Do the homogeneous American “lifestyle enclaves” explored by Frances FitzGerald in her fascinating study Cities On a Hill, running the gamut from the retirement towns of the Sunbelt to the Castro District in San Francisco to the Rajneeshi religious commune in Oregon, represent a recovery of the vibrancy of community life through shared values and shared narratives? If anything, the opposite effect seems more likely, at least in the short run. Tocqueville seemed to think so. It established the categories Americans now use when thinking about the workplace, the suburbs, and their lives. But if we are to have a national discussion of individualism, and if such a discussion is to move beyond simplistic platitudes, which often serve only to veil the instrumental partisanship that really motivates them—the ritual invocation of the 1980s as a “decade of greed,” for example—we will have to think more deeply and carefully about what American individualism really is, and about the proper social preconditions for combating it. Fox-Genovese in particular has complained that feminism itself has increasingly become one of the most pernicious expressions of the individualistic ethos in American culture, offering an “atomized” view of society, a “celebration of egotism,” and a denial of “the just claims of the community.” She would hardly be the only one to feel defeated if feminism accomplished nothing more than to secure women’s equal right to be Hipsters. But since the other-directed could only identify themselves through references to others in their communities (and what they earned, owned, consumed, believed in) they inherently were restricted in their ability to know themselves. [original research?]. Its now-classic analysis of the “new middle class” in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political, and economic problems that confront the individual in contemporary American society. This arrangement offers the individual little satisfaction or freedom. But anyone who takes seriously the binding power of the most fundamental sociological concepts will have trouble seeing this wish list as more than insubstantial word-combinations, wholly without plausible historical precedent. For MacIntyre, this problem was especially pronounced in the case of the modern nation-state, which his prescriptions assaulted directly, comparing the present situation to the declining years of the Roman Empire. Habits preferred to frame the issue linguistically—as one of enhancing public discourse by bolstering Americans’ “second language” of republican and biblical forms, and pointing out its embeddedness in the shared “narratives” of “communities of memory,” as a counter to its “first language” of radical individualism. "Children of The Lonely Crowd: David Riesman, the Young Radicals, and the Splitting of Liberalism in the 1960s,", This page was last edited on 17 December 2020, at 03:06. Central to that effort is the work of educational psychologist Carol Gilligan. Riesman's book argues that although other-directed individuals are crucial for the smooth functioning of the modern organization, the value of autonomy is compromised. We tend to forget how often we allow the marketplace to function as our model for, or substitute for, moral authority. Yet her work has also been sharply criticized as nothing more than a postfeminist social-scientific rationalization for a return to Victorian womanhood. But nowhere is it more relevant than in the perpetual opposition between individualism and social conformity, that great chestnut of American cultural analysis. Instead, the modern social world is “bifurcated” into a “realm of the organizational” and a “realm of the personal,” each of which obeys an entirely different moral calculus. The task facing writers like Gilligan, Mary Ann Glendon, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and others who have approached the problem in this way is that of reconciling the cultural (and in some cases biological) implications of difference, which they feel committed to uphold, with the politics of equality and individual rights. Major Works by David Riesman. Indeed, the concept of “totalitarianism,” so vital an element in the political discourse of the past half century, not only profoundly affected interpretations of foreign governments, it decisively affected the interpretation of social structure and social psychology in the United States itself. MacIntyre’s point bears directly upon the tension between the Hipster and the Organization Man. (Here again, one thinks of the phenomenal rise of the support group.) "— But the rebellious thrill that accompanied Mailer’s words when they were written seems distant today. the organization man. But women, Gilligan proposed, showed a strikingly different trajectory of moral evolution and a different style of moral judgment, and researchers who habitually treated the male pattern as “normal” needed henceforth to take respectful account of women’s difference. There is a price for the possibility of authentic community, a price levied, so to speak, both up and down the scale of organization—both upon the would-be autonomous self, and upon the consolidated social order within which it presently lives, moves, and has its being. It is perhaps encouraging, then, that so many in the recent generation of American social thinkers seem preoccupied by questions of community and solidarity, rather than individualism and autonomy. In the United States, that idea’s political high-water mark came in the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, who was committed, both in rhetoric and policy, to the conception of the nation as a community, even as a family, very much in contrast to the imagery of self-reliant frontier individualism. They perhaps constitute a special case of Tocqueville’s more general observation that Americans have a propensity for forming themselves into voluntary associations, which generally combine a functional purpose with a social one, bringing men and women together for the sake of a self-identified, homogeneous community of interest. America, he taunted, was in thrall to antiauthoritarian fanaticism; it was “a vast republic of escaped slaves,” of “masterless” souls who fancy that they can find freedom by “escaping to some wild west” wherein they can evade all constraint. The crucial fact is the one upon which the opposing parties agree: “[T]here are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals.” In light of this agreement, the policy debates dominating the politics of modern societies tend to vacillate between “a freedom which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior” and “forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest.” Such is the usual form taken by debates about “individualism,” and such is the reason why the discussion always remains so shallow and unedifying. $26.19 . The Lonely Crowd is considered by many to be the most influential book of the twentieth century. One has seen or heard a thousand variations on them by now, in record liner notes, TV commercials, and celebrity interviews. The latter of these works also affixed a memorable label to the human results of those demands. But submit to what? There is constant discussion in bifurcated societies about “a supposed opposition between individualism and collectivism,” he observes, but in fact, such debates are superficial. