Living With Books

...The first essay of Riesman's I ever read was called "The Ethics of We Happy Few," which dealt with a not very widely-known novel by Helen Howe...

...And in two essays he explicitly defends the right to be different...

...But he neither recommends nor condemns the other-directed character...

...Riesman, I found, agreed with these judgments but went on to criticize the heroine's renunciation of the standards and responsibilities of the intellectual life...

...I remember wondering why a sociologist would want to write about this particular book, which I had found moderately entertaining but not especially significant...

...This is particularly clear in an essay he wrote last year for the American Scholar in reply to Archibald MacLeish's "Loyalty and Freedom...

...For the rest, there are two essays on totalitarianism and four on the methods of the social sciences...

...In my judgment," Riesman writes, "he is a poor, if often amusing and provocative, guide to America...

...Of these troubled persons, so many of them habitual prophets of doom and bred-in-the-bone enemies of the status quo, whatever the status quo may be, he writes: "I regret that they do not see that we in America now live in what in many ways is a great age...

...There is, for instance, an essay called "Recreation and the Recre-ationist," originally delivered as a lecture to a conference of social workers, in which Riesman tactfully asks whether we are allowing our recreation to be over-organized...

...This persistence in qualification could, of course, be the product of weakness, but with Riesman it comes from subtlety and breadth of vision...

...MacLeish had viewed with alarm the rise of Mc-Carthyism and related phenomena, and Riesman wanted to suggest that the alarm might be excessive by pointing out how much evidence there was to indicate that we were not on the brink of fascism...

...In "The Limits of Totalitarian Power," as in the reply to Archibald MacLeish, Riesman wonders whether the harried intellectuals are not underestimating the strength of the society in which they live...

...That the heroine should be critical of her own group was fine...

...The latter are on the professional side, but they are full of incidental insights that will reward the lay reader...

...I was not to understand all the implications of this indictment until I had read other essays of Riesman's and especially The Lonely Crowd...

...Riesman believes that autonomous persons are few—the title of one of the essays is "The Saving Remnant"—but he believes that they can and do exist in our kind of society, and he is anxious that there should be more of them...

...But, as I read the book, I understood why he had wished to let the emphasis of the title fall on the individual rather than on society...

...He quotes one of the speakers as saying that "the delegates were having trouble because American culture had become, in some ways, more sophisticated than they realized...

...Since he believes that the other-directed person, the kind of person who takes his values from those around him, is the most numerous type in our society, he devotes much of the book to the behavior of such persons...

...For Freud, to whom he devotes four essays, he has greater admiration than for Veblen, stating, indeed, that "no one else has contributed so much to the vitality of the social sciences today...

...He is sympathetic in his approach to the mass media, and chides the critics for failing to recognize the good things that have been accomplished...

...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...

...that she should accept uncritically the values of another group—and that the author approved of her doing so—was bad...

...And again: "In the arts of consumption as well as in the arts of production, Americans have moved so fast that, in architecture and design, in moving pictures and in poetry and criticism, we are living in what I believe to be one of the great cultures of history...

...Riesman heartily approves of the high standards of living and the approximate equality that have come about in this age of abundance, and he finds much that is good in mass society and mass culture, but he never forgets the importance of the individual...

...In an essay significantly called "Some Observations on the Limits of Totalitarian Power," Riesman asks whether Orwell and others haven't attributed to totalitarianism a monolithic quality that it doesn't really have...

...LIVING WITH BOOKS David Riesman Explores the Problem Of the Individual in a Mass Society By Granville Hicks In the introduction to one of the sections of Individualism Reconsidered (Free Press, $6.00), David Riesman tells of a conference at which he and others attempted to interpret American society to a group of foreign students...

...He continues: "I myself constantly feel that it escapes my efforts at investigation, that I have a sense of only a very small fragment of what goes on, and that neither social science nor other forms of reporting are quite keeping up with the growing differentiation of our national life...

...The question here is not whether Riesman has exactly estimated the threat of reaction, either in his original article or in the postscript...

...Whereas many people say that we are living through a revolution, he really feels it...

...Other essays in the first two sections of the volume develop related concepts...

