The Lonely Crowd: David Riesman and American Society

Abstract

The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, was published in 1950. It belongs to a particular genre of sociological investigation that aimed to describe and predict the future shape and ideology of post-war America. Looking back at the book in 1961, David Riesman questioned a major assumption of the book that ‘took for granted an economy of abundance, however sustained’.¹ This assumption coloured a whole range of investigations into the ideology of what was seen as the post- or advanced industrial civilisation that was taking shape in America. The distinctive characteristics of a post-industrial society included an increasing automation of labour, the shift of jobs and productivity from declining manufacturing industries to an increasingly dominant sector of service industries such as computers and insurance, from blue-collar to white-collar occupations. A corollary of this thesis was that the main problem for such a society that was relieving man from the necessities of crude physical work was how to occupy oneself in a society that was creating more time for leisure than for work. The post-industrial thesis was subjected to a whole range of revisionary critiques from Paul Goodman’s Growing up Absurd (1960), that examined the psychological costs of a world without meaningful work, to C. Wright Mill’s analysis in The Power Elite (1956), of how power in a post-industrial society would pass into the hands of three linked groups: corporation capitalists, militarists and politicians.