Still Lonely After All These Years

Abstract

The great literary critic Lionel Trilling, in a review of The Lonely Crowd, once observed that sociology to be in process of taking over from literature one of literature's most functions, the investigation and criticism of morals and manners.2 A half century after they were written, Trilling's words ring hollow. We can, to be sure, find occasional examples of sociology that aspire to the function Trilling had in mind-the various works of Erving Goffman, Hochschild's Managed Heart, Bellah and colleagues' Habits of the Heart, and Many fine ethnographies. But who, today, reading dreary monographs or struggling through our leadng journals, could still imaging sociology supplanting literature? I am not at all sure that Trilling was right, even 50 years ago. David Riesman's Lonely Crowd, wrtten with the collaboration of Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, was, I suspect, very much an exception even in 1950 (the same year, after all, in which Parsons published his Social System, a book that, whatever its virtues or lack thereof, posed no threat to the characteristic functions of literature). Nonetheless, Trilling seems to me altogether correct in his assessment of The Lonely Crowd itself. The Lonely Crowd invites a reading as literature as well as social science. But what literature? Was Riesman our Jane Austen? Or was he only our Stephen King? We do know that The Lonely Crowd is almost certainly the best-selling book in the history of post-World War II sociology. It isn't even close. The Lonely Crowd was first published in 1950 by Yale University press. It was