Other social critics, however, were not convinced that this high modernist vision was accurate and searched for alternatives to the notion of a nonrepressive ego identity that discovered itself only in the aesthetic realm. A range of other modernists came forth in the postwar period to challenge this argument about a fundamental weakness in the American character. One of the most forceful of these late modernist critics was sociologist David Riesman, whose 1950 book The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character became a key marker of this shift in perspective. Riesman, however, was an unlikely candidate to challenge the hegemony of high modernism.55 In fact, his relationship with many of the New York intellectuals and many members of the Frankfurt school contributed to his early pessimism about American society. For instance, Riesman, having been introduced to Hannah Arendt through Daniel Bell, befriended the German intellectual and began a correspondence with her while she was completing work on The Origins of Totalitarianism in the late 1940s. Riesman read versions of Arendt’s book in manuscript form, and the two exchanged opinions on “the terror, the liquidation, [and] the atomization,” as he put it in a letter in 1949, that characterized life under totalitarianism.56 Riesman was quite laudatory in his remarks to Arendt, expressing to her in the same letter “how stimulating it is to confront your own understanding of what is going on and to find myself at every point, with negligible qualifications, in agreement.” Indeed, Riesman was “overwhelmed” by the historical scope and sweeping grandeur of Arendt’s manuscript, and he told her in the summer of 1949 that her book had inspired him to rename his own manuscript “Passionless Existence in America.”57 Riesman’s enthusiasm was also reflected in his 1951 Commentary review in which he praised Arendt’s “extraordinarily penetrating book” into the “fanatical ideals” motivating totalitarian movements.58 But Riesman’s review was slightly more critical than his letters to Arendt had been two years prior; by then, Riesman was not wholly convinced of her argument. First, he questioned Arendt’s causal claims, arguing, for instance, that her attempt to locate the origins of Hitler’s maniacal drive toward European occupation in the expansionist tendencies of Lord Cromer and the British Empire in nineteenth-century Egypt was much too overdrawn. More important, Riesman argued that her book tended to “overinterpret” totalitarianism by making it appear “consistently fanatical” and by ignoring the “more or less accidental concatenations of bureaucratic forces, slip-ups, careerisms, as explanatory factors” (397). Riesman’s growing hesitations in respect to Arendt’s book signaled in some measure his own confusion over theories that supposedly explained the appeal of totalitarian movements.
This was not the first time Riesman challenged such theories. In fact, Riesman had used the same argument previously in his review of The Tensions That Cause War, a collection of essays stemming from a 1948 UNESCO conference in which a number of intellectuals, including Max Horkheimer and Hadley Cantril, debated the usefulness of the social sciences in dissipating psychological insecurities. Despite his appreciation of such efforts, Riesman chided the essayists for their overestimation of the efficacy of social scientific tools and for their enthusiasm for “the clichés of conventional Marxism” and “the clichés of the psychological approach.”59 Pointing to the determinism within Horkheimer’s argument, which delineated man “as the prisoner of industrialism, standardization, and mass culture” (521), Riesman encouraged the UNESCO participants to broaden their understanding of man’s resiliency. Horkheimer had argued that the problem with modern forms of identity was the “personae phenomenon,” a concept he borrowed from psychologist Gordon Allport, who had noted the dispersion of the modern subject into a “set of masks.” The collapse of an “integrated ego” had forced the individual to become “one person in the barber shop, another in an interview situation; a tender husband and father at home and a hard-boiled, hard-driving businessman from nine to five.”60 In contrast, Riesman stressed the flexibility of the modern personality, that is, the ability to function as “split personalities,” which signaled a level of maturity and resistance. According to Riesman, instead of “cutting men down to the size of categories,” intellectuals needed to allow them “to play the multiplicity of roles, with the multiplicity of emotional responses, that we constantly show ourselves capable of.”61 Unwilling to hold fast to the image of ego autonomy offered by high modernists, Riesman searched for an alternative that better expressed the dialectical relationship between self and society.
The book that emerged from Riesman’s confrontation with the high modernist investigation into the modern authoritarian personality was his hugely successful 1950 study of the American character The Lonely Crowd, a book that would sell by the thousands and that would eventually place the well-known author on the September 1954 cover of Time magazine. An almost accidental sociologist, Riesman was an unlikely candidate to write such an influential study. The project, which one reviewer referred to as “the Catcher in the Rye of sociology,” began in 1947 when Riesman received a two-year research appointment at the Committee on National Policy at Yale University in which he planned, with the help of sociologist Nathan Glazer, to study the relationship between political opinion and mass communication.62 Preliminary information was culled from interviews conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, interviews sociologist C. Wright Mills had done for his book White Collar: The American Middle Classes, Glazer’s studies at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, and interviews Riesman’s research assistants conducted at a boarding school in New Haven. Originally interested in the causes of political apathy among American voters, Riesman broadened his focus to include the relationship between political behavior and changing character structures in modern society. From this sampling, Riesman categorized his interview subjects according to their mode of social conformity, originally labeling the two most prominent as conscience-directed and other-directed. In this sense, his book fit in with the larger trend within American sociology that measured the link between politics and personality in light of the horrific scene overseas.
Indeed, The Lonely Crowd was inspired much more by the Studies in Prejudice series than Riesman originally acknowledged. Despite the myriad references to Alexis de Tocqueville and Thorstein Veblen, Riesman was just as interested in the problem of political deviance as he was in theories concerning national character; as he admitted years later, he and his collaborators had worked “in the vein of Escape from Freedom and of the research tradition that led to The Authoritarian Personality.”63 For instance, the interview guides used by Riesman and his researchers were modeled in part on those used by Adorno and his colleagues, although Riesman shied away from their projective testing methods (Rorschach and thematic apperception tests) and used conventional interview practices. Riesman was also well versed in the recent theoretical attempts to merge psychoanalysis with more conventional sociological approaches, a project inaugurated by Sigmund Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and continued in more contemporaneous works such as Harold Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics. Like many such works, Riesman’s book drew heavily upon individual case studies of social behavior. In total, Riesman and his colleagues gathered 180 interviews between February and July 1948 for their study. Respondents included Harlem residents at the Neighborhood Center for Black Organization, students at a vocational trade school in Connecticut, residents of a small, middle-class Vermont community, teenagers at a progressive school in California, and graduate students in medical and academic programs at several major universities, as well as a number of single interviews from professional actors, missionaries, small farmers, and manufacturers. Twenty-one of Riesman’s interviews were later collected, along with his lengthy interpretations of the political orientation of each interview subject, in Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics, his 1952 addendum to The Lonely Crowd in which Riesman further explained his interview and research methods.