The "innerdirected person," he wrote, was driven by a "chronic panic fear" of relaxed intimacy, never able to be happy, haunted by failure, prone to neurosis...

...their powerlessness must be matched by power somewhere else...

...everyone was constantly looking at everyone else...

...For the rest of his life, he preached a pragmatic liberalism, played tennis, raised children, and simultaneously opposed the war in Vietnam and the movement to stop it...

...To explain this internal evisceration, Riesman turned from politics and economics to psychology and sociology...

...Or, put differently, it is the collective fight for equality and security—for justice— that transforms the drifting crowd into a political community once again...

...She was disappointed in her scholarly son, who she felt lacked artistic and creative capacities—the only ones, for her, that truly mattered...

...Riesman loved the legal realists and was a passionate liberal as a young New Dealer, but he never became active in the radical politics of the era...

...Like Betty Friedan's suburban housewife, they were dominated by an "objectless craving," an unfulfilled longing...

...In his 1942 essay "Civil Liberties in a Period of Transition," Riesman argued that eighteenth-century doctrines of civil liberties no longer made sense in the modern era...

...Riesman claimed to see political engagement as at least a partial cure for alienation...

...for Mills, the rise of Weberian bureaucracies...

...As he wrote when still pulsing with the hopes of depression-era politics, it is political action that creates a democratic culture...

...Modern society simply did not support "character types" capable of independent action...

...In 1950, he published The Lonely Crowd...

...They do not see that, to a great extent, it is they themselves who are doing it, through their own character...

...But at the same time, he treated the effort to think politically instead of psychologically as a way of evading one's own complicity, a refusal to face one's own sick longing for weakness...

...But during the New Deal, conservatives invoked the Bill of Rights to stifle the use of 88 n DISSENT / Fall 2002 the very liberties it had originally served to protect...

...This "government education for democracy" would, Riesman thought, create a vibrant, lively political culture: "Only a frontal attack on the inequalities and insecurities of our society will create the social soil in which civil liberties, either old or new, can flourish...

...Some big chiefs must be doing this to them...

...90 n DISSENT / Fall 2002...

...The Lonely Crowd, the book for which Riesman is best known, has sold more copies in the United States (1.4 million since its publication in 1950) than any other book by a sociologist...

...In the 1950s, his sociology provided a moody contrast to the cold war's flag-waving, arguing that the return of material prosperity led not to social peace but inner desolation...

...Like many liberals in the pressure of the cold war, Riesman reflected the ideological politics of the Old Left, but instead imagined a world virtually devoid of political actors...

...In contrast to the New Leftists, he did not think there was a powerful elite in American life, but that even people who seemed powerful were impotent: "The so-called leaders are only the more perplexed and overwhelmed, but scarcely less helpless, prisoners...

...RIESMAN'S underlying suspicion that activism was a futile and misguided form of therapy became more evident in the 1960s...

...Their Philadelphia household was a study in erudition...

...For an earlier generation of sociologists, such obscurity would have seemed inconceivable...

...It was a quiet nihilism and depressed apathy...

...Politics, for Riesman, was essentially therapy for the country's flawed culture...

...KIM PHILLIPS-FEIN is a graduate student in American history at Columbia University, where she is an active member of Graduate Student Employees United-UAW the teaching assistants and resident assistants union...

...It is this dark view of American culture almost irredeemably flawed, and the accompanying view of politics as remedy, that accounts for the lasting appeal and influence of The Lonely Crowd in times when political transformation seems impossible...

...Each society had its own way of guaranteeing that people behaved according to a specific set of norms...

...He wanted political engagement, but when confronted with people who actually were politically engaged, he never felt that they lived up to his standards...

...Detached individuals floated through their lives, preferring "social security to achievements, love to glory...

...Parents rigorously trained their children to internalize a clear ethical code...

...But this readiness was destabilizing and frightening, constantly threatening a complete loss of identity...

...Any further challenge to authority only threatened the fragile communities that might still exist...

...The cultural approach to politics has an enduring attraction for thinkers in moments of flight from radicalism, for it offers a way to criticize American society without addressing the deep problems of economic and political inequality that might require a struggle or a fight...

...Such "inner-directed people" were not exactly independent, but they were stubbornly and single-mindedly fixed on attaining the goals they had been taught to work toward when young...

...On an unconscious level, life for him was "not a renewal but an effortful staving off of psychic death...

...The philosophy of natural rights had justified the political action of a rising middle class, struggling to unseat an aristocracy with a death grip on the state...

...In the bourgeois nineteenth century—the age of the superego—people learned, as children, a strict set of moral rules...

...A crisis far greater than the Great Depression or even the cold war loomed large...

...In The Lonely Crowd, he argued that the deepest problem in American life was not poverty, inequality, or political repression...

...In Riesman's case (and for some of the others as well), this view of subterranean social change represented a sharp political shift...

...His father was a physician, his mother a former graduate student who relinquished academe for art...

...For Riesman, the central problem in people's lives was that old forms of authority had collapsed, making it impossible for them to understand who they were...

...As social beings, RECONSIDERATIONS Riesman argued, people were driven by an intense desire to fit into the institutions they lived within...

...It was an existential necessity, a way of bringing meaning and connection to an alienated people, more than it was a means to achieve a just society...

...Instead, they lashed out, blaming phantoms: Somebody else must have what they have not got...

...Natural law, far from being a neutral statement of universal rights, had been used to enable members of this nascent bourgeoisie to exercise political power...

...Leftist political engagement provides a way of relating to other people as equals and citizens, instead of as marketplace competitors and rivals...