...Yet, in spite of his acknowledged debt to Freud, three of the four essays express drastic disagreements with Freud's ideas...

...The essay on We Happy Few, then, was one of Riesman's earlier attempts to present the concept of autonomy...

...Indeed this is not the fashionable sort of thing to be saying today, but that does not make it any the less valuable—or, for that matter, any the less true...

...The autonomous person, he clearly feels, will neither sneer at mass culture nor disparage what is called high culture but will take his enjoyment where he finds it...

...It told about a young woman who had grown up in a snobbish clique of intellectuals in the East, who broke with that clique, and who discovered a new meaning in life when she learned to know and like the common people...

...As I looked through the names of the thirty essays Riesman has included in Individualism Reconsidered, I wondered a little why he had chosen the name of that particular essay as the title of his book...

...This modest tribute to the complexity and richness of the civilization of contemporary America indicates why Riesman is so stimulating a student of our culture...

...I felt that the satirical description of the clique was quite amusing but that the conversion didn't come off...

...the great point is his willingness to look critically at his own position...

...At the same time, he was afraid that his article might encourage indifference to McCarthyism, and in a characteristically candid postscript he confesses that it seems, in some degree, to have done so...

...One of the related concepts of great importance is what he calls "the nerve of failure"?the nerve to be oneself when that self is not approved of by the dominant ethic of a society...

...Such moral experimentalism, while it has the perils I have already outlined and others I know not of, is essential if we are to meet life flexibly, listening to the ancestor within and the friend without, but not bound to obey either...

...Most of the people who defend mass society show little interest in the individual, and most of the proponents of individualism condemn mass society outright and would turn back the clock a century or half a dozen centuries...

...The raising of this kind of question, as heretical in certain circles as the questions Riesman has raised about McCarthyism are in others, is one of Riesman's great services to American intellectual life...

...That an economy of abundance has been established, for the first time in history, is for him the marvel that it ought to be for all of us, and he is constantly trying to grasp the implications of this achievement...

...To say that he is chiefly interested in discovering how the individual can live a good life in a mass society is to make his aim sound commonplace, but it is in fact revolutionary...

...In the latter, it will be recalled, he describes three types of character—tradition-directed, inner-directed and other-directed...

...The former bear sharply on the problems of the present moment...

...Yet, I am perfectly sure that I would not be attacking 'groupism' in America if I could not rely on its durable achievements—it is just these that make individualism possible...

...Although I am more optimistic now than I was then...

...Thus, he says at the outset: "I am defending individualism (of a certain sort) and being critical of conformity (of a certain sort...

...And to prove that a more realistic attitude toward totalitarianism might have practical consequences, he has written a pointed fantasy, "The Nylon War...

...Again, in talking about values, he writes: "Thus, there are issues on which I am a relativist and issues on which I am an absolutist and those in which I am in doubt as to what I am or should be...

...Certain of the essays are interesting not only because they show Riesman's critical methods in operation but also because they indicate something of his intellectual background...

...I think that is a reasonable question to raise...

...he reserves his praise for the autonomous character, the person who has learned to choose for himself...

...There is, for instance, an essay on Veblen that explores and attempts to explain the latter's weaknesses...

...1951), I wondered whether the kind of society Riesman was describing could stand the strain of a prolonged cold-and-hot war...

...But here, as everywhere, he is concerned with the free development of the individual...

...When I reviewed The Lonely Crowd three years ago (The New Leader, March 12...

...After all, he is known as a student of our mass society, and it is with the characteristics of such a society that most of the essays are concerned...

...This thesis is developed more fully in Riesman's book on Veblen in the Twentieth Century Library...

...In all these essays, the reader is constantly impressed by Riesman's determination not to ignore attitudes or facts because they won't fit conveniently into his theories...

...The same sort of discrimination is to be found in Riesman's studies of popular culture...

...Yet, we may ask as Crane Brinton does in Ideas and Men: What is there in Pericles' famous praise of Athens that does not apply to us, in some or even in extended measure...

...What I am sure of...

...It is not fashionable to say this...

...Among the forces that have forged that conviction must he included the writings of David Riesman...

...Terrible things are happening but wonderful things, too, and the former do not cancel out the latter any more than they do in one's personal life...