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, Christ had taught in the Sermon on the Mount; and it must have seemed that Lawrence was trying to ring his own psychodynamic change upon that imperative. One of the most popular shows to air on television was a situation comedy from the 1950s called. Those who are other-directed need assurance that they are emotionally in tune with others. $47.69 . They trace the evolution of society from a tradition-directed culture, one that moved in a direction defined by preceding generations. The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denny About this title: The Lonely Crowd is indispensable reading for anyone who wishes to understand the social character of the United States. Those questions are difficult to answer, but several observations may at least help sharpen them. Instead of living according to traditions, or conforming to the values of organized religion, of the family, or societal codes, the new middle class gradually adopted a malleability in the way people lived with each other. Like it or not, the Memorial fittingly represents our condition. But precisely their tameness is an indication of the profound changes that have occurred in the intervening years. How to define oneself became a function of the way others lived. Still, as a critique of American culture, Lawrence’s remarks are harder to dismiss. 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. If one applies the other-direction criteria to everyday actors as portrayed in modern culture, for example, the other-directed person is easy to identify. The best answer would seem to be, Yes, take your pick, for you can find ample support for either assertion. Its now-classic analysis of the “new middle class” in terms of inner-directed and other-directed social character opened exciting new dimensions in our understanding of the psychological, political, and economic problems that confront the individual in contemporary American soc The Lonely Crowd is a 1950 sociological analysis by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. Riesman et al. The most noted social observers elaborated on William Whyte's “organization man” and David Riesman's “other‐directed” man. famous among them David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, C. Wright Mills's White Collar, and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man, as well as Sloan Wilson's novel The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman - tell us that white middle-class businessmen were stuck The same fundamental questions arise again and again: are Americans excessively prone to willful individualism, or, conversely, are Americans excessively prone to mindless conformity? Or were those “biblical and republican” traditions to be appropriated piecemeal, purged of any elements that ran contrary to conventional wisdom? Her case says something about the dilemmas facing a movement which strives to offer a model of relatedness that could supplant “male” models of individualism—even as it insists upon its own rightful participation in the very same thrust toward individual empowerment. “[W]e too have reached that turning point,” he declares darkly, and so our task is “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.” The reconstruction of “community,” of the possibility of social units mediating between radical individuals and the vast megastructures in which they are embedded, units in which connectedness and moral responsibility were once again possible, had become paramount in importance. Yet no problem is more fundamental to American social character, and to the complex of issues here under examination, than the locus of authority; for a large, complex society cannot be governed by the premises of a voluntary association—and even voluntary associations must wrestle, in the end, with problems of authority, as the history of churches and reform movements amply indicates. “When the conditions of men are almost equal,” Tocqueville remarked, “they do not easily allow themselves to be persuaded by one another.” Equals, that is, do not take orders from one another. Roy F. Baumeister. From their beginnings in the Port Huron Statement, the intellectuals of the New Left evinced a strong inclination towards decentralized, small-scale, participatory institutions, which would stand in stark contrast with the gigantic corporate, government, and academic bureaucracies that they saw dominating American life. Which trend of the 1950s did books such as The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd criticize? Surely one reason for this response was the waning appeal of the particular ideal of national community (though not necessarily of nationalism per se) to which he was appealing. Progressives like Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt had assumed that there could be such a thing as a national community, guided by a strong sense of the public interest and common weal, which could substitute for the small-scale community rendered obsolete by the inexorable consolidating effects of the industrial age. Because large organizations preferred this type of personality, it became indispensable to the institutions that thrived with the growth of industry in America. But their dreams were thwarted, because, as political scientist Michael Sandel argues, the nation-state has simply “proved too vast a scale across which to cultivate the shared self-understandings necessary to community.” Since abandoning the Progressive notion of a common good, Sandel observes, we have limped along in a “procedural republic,” in which the nation-state, after endowing individuals with “rights and entitlements,” relies upon disembodied procedures, rather than on substantive and authoritative policies, to govern. Riesman and his researchers found that other-directed people were flexible and willing to accommodate others to gain approval. Can it be that both are somehow enduringly true? Not only Mailer’s Hipster, but most men and women in modern Western societies are increasingly guided in their personal moral judgments by what Alasdair MacIntyre calls “emotivism,” the doctrine that moral evaluations ultimately represent nothing more than expressions of personal preference, attitude, or feeling. William H. Whyte. Logan Wilson. (''The Organization Man,'' 1956) and sociologists like David Riesman and his colleagues Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney (''The Lonely Crowd,'' 1950), were … But the willingness to surrender a significant portion of oneself to a social whole cannot reliably flow from a vague and uplifting desire for the warmth and supportiveness of “community-building,” but will be directly commensurate to the degree of authority invested in that entity; and that very thought tends to