Biographical Profile

David Riesman Reconsidered Peter I. R o s e

n January of 1939, David Riesman, then a young law professor at the University of Buffalo, published a short piece in The Atlantic Monthly. It was written in response to the editor's request to selected men and women under 30 who were asked to comment on the aims, experiences, and perplexities of their "Post-War Generation." Riesman's message, read more than four decades later, provides some fascinating insights into the man who was to become one of America's foremost commentators, critics, and interpretive sociologists. I quote at length for it is important to get the full flavor of his message and his style.

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I spent the summer of 1931 in Russia with a small group of American students. We saw many Russian youths, and in a sense were envious. For they seemed to have no troubles such as confronted us: what to do for a living, what to do for a career. They taunted me, as capitalist apologist, asking how anyone could be happy in a competitive society, serving himself at the presumed expense of others, serving no greater cause. It was hard to answer them. It was tempting instead to throw oneself, as one of my companions did, into the external, picturesque activity of building the S o v i e t - building tractors, bridges, railroads. It was easy. After all, we Americans had done just that in the previous one hundred years. Our problems were tougher, for the building that remained for us to do was subtle and complex--the building of good society with all its fine adjustments. But our generation was raised in the Victorian (now Russian) mechanical notion of progress, and, when the building of bridges and making of fortunes were over, so was our drive. We are a democratic and literate society. Hence our opinions about it and ourselves are as important as any statistical data. The penetration of Marx and Veblen gave us crushing insight into that society; the penetration of Freud gave us crushing insight into ourselves. The insights were partial, but we as-

sumed them to be complete. Sensitive and idealistic lads dreaded emergence from college into the stridency of pecuniary competition: we knew about it, since we could read and had no censors. We became cynics. Our Russian contemporaries, if not illiterate, read Pravda and not Dostoevsky; unsophisticated, they did not know themselves or their society with its malevolence of bureaucratic competition. In his statement, Riesman went on to talk of the Blacks (meaning the fascists) as well as the Reds and of "the stale, mad b a t t l e . . , opposing caricatures of industrial and pre-industrial nostalgias," and concluded that: The Blacks, in their clear cloaks and disguises, brush out the flame [of the candle of reason] like bats afraid of the light. They scrap constitutions, pervert democracy, and root out from the bloodand-soil the small ethics we have, as well as the big we profess. The Reds, hurrying from rational premises towards valid humanitarian goals, shove the bellows of force at the candle, to blow it their way, and have ended by blowing it out, like the candles on feast cakes. We must fight without charity both unreason and reason's inhuman abuse even while they are fighting each other, even while we are shaping our treaty between them. We must fight with the candle of reason and faith, and not with our foes' weapons of evil, for our only irreparable defeat would be to suffer their thoughts to enslave us. Even so, we may lose; but what of it? Who ever said life was like a snap course in college? This is vintage Riesman. Earnest and brash. Some of it tinged with romantic chauvinism; some of it sharply polemical; some of it incredibly prescient; but all of it stimulating, challenging, refreshing, and timely. It is still timely, for the issues written about in Riesman's " U n d e r Thirty" circumscribe the concerns of many twenty-nine-year-olds setting down (or merely debating)

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their own thoughts in our own "post-war period." There have been several such periods since Riesman was under 30. However, unlike the many commentators who wrote on the Jazz Age and the Depression, or World War Two and its Cold War aftermath, or Korea and the fifties, or Vietnam and the seventies, and stopped in their time of disillusionment and reawakening, David Riesman stayed the course. He is still writing about aims, experiences, and perplexities of post-war generations. Riesman's life and work is a testament to the American intellectual spirit and the unshaken faith one of its most ardent critics has in the American system--a paradox perhaps. But not a paradox to those who know this pro-Enlightenment, anti-Progressive, German-Jewish Philadelphia gentleman, Harvard don, and self-proclaimed autonomous man. The way his twig was bent by a physician father and feminist mother, by favorite teachers at Harvard, by legal and on-the-job training, by early acquaintances and professional colleagues, and by a myriad of life-experiences (including trips to Russia and Japan--and to the coast of Maine)--is expressed time and again. It is evident not only in his studies of American character and American institutions, particularly education, but also in his general writings as represented in law-review articles on the Constitution, democracy and defamation, law and social science, and in his journal pieces, essays, and book reviews, many of them found in such published collections as Individualism Reconsidered (1954) and Abundance for What? (1964), in the pages of The Correspondent, and in the private files of his hundreds of pen pals.

