sociologist;
author of The Lonely Crowd
David Riesman (1909-2002)Sociologist David Riesman, best known for his influential study of post-World War II American society, The Lonely Crowd, died May 10 in Binghamton, NY, of natural causes. He was 92.
Born in Philadelphia in 1909, the son of a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Riesman attended Harvard College, graduating in 1931.
He earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1934 and embarked on a law career, which included clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and teaching at the University of Buffalo Law School.
As a research fellow at Columbia Law School, Riesman had the opportunity to discuss comparative social issues with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and literary critic Lionel Trilling. Later he studied psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan.
In 1949, he was invited to join the social science faculty of the University of Chicago. The Lonely Crowd was published in 1950, and became a best seller, as well as winning the admiration of his academic peers. He co-authored the book with Nathan Glazer, professor emeritus of education and social structure, and Reuel Denney, but, according to Glazer, Riesman was the real author of the work. Riesman taught at Chicago until 1958, when he was named the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard.
For almost 20 years he taught a popular undergraduate course, “American Character and Social Structure,” and, through his voluminous correspondence, continued to exert an influence on many of his students long after they had left Harvard.
Riesman’s other works include Faces in the Crowd (1952, with Glazer and Denney); Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (1953); Constraint and Variety in American Education (1956); Conversations in Japan: Modernization, Politics, and Culture (1967); The Academic Revolution (1968, with Christopher Jencks); and many others.
His wife, Evelyn, passed away in 1998. He is survived by two daughters, Lucy Riesman Lowenstein and Jennie Riesman; a son, Michael Riesman; and two grandchildren, Amanda Riesman and Benjamin Riesman. Their father, Riesman’s son Paul, died in 1988.
Ken Gewertz, Harvard University Gazette Staff (reprinted with permission)
Editor’s note: See Orlando Patterson’s editorial tribute to Riesman, “The Last Sociologist,” in the New York Times, May 19, 2002.
'Lonely Crowd' author dies at 92:
David Riesman '31, LL.D '34, studied post-World War II American society
By Ken Gewertz
Harvard Gazette StaffSociologist David Riesman, best known for his influential study of post-World War II American society, "The Lonely Crowd," died May 10 in Binghamton, N.Y., of natural causes. He was 92.
Born in Philadelphia in 1909, the son of a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Riesman attended Harvard College, graduating in 1931.
He earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1934 and embarked on a law career, which included clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and teaching at the University of Buffalo Law School.
As a research fellow at Columbia Law School, Riesman had the opportunity to discuss comparative social issues with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and literary critic Lionel Trilling. Later he studied psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan.
In 1949, he was invited to join the social science faculty of the University of Chicago. "The Lonely Crowd" was published in 1950, and became a best seller, as well as winning the admiration of his academic peers. He co-authored the book with Nathan Glazer, professor of education and social structure emeritus, and Reuel Denney, but, according to Glazer, Riesman was the real author of the work. Riesman taught at Chicago until 1958, when he was named the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard.
For almost 20 years he taught a popular undergraduate course, "American Character and Social Structure," and, through his voluminous correspondence, continued to exert an influence on many of his students long after they had left Harvard.
Riesman's other works include "Faces in the Crowd" (1952, with Glazer and Denney); "Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation" (1953); "Constraint and Variety in American Education" (1956); "Conversations in Japan: Modernization, Politics, and Culture" (1967); "The Academic Revolution" (1968, with Christopher Jencks), and many others.
His wife, Evelyn, passed away in 1998. He is survived by two daughters, Lucy Riesman Lowenstein and Jennie Riesman; a son, Michael Riesman; and two grandchildren, Amanda Riesman and Benjamin Riesman. Their father, Riesman's son Paul, died in 1988.
An Interview with Professor Emeritus David Riesman
by William Sims Bainbridge
(reprinted in Fall 2002 issue of Sociology Lives)
DAVID RIESMAN, B. 1909
Big Thinkster
By CHARLES MCGRATH
New York Times, Dec. 29, 2002In midcentury America, sociologists for a while rivaled even psychiatrists in their seeming ability to explain everything about everything. The most influential sociologist of the era was David Riesman, whose 1950 book ''The Lonely Crowd'' ventured to break all of civilization down into three basic character types: ''tradition-directed,'' ''inner-directed'' or ''other-directed.'' Tradition-directeds rigorously follow ancient rules and customs; inner-directeds are self-motivated and goal-oriented; and other-directeds, the people Riesman saw all around him, are slavish conformists who want only to be loved and accepted. They were those craven 50's types we still hear so much about.