...When the University of Chicago hired him after the war, he abandoned law for sociology, giving up political analysis for the silent trends of demography and the market...

...Even today, when The Lonely Crowd is more cited than read, a period piece rather than a contemporary text, Michael Lerner's pleas for the "politics of meaning" are Riesman Lite...

...They needed to encourage self-organization, by passing laws like the Wagner Act, which Riesman called "one of the essential pillars for civil liberty in our time...

...Cultural mores were enforced through people's sensitivity to the wants and demands of those around them...

...It helped to inspire the New Left's quest for "participatory democracy...

...The rise of urban society, the corporation, and mass culture meant that life was lived under the influence of large-scale institutions, without clear authority figures...

...In "traditional" societies, social roles contained a clear set of rules, leaving individuals little freedom of action...

...Sensing their own powerlessness, they nonetheless could not accept responsibility for it...

...The Old Left might have had an analysis appropriate to a time of economic crisis but it could not provide the language to formulate the amorphous misery of the mass...

...Less than a decade later, though, Riesman was far more pessimistic about the ability of the state to promote political engagement...

...It is total meaninglessness...

...His early work, although not explicitly leftist, was more self-consciously political than his later writings on culture and psychology...

...But this does not happen easily or without a cost...

...Freedom of speech" justified Henry Ford's berating his workers to vote No Union...

...In the twentieth century, though, the inner compass of morality seemed to have swung off kilter...

...For politics to be safe, it had to be the province of the "autonomous few," the "saving remnant...

...In his early legal writings, Riesman had argued that politics was a space of freedom and conflict: corporations sought to quell political activity, but governments could take action to encourage it...

...Their core instability made it impossible for them to take independent action, for fear of collapsing under the internal weight of unanswerable questions about what the neighbors might think...

...In the 1969 edition of The Lonely Crowd, he wrote that, unwittingly, he had contributed to the "snobbish deprecation of business careers" and to the spirit of "nihilism" among youths with the temerity to pretend to "moral or intellectual nonconformity...

...There was no way to consciously change "social character" on a mass scale, to smooth out the deep flaws of cultural personality, and to reinvigorate public life...

...He floundered into law school and subsequently clerked for Louis Brandeis...

...But instead of being pleased, Riesman was distressed...

...It allows a group of people to make the world their common work...

...Despite Riesman's bitter skepticism, The Lonely Crowd is a book whose arguments and approach seem to come back into vogue in conservative times...

...Christopher Lasch's The Culture of Narcissism echoed Riesman's themes, with a touch more Freud...

...Riesman's critical take on American culture fundamentally shaped the thinking of the postwar generation...

...What we fear...is more than total destruction," Riesman wrote...

...He taught at Harvard, published books and copious short articles and essays, and wrote many letters, but The Lonely Crowd remained the pinnacle of his intellectual work...

...Today, the labor movement and the antiglobalization movement seek to reclaim the economy as a site of political struggle, reversing the intellectual movement of the cold war years and bringing politics back into the workplace and the market...

...People get involved in these conflicts for reasons that go far beyond higher wages and health insurance, though surely these matter in their own right...

...Perhaps because of his parents' high expectations, Riesman graduated from college (where he studied science) uncertain of what DISSENT / Fall 2002 n 87 RECONSIDERATIONS to do...

...LTHOUGH RIESMAN ' S worldview remained fairly consistent after 1950, his approach to politics underwent a dramatic transformation in the years before he wrote The Lonely Crowd...

...By arguing that the cultural perils of prosperity—more than union-busting, McCarthyism, or racial segregation—were the greatest threats to American democracy, Riesman helped shift political debate away from the open conflicts of the New Deal era, creating the myth of the quiet 1950s...

...In modern America, private and corporate power, far more than the tyrannous reach of the state, was the major threat to political liberty...

...College students, awakened by the civil rights movement and—in later years—disgusted by Vietnam's bloody maelstrom, organized the Free Speech Movement and Students for a Democratic Society...

...It was a smash hit, and Riesman immediately soared to academic stardom...

...Still, even though he rejected nostalgia, Riesman's description of the present was airless and bleak...

...There were no obvious leaders...

...They should create public meeting spaces, where citizens could come together to fight oppression and inequality...

...He described his mother in a memoir as "nostalgic," dissatisfied with the shallowness of American culture...

...What kind of life, indeed, is appropriate to a society whose lower classes are being devoured faster by prosperity than Puerto Rican immigration can replenish...

...The idea that the state was the primary threat to political freedom reflected the historical fact that in the eighteenth century civil society had to be carved out against the backdrop of absolute monarchy...

...Neither traditional liberalism nor Marxism was meaningful for Americans, who found themselves "ill at ease in Zion," adrift in the plastic glory of the postwar boom...

...DAVID RIESMAN'S early life was characterized by indirection...

...People needed to be instantly able to adapt to their surroundings: open, flexible, never committed to any set of fixed principles...

...The Lonely Crowd is often viewed as a sepiatinted book, a paean to lost individualism...

...It gave flower children and hippies the courage to live differently...

...In abandoning his focus on the corrosive impact of corporate power on democracy, he seemed to forget that freedom and economic security are not opposed to one another...

...For when young radicals took his ideas seriously, Riesman was shocked...

...If political activists are to engage with things that matter, which is the only way that they can give their lives the seriousness that Riesman sought, they must do what seemed to frighten Riesman most of all: seek out a real confrontation with the sources of power and authority in their lives...

...As a young man, Riesman saw that democratic politics revolved around hard questions of material and political resources...