Groups and Individuals Riesman's early essays--and what are best labeled "exchanges' '--include commentaries on individualism, marginality, popular culture, business, psychoanalysis, Veblen, Freud, totalitarianism, the Cold War (and " T h e Nylon W a r " - - R i e s m a n ' s sardonic suggestion to bomb Moscow with nylons instead of nukes), work, leisure, disarmament, and social science. If there is a theme that runs throughout, it is the search for a meaningful and productive place in an increasingly amorphous society. Not surprisingly, Riesman's questions (and the title of his best-known book, The Lonely Crowd) pick up where Tocqueville left off. Like the French observer, Riesman has always been enchanted by the promise of the American experiment and has sought to reconcile its vaunted penchant for personal freedom (and faith in God or self) with the lure of organizations that seem to offer solace and security in order to stave off the threat of anomie. In the title essay of Individualism Reconsidered, he suggested that, We live in a social climate in which, in many parts of the world and of the United States, the older brands of ruthless individualism are still a social danger, while in other parts of the world and of the United States, the newer varieties of what we may

term " g r o u p i s m " become increasingly menacing. Actually, we can distinguish conceptually between the needs of society (as a system of social organization) and those of environing groups (as a system of psychological ties and expectations). As so defined, society, the larger territorial organization, often provides the mechanisms by which the individual can be protected against the group, both by such formal legal procedures as the bill of rights, and by the fact that large-scale organization may permit the social mobility by which individuals can escape from any particular group. Prior to the rise of passports and totalitarianism, the modem Western city provided such an asylum and opportunity for many, while the existence of this safety-valve helped alleviate the presence of " g r o u p i s m " everywhere. Riesman was and remains committed to seeing people free themselves from the fetters of ascribed group membership. In an early essay, " A Philosophy for 'Minority' Living," he discusses his idea of the "nerve of failure," defined as "the courage to face aloneness and the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed. It is, in a larger sense, simply the nerve to be oneself when that self is not approved by the dominant ethic of the society." Time and again Riesman suggests that breaking away and going it alone may be a better course than continued attachment to what Harold Isaacs once called " T h e Idols of the Tribe." For example, his famous essay, "Marginality, Conformity, and Insight," ends with some observations on the ambiguity of being a hyphenated American and the problems faced by those made near-schizophrenic by what W.E.B. DuBois called their " t w o - n e s s " - We are afraid of a chaotic situation in which people do not know their own " n a m e s , " their own brand names, that is. In fact, under the mantle of cultural pluralism we often intensify these tendencies. As recently as 1980, Riesman felt similarly, making a nearly identical point to me in a conversation about minority students at Harvard. Despite a keen interest in the problems of pluralism, it is noteworthy that this most prolific writer on the American scene has published relatively little about "ethnicity" itself, a term many claim he was the first to coin. Still, he has remained interested in the subject, and through conversation and correspondence has sparked the thinking of many others. An excellent recent example is to be found in Herbert Gans's article on "Symbolic Ethnicity" in On the Making of Americans (1979), a Festschrift for Riesman which Gans co-edited. Yet, it remains the case that David Riesman's major published works often seem somewhat limited in perspective, for America is seen mainly in terms of its dominant culture and those who subscribe to its norms and values----or would aspire to. Ethnic minorities are clearly in the