Originally intended for the college classroom, ''The Lonely Crowd'' unaccountably landed on the best-seller lists and stayed there for months and months as thousands of Americans anxiously examined themselves and their neighbors for directional indications. The book went on to sell more than 1.4 million copies, making it the most successful sociologist's book ever, and it still turns up on lists of the century's most influential books -- even though today it might have trouble finding a publisher.
''The Lonely Crowd'' is not a slog, exactly -- Riesman is a reasonably fluent writer, especially by academic standards. But in spite of some occasional hip formulations (''peer-grouper,'' ''inside dopester''), neither is it user-friendly. It's written in outline fashion, with lengthy chapter heads and roman-numeraled subsections, and it goes in for professorial signposting: This is what I'm about to say, and there, I've just said what I said I'd say, so let's review. The juicy stuff -- like the claim that other-directeds have adventurous sex lives, because sex is where they look for reassurance that they are not just social automatons is embedded in the text without warning or fanfare.
''The Lonely Crowd'' was also burdened with a far-fetched theory about population growth, which Riesman later backed away from. And the evidence for the essential character types themselves mostly consists of a few interviews (virtually un-footnoted) and lots of references to books and movies. In short, there's nothing very rigorous about ''The Lonely Crowd,'' but the book feels scientific all the same; its very structure imparts a suggestion of seriousness and gravitas.
This was the style back then. The 50's and 60's were the great age of the Big Notion: the pseudoscientific book that explained us to ourselves and told us where we were headed, which in most cases was nowhere good. The avatar of them all, of course, was Freud's ''Civilization and Its Discontents,'' which argued, among other things, that we were all suffering from a kind of collective neurosis, and picking up the theme, in addition to ''The Lonely Crowd,'' were William H. Whyte's ''Organization Man,'' which made many of the same points as Riesman; Herbert Marcuse's ''One-Dimensional Man,'' which gave a Marxist twist to the argument and said that we were prisoners of the economy; and Norman O. Brown's ''Life Against Death,'' which said that the solution to all this one-dimensionality was more eros. (In certain 60's grad-school circles, ''Life Against Death'' was a very important book to get your date to read.)
You can see flickerings of the genre in more recent works like Allan Bloom's ''Closing of the American Mind'' or David Brooks's ''Bobos in Paradise,'' which is partly an ironic gloss on Riesman, but Charles A. Reich's ''Greening of America,'' which came out in 1970 and said that we were all becoming hippies, pretty much ended the vogue for Big Notions. After Reich, no one wanted to risk looking so foolish. Sociology, meanwhile, like the rest of the social sciences, has become more and more quantitative. Harvard recently canceled the lecture series that was held in Riesman's memory.
''The Lonely Crowd'' is in part a monument to a bygone moment -- the time when eggheads ruled the earth, or at least seemed to have all the answers. What makes it poignant -- and what no doubt accounts for its unlikely success -- is that Riesman was actually on to something. To call it a theory or an analysis is probably too grand, but informing the book is an intuition that life in the mid-50's was different somehow from life in decades past, and that, for all their outward success, many Americans were leading lives of inner emptiness and desperation. Riesman's title is a publisher's invention -- the actual phrase appears nowhere in the book -- but it touched a nerve, the same nerve touched by Sloan Wilson's novel ''The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit,'' say, or by Cheever's short stories about lonely commuters and anxious suburbanites, or for that matter by Douglas Sirk's movies, now back in vogue. The odd thing was that back then it took a sociologist to tell people what they were feeling. Nowadays someone on TV would do it for us.
Charles McGrath is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.
Harvard Magazine
July-August 2002
DAVID RIESMAN '31mcl, J.D. '34mcl, LL.D. '90, died May 10 in Binghamton, N.Y. He was Ford professor of social sciences emeritus at Harvard, where he served on the faculty from 1958 to 1980 and for many years taught one of the most popular general education courses, Social Sciences 136, "Character and Social Structure in America." A lawyer by training, he clerked for Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis and began his career as a law professor at the University of Buffalo. His writings on civil liberties attracted the attention of the University of Chicago, where he became a full professor in 1949. His 1950 book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, a collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, is considered one of the most influential sociological texts of the twentieth century, selling its millionth copy in 1977. After coming to Harvard he focused his research on higher education. His many books on academia include Constraint and Variety in American Education, The Academic Revolution, Academic Values and Mass Education, Education and Politics at Harvard, and The Perpetual Dream: Education and Reform in the American College. He leaves two daughters, Lucy Lowenstein and Jennie, and a son, Michael, Ph.D. '72; his wife, Evelyn (Thompson), died in 1998.