strike terror in the hearts of Americans. The Hipster surrenders control over his own actions and “lives with death as immediate danger,” the complete existential hero. Other writers, of course, took less subtle positions; and over the course of the nineteenth century, the prevailing views of different periods varied dramatically. This is how we see etiquette through a modern lens, and following the rules of etiquette could certai… This may seem contradictory; after all, aren’t those who are concerned about etiquette the kind of people who care a lot about what others think of them? In its ideal form, then, a voluntary association offers the prospect of a frictionless association of self and society, conceiving the latter as a receptacle into which the desires of the former may flow freely and be fulfilled, without the coercive hand of human authority intervening. The Lonely Crowd is a 1950 sociological analysis by David Riesman, Nathan Glazer, and Reuel Denney. But that image is, of course, far from being the whole truth, especially about the intellectual ferment of those years. Even without Vietnam, the opposition to the idea of national community had been gathering force on its own in the 1950s and 1960s, from a variety of positions. Feminism finds itself caught between the desire for unrestricted latitude of action and the desire to retain the distinctive assets of women’s experience—between an aspiration to secure the kind of personal autonomy that had formerly been the exclusive province of men, and an insistence that women are crucially different from men and that women’s heightened sense of mutuality and relationship are the central features of that difference. B) community-centered. Such is the appeal today of so much New Age spirituality, which often serves merely to bless emotivism and dress it up in flowing robes. But views on these matters also seem to follow cycles which, if not of Schlesingerian predictability, are nevertheless fairly regular; and for the past three decades the language of individual rights, entitlements, and self-realization has nearly always prevailed in the field of public discourse. The authors of Habits seem to envision strong personal morality without the taint of discipline or intolerance, strong communal and civic values without insularity or particularism, strong commitments without sanctions against those who disdain them, strong national self-esteem without national pride, patriotism without chauvinism, and so on. Americans are seen to be predisposed to a radical individualism that holds all social obligations and traditional forms of authority of no account, yet they also are seen to be imprisoned within an anxious and timid social conformism that smothers autonomy, expressiveness, and creativity in the name of sociability and order. identify and analyze three main cultural types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Many of its assertions have since proved wrong, most notably a demographic hypothesis that tied the rate of population growth to national character type, a hypothesis that Riesman himself abandoned in the … It is notable that the symbolism of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington pointedly refuses the allusion to nation, offering instead the engraved names of the thousands of dead or missing individuals. The old Republican right, epitomized by the doughty Robert A. Taft of Ohio, had never accepted the understanding of the nation inherent in the New Deal. The debate over “multiculturalism” that rages in contemporary academe reflects a fear that the satisfactions achieved through the embrace of ethnic tribalism or other particularisms may come at an incalculable price to the common culture, upon whose cohesion all such self-conscious and hyphenate embraces depend. 0 votes. The Black Power movement also advocated community self-governance and empowerment, and some mainstream politicians, notably Robert Kennedy, looked upon the idea with favor, seeing it as latter-day Jeffersonianism. Such was the gravamen of such influential postwar works as David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd or William Whyte’s The Organization Man, which sought to guard the endangered self against what were seen as the totalistic demands of an organized and conforming world. The resurgence of ethnic sensibility in Northern cities, partly stemming from a proud or fearful distaste for the nation’s growing homogenization, partly stimulated by resentment of bureaucratic or judicial intrusions into settled neighborhoods, also had the effect of asserting particularism and ethnic identity over against the national identification. By recommending a turning away from the imperium, MacIntyre was asserting, in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle, the connection between a particular political regime or social order and a particular kind of soul. The Lonely Crowd. Gradually an other-direction took hold, that is, the social forces of how others were living—what they consumed, what they did with their time, what their views were toward politics, work, play, and so on. For better or worse it is the support group, not the nation-state, that looks to be the model of revitalized social organization now and in the near term. But one can be forgiven for asking: what authority do the authors believe should be given to, for example, the Ten Commandments, or to biblical teachings on sexuality? 1962 M oses was a man without a country. One of the many virtues of his Democracy in America was its ability to formulate with precision both halves of the dualism, and the sound reasons for fearing each. But the ascendancy of this outlook proved short-lived. The various New Federalisms have been notoriously shallow in practice, and the size of the Federal government has continued to grow rapidly during the very administrations that espoused reduction. In the postwar years, it became the first order of business for sociologists, historians, theologians, and other social critics to alert Americans to the self’s imminent peril, and provide resources for its defense. Habits took a similar approach to the two traditions it affirmed, hoping to gather the fruits of their cohesive effects without paying the price of accepting their authority. The Organization Man. Necessary Dreams. We live in an era in which nations and empires are experiencing, or facing the prospect of, disaggregation, disintegration, dissolution into their constituent elements. The rise of the Hitler and Stalin regimes, and of the anti-individualist ideologies advanced to legitimate them, put any such “socializing” tendencies on the defensive, and gave renewed vigor and credibility to the earlier Emersonian exaltation of the autonomous individual—which seemed only to intensify in the years after the Second World War. Commercials, and Reuel Denney enable javascript of that era world, must surely be in it so. Valuable books about American life tradition-directed culture, Lawrence’s remarks are harder to dismiss must surely in! 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