David Riesman
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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David Riesman (September 22, 1909 – May 10, 2002) was a American sociologist and best-selling commentator on American society.
Riesman's 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd is considered a landmark study of American character.
The Lonely Crowd
Horowitz says The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, in 1950
- quickly became the nation’s most influential and widely read mid-century work of social and cultural criticism. It catapulted its author to the cover of Time magazine in 1954, making Riesman the first social scientist so honored.... Riesman offered a nuanced and complicated portrait of the nation’s middle and upper-middle classes.... Riesman pictured a nation in the midst of a shift from a society based on production to one fundamentally shaped by the market orientation of a consumer culture. He explored how people used consumer goods to communicate with one another.
The book is largely a study of modern conformity, which postulates the existence of the "inner-directed" and "other-directed" personalities. Riesman argued that the character of post-World War II American society impels individuals to "other-directedness," the preeminent example being modern suburbia, where individuals seek their neighbors' approval and fear being outcast from their community. That lifestyle has a coercive effect, which compels people to abandon "inner-direction" of their lives, and it induces them to take on the goals, ideology, likes, and dislikes of their community.
This creates a tightly grouped crowd of people that is yet incapable of fulfilling each other's desire for sexual pleasure. The book is considered a landmark study of American character. Riesman was a major public intellectual as well as a sociologist and represented an early example of what sociologists now call "public sociology".
