The Lonely Crowd revisited

Abstract

David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) is inseparably linked-name and image both-to 1950s. The title evokes at once such themes as spread of large organizations manned by a grey-suited middle class, delusive attempts to escape their reach in pseudo-pastoral suburban retreats, flush of a new and unexpected prosperity inducing a frenzied accumulation of material goods, and an underlying malaise that expressed itself in compulsive conformity in tastes, habits, and opinions, including political opinions. This era, with these strikingly salient associated images, stands out so sharply because it was actually of rather short duration, although I often encounter younger people who equate the 50s with a dreary, interminably long succession of bad old days (rather way my generation thought of Victorian Age or even 19th century) from which we were all liberated in blessed 60s. In reality, The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950 and was written in 1948-1949 when Riesman, joined by Nathan Glazer, was on leave at Yale from University of Chicago, where Reuel Denney was a colleague. Interviews, intended to illustrate rather than confirm book's major ideas, were conducted in 1948, and 21 of them provided basis for a separate volume, Faces in Crowd, published in 1952. The tone of both books reflects, therefore, what Riesman himself has recently called (1987) innocent optimism of immediate postwar years rather than rising tide of inchoate spiritual discontents of half a decade or more later. Most of conditions with which The Lonely Crowd is so readily linked-affluence, rising mass consumption, suburbia, alienation, etc.-postdate it, although Riesman's pioneering insights, including those in later essays of his, contributed considerably to identification and interpretation of these phenomena. The social science perspectives shaping