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Changing Styles of American Character: The Lonely Crowd Forty Years Later
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18049 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
4,929 Words |
| Author
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Joseph R. Gusfield
Joseph R. Gusfield is professor of sociology at the University
of California, San Diego. He is the author of Symbolic
Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement;
The Culture of Public Problems (with Don Riesman and Zelda
Gamson), and Academic values and Mass Education. |
By 1950 America was settling into the postwar world. The crises of the great Depression and World War II were behind us, and we were beginning to recognize the deep changes that the past three decades had produced. As the country reentered peacetime, America was again undergoing significant transformation. It was a propitious time for stocktaking and for forecasting, as the outlines of a new form of American society were beginning to appear. Sociologist David Riesman, with his associates Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer published The Lonely Crowd in 1950. It was both an epilogue to the past and a prologue to the emerging future.
The Lonely Crowd is one of a number of works published in the past for years that have described and analyzed the tensions and conflicts that one or another form of American individualism has confronted in postindustrial society. Riesman and his associates depicted Americans as in motion from one kind of character structure (inner-directed) to another (other-directed). From the vantage point of forty years, what he described as different types of Americans and the conflicts between them now seems to be a tension within many Americans. The very conflicts that Riesman saw in the shift from an earlier sort of American to the contemporary type exist within the American psyche and culture. The conflicts engendered have been accentuated as we live our lives toward the end of the twentieth century.
Social Structure of American Character
Riesman's book was unusually popular for an academic work published by a university press (Yale). Its original thesis and lively writing style were abetted by the then-new "paperback revolution." Professors could assign it for college classes since textbooks were being replaced and supplemented by low-cost editions of original works. (Doubleday published the first paperback version of The Lonely Crowd in 1954.) With the expansion of public universities, the college-educated population was transformed from a tiny prewar intellectual elite to a significant segment of the American public in the early 1950s. The Lonely Crowd was one of its major instructors.
The book is subtitled "A Study of the Changing American Character." In it, Riesman described the American character as a "social character." In it, Riesman described the American character as a "social character." By that he meant the organized pattern of an individual's motives, goals, and dispositions as socially conditioned. Social character is more typical and more uniform among a society's members than is the more
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