Published at the nadir of a certain level of national self-analysis, Riesman’s book was quickly linked to the myriad studies that criticized the bureaucratization of American life through recourse to heraldic images of an inner-directed world washed away. Noting his references to Max Weber, Erich Fromm, and other prognosticators of social decline, most early reviewers depicted Riesman as a humanist critic of “‘groupism’ and the zeitgeist.”69 Although magazines such as the Nation took him to task for his supposed contribution to the rise of “the new cocktail-and-breezeway Bohemia,” most found his analysis an astute portrait of the ubiquitous malaise under postindustrialism.70 Consequently, many high modernists assumed that Riesman shared their critique. For instance, in his review of The Lonely Crowd, Lionel Trilling praised Riesman for avoiding the “jargonistic” and “platitudinous” language of modern sociology and for producing “a work of literature in the old comprehensive sense of the word according to which Hume’s essays are literature, or Gibbon’s history, or Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.”71 Like the great novels of the past that engaged in “the investigation and criticism of morals and manners,” Riesman’s book, according to Trilling, explored the subtle shifts within American culture by exposing what was occurring in the nation’s factories, schools, families, movie theaters, political parties, and courthouses. Noting that Riesman had detailed contemporary “morals and manners” more thoroughly than any other sociologist, Trilling saw The Lonely Crowd as a compelling rejoinder to the current preeminence of “affability, blandness, [and] lively sensitivity to the opinion of the group” as forms of social adjustment. Trilling asserted that “it is still inner-direction that must seem the more fully human, even in its excess” (97), and he argued that Riesman himself, however hesitantly, echoed such a preference. Autonomy for Trilling meant individualism, and he praised Riesman for salvaging the word from its pejorative and bland uses.
Despite such praise, Riesman spent years after the original publication of his book trying to correct the misunderstanding that he had outlined a tragic historical decline. In several interviews and a number of new prefaces to the book, Riesman argued that “the authors of The Lonely Crowd [were] not conservatives harking back to a rugged individualism that was once a radical Emersonian ideal.”72 In fact, he directly challenged two misreadings. First, despite even some ambivalence of his own, Riesman railed against “the panic doctrine” present in many high modernist works and in the pages of many social science journals that the country was “on the road to fascism.”73 While he appreciated Adorno’s inventive combination of psychological and sociological categories, he resisted “the research assumption that authoritarianism is the main problem facing American society today.”74 Most of his hesitancy stemmed from the unexpected findings in his interview materials. Not surprisingly, Riesman discovered several interview subjects who bore a strong resemblance to the ego-weakened, authoritarian personalities found in Adorno’s study, including, for instance, Robert Gibbons, a seventeen-year-old student at a Connecticut trade school whose growing feelings of alienation and declining economic status bore a similarity to the “status-threatened youths in Weimer Germany who were early recruits to Nazism.”75 Abandoned by his father, a middle-class office manager, and forced to work part-time to support his mother, Gibbons was unable to relate to his working-class associates and unable to find a proper outlet for his pent-up aggression, choosing instead to vent his frustrations within the political arena by scapegoating foreigners. According to Riesman, Gibbons had never gained the ability to overcome his sense of powerlessness either by relating to others in a healthy way or by using the elements of consumer culture to prop up his identity. Instead, Gibbons remained suspended between the other-directed world of his fellow classmates and the inner-directed environment of his middle-class upbringing, a suspension that Riesman believed might lead to self-destruction or to reactionary political attachments. But Riesman hesitated to pass such judgment, claiming that “all this is not enough to permit a prediction that Gibbons will become a fascist rather than remaining, as he now is, a ‘clinical’ case” (220). Indeed, Riesman was much more generous toward his interview subjects than Adorno and his colleagues were to theirs.
In fact, Riesman pointed to Gibbons’s classmate Joseph Pizzeri as a counterexample. An eighteen-year-old son of Italian immigrants, Pizzeri had learned to cope with his declining social status without resorting to compensatory feelings of superiority over others or repressed frustration. According to Riesman, Pizzeri had found a way to adapt to the traditional values of hard work and obedience without reference to the compulsive need for inner-directed self-improvement or for other-directed social acceptance. As Riesman argued, despite his apparent fixation within the oral stage of personality development (which was expressed by his overattachment to primary groups), Pizzeri did “not at all resemble the sado-masochistic type described by Fromm in Escape from Freedom (or the anti-democratic, authoritarian personality described by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford)” (163). Whereas Fromm saw orality exclusively in terms of sadistic ingestion, self-aggrandizement, and exploitation, Riesman noted that an oral disposition might also mark a form of receptivity, openness, amiability, and generosity, traits that helped Pizzeri maintain a stable relationship with those around him. In fact, Riesman noted that despite Pizzeri’s tendency toward submissiveness he did not answer in the affirmative any of the questions posed to him that Adorno and his researchers deemed typical of authoritarian personalities. Such examples made Riesman quite wary of holding fast to psychoanalytic categories as explanatory tools.
Riesman’s difficulties with the assumptions embedded in the social scientific perspective on authoritarian behavior was also evident in his analysis of Walter Poster, a sociology graduate student at Princeton University and the son of Jewish immigrant parents in Minnesota. Poster was, according to Riesman, an example of a character type that did not fall easily under his typology, a person who was neither emphatically inner-directed nor other-directed and who was neither clearly destined for an anomic outlook nor an adjusted one. Instead, Poster, as Riesman originally explained, was a prime example of the rebellious and resentful personality whose ambivalence toward his family had resulted in a pathological projection of his anger from his parents to society as a whole. Echoing Harold Lasswell’s claims in Psychopathology and Politics and Adorno’s findings in The Authoritarian Personality, Riesman argued that Poster was an example of how “affects arising in the personal sphere are displaced upon the public sphere and rationalized in terms of the general good” (529). Unable to assert himself against parental expectations, Poster was unable to define his own identity in any meaningful way, choosing instead to give into his “sado-masochistic tendencies” by sacrificing himself in the name of the larger public good to radical politics. As Riesman explained, “at odds with his father, his solution was to run away from himself and to choose one of the totalitarian political positions which is hostile to the cultivation of the individual self, namely Stalinism” (530). As such, Poster used the party apparatus to escape from his family’s authority without ever engaging in any form of self-realization or self-emergence, marking him as neither inner-directed nor other-directed.
However, sensitive to the accusation that his own bias against Poster’s political opinions might have clouded his judgment concerning the young man’s character and maturity, Riesman soon believed that his claims regarding Poster’s political fate were too hasty and decided to interview