Borrowing themes from Karl Marx, Max Weber, J. J. Bachofer, and Georg Simmel, Fromm had repudiated theories about man’s character that focused on one particular structural factor or that tended to project onto the past conditions found in the present. Instead, Fromm treated man’s character—his behavior, his social attitudes, his aesthetic preferences, his morality, and so on—as the product of shared traits within a given society during the course of its development. Character, according to Fromm, was formed neither by the vicissitudes of any particular phase of libidinal development nor by the activation of physiologically conditioned drives within a self-contained psychic structure. Instead, character was formed by man’s interaction with the world around him, as his existential need to overcome feelings of finitude and helplessness forced his adaptation to the prevailing social, political, and economic institutions in which he found himself. Echoing the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Abram Kardiner, and other social psychologists and anthropologists, Fromm revised the Freudian conception of man’s development. For Freud, character traits such as parsimony and stubbornness were the result of disruptions to man’s instinctual development during the teleological activation of a particular erogenous zone; for Fromm, such traits were imposed upon man by the specific characterological requirements demanded by a specific society. As such, the formation of an anal character structure was a process determined by a particular form of economic relations that prioritized those traits and a process reinforced by institutional, religious, and familial training. For Fromm, “character … is the specific form in which human energy is shaped by the dynamic adaptation of human needs to the particular mode of existence of a given society.”65 Character, in this sense, was an orientation toward the world, a learned assemblage of traits, attitudes, and reactions and an internalization of external norms and expectations.
By abandoning Freud’s theory of ontogenetic development, Fromm was able to trace the rise and fall of particular character structures as the result of large-scale historical changes in political, economic, and religious regimes. The channeling of human energy in the name of socialization was quite different under feudalism, for instance, where a learned “receptive orientation” had made individuals passive, dependent, and loyal to the religious and political authorities to which they willingly submitted themselves than under early capitalism, where a learned “hoarding orientation” had encouraged individuals to gain pleasure from the ruthless acquisition of property and goods under new market relations, all at the expense of devotion to outside authority. As Fromm explained, such orientations formed “the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group” (277). Political difficulties like those that plagued Europe in the twentieth century stemmed from a lag between changes in economic conditions and outdated character traits from the previous order. Normal psychic dispositions, such as a craving for aggressiveness and ruthlessness in the economic realm, were stunted by a bureaucratic order that interfered with such pursuits. Consequently, the ensuing frustration was transferred from the economic realm to the political, which explained, according to Fromm, the Fascist impulses within the German lower middle classes.
Riesman was quite persuaded by Fromm’s successful integration of psychoanalytic categories with traditional historical and sociological arguments, and the perspective Fromm offered became the starting point for Riesman’s book. As he described, “The Lonely Crowd did not move outward from individuals towards society, but rather the other way around; we started with society and with particular historical developments within society.”66 Paralleling Fromm’s description of the emergence of the individual from the bonds of primary ties with the onset of capitalist expansion, Riesman charted the historical development of an inner-directed character structure—the self-sufficient and pioneering individual of early capitalism whose adherence to an ethic of work and productive labor marked the self-discipline needed to confront an ever-expanding and unpredictable environment. In an age of historically new roles and opportunities, the old mechanism of conformity based upon a specific body of social customs and traditions began to collapse and was replaced by a set of behavioral norms and internalized controls instilled by parental authorities, a “psychological gyroscope” that helped the individual commit to his chosen goal or career in the face of social pressures. Reflecting in part Freud’s description of the introjection of parental authority and the subsequent development of “the watchful superego as a socializing agency,” Riesman noted that “the drive instilled in the child is to live up to ideals and to test his ability to be on his own by continuous experiments in self-mastery—instead of by following tradition.”67 Embodied in the pioneering spirit of the frontiersmen of American expansion, the inner-directed man confronted the intractability of the world around him through the driving sense of purpose instilled at an early age. Work or productive labor had become the central element in man’s conception of himself, property became a sign of his independence, and discipline became a marker of his self-mastery.
But with the transition from an economy based upon production, manufacturing, and thrift to one based upon consumption, service, and abundance, a subsequent characterological change had occurred. Borrowing from Fromm’s description of the “marketing orientation,” in which the personal values of adaptation and sociability marked an economic regime based upon the salability of goods and services, Riesman described the shift to an “other-directed” character structure in which the source of direction or discipline was no longer provided by the internalized “gyroscope” derived from parental authority but by the demands and commands of contemporaries, peer groups, and social authorities. Forced to become more self-aware of the opinions of others and abandoned by parents whose authority had little say in a consumer-driven, people-oriented, and interpersonal world, the other-directed person was forced to find a “source of direction” from “either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media” (21). Ever sensitive to the expectations of his peers and trained to pattern his desires on the models offered by the mass media, this new character type developed a sensitive “radar screen” to navigate the ever-shifting judgments of value and worth in an endless search for respect, admiration, and acknowledgment.
Besides his descriptive typology, Riesman added a “non-historical” dimension to his analysis and provided categories with which to describe the difficult relationship between the individual and the characterological requirements demanded by a particular social structure, noting that there were great disparities in and a wide variety of modes of reconciliation with such pressures. Recognizing that “social character [was] not all of character,” Riesman detailed three “universal types” of reconciliation between the individual and the dominant social character: the first was a relatively painless conformity to such personality requirements that Riesman termed “adjusted”; the second was a refusal to reconcile with those demands that he referred to as “anomic”; and the third was a mature capacity to decide whether or not to conform to behavioral demands