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wings. And their hopes and fears are seldom so clearly articulated as are those in the mainstream. Consider, for example, his most famous work, The Lonely Crowd, coauthored with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney (1950), where almost all descriptions of the three character types are specified as being middle class, and the others are seen as deviants. American Culture and C h a r a c t e r The basic thesis of The Lonely Crowd is that changes in demographic conditions (the famed " S curve" of high births and high deaths; high births, low deaths and transitional growth; low births, low deaths, or incipient population decline) and in technology, from production to consumption, are the chief correlates of changes in social character, from tradition- to inner- to other-directedness. Social character itself is defined as "the patterned uniformities of learned responses that distinguished men of different regions, eras, and groups." While the book is primarily an examination of American social character and politics, Riesman stresses in the beginning--and later on--that he views Americans as but a subtype within a more generalizable European paradigm, which also has its tradition- and inner- and other-directed equivalents. In Europe societal members also suffer from increasing loneliness as they move from the rigidity and protectiveness of ancient regimes or tribal states to the uncertainty of parentally encouraged independence and, eventually, to the paradoxical state of peer-oriented togetherness and peer-involved anxiety. The fact is that, owing to a lack of specificity about other European cultures, the generalization remains highly speculative; even more speculative than the central demographic thesis. The book itself is an explication of Riesman' s concept of character and of the three types, with special attention to the agents of socialization--parents, teachers, peers, and the media. The last category includes everything

Riesman's life and work is a testament to the American intellectual spirit and the unshaken faith one of its most ardent critics has in the American system.

from the oral tradition of earlier social orders and their storytellers, to the functions of print in the stage of inner-directedness, to the market-oriented mass media said to be so influential in modern other-directed America, circa 1950. In addition, Riesman describes, in Part I, the different lifeways, particularly those connected to economic activity, of inner- and other-directed people, and the shifts, as he puts them, " f r o m craft skill

to manipulative skills", " f r o m free trade to fair trade", and " f r o m bank account to expense account." The second part of The Lonely Crowd is about politics. Again, the three types are characterized by three styles: "indifference", "moralizing", and playing the roles of "inside-dopesters," respectively. There are chapters on political persuasion and on power. It is here that Riesman's famous "Veto Group" argument, known to all readers of sociological anthologies through William Kornhauser's juxtaposition of that theory against C. Wright Mills's "Power Elite," is first posed. Riesman's position, oversimplified, is that, to understand veto groups--those agglomerations of individuals banded together owing to special interests (like those in the UAW or the A M A - - o r , today perhaps, in the Moral Majority) or bonded together by ascriptive traits (like members of racial or ethnic groups)--one must recognize that,

Within the veto groups, there i s . . . the same struggle of antagonistic cooperation for top places that goes on in other bureaucratic setups. Among the veto groups competition is monopolistic; [only] rules of fairness and fellowship dictate how far one can go. Riesman suggests that, despite the rules, there are jurisdictional disputes; but these can usually be resolved by negotiation, the division of territory (real or symbolic), and the formation of a roof organization for the previously split constituency, all ploys that insure that the interests of the monopoly remain foremost. Riesman suggests that, however powerful they are, veto groups do have one significant drawback. They tend to be more protective ("defensive" says Riesman) than leaderly. He contends that, owing to their social chemistry. the emergence and presence of large numbers of veto groups "foster the tolerant mood of other-direction and hasten the retreat of the inner-directed indignants." (In the future things were to get turned around when latterday conservatives, spewing forth the rhetoric of individualistic indignation played a most successful game of veto-group politics themselves. N.B.: The organized attack on "targeted" liberal politicians, and the successful mobilization of reactionary forces lobbying with collective voices raised on high for more individual freedora--and simultaneous restrictions on abortion, birth control, and secular humanists.) Part II of The Lonely Crowd also contains an interesting chapter called " T h e Conversation of the Classes and Other Dialogues" that, even more than many parts of this now-dated but still seminal work, seems to hold a special kind of foresight. Especially cogent is a brief discussion of politicians who seek not merely tolerance but, presumably being other-directed themselves, approval. (One thinks of another recent President, Jimmy Carter, who constantly felt he was unappreciated, misunderstood, and unloved.)

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Before turning to the way out of the Americans' characterological dilemma, Riesman steps back and looks at his representation of his fellow post-World War II countrymen alongside the three tribal societies whose folkways and mores were so aptly summarized in Ruth Benedicrs Patterns of Culture in 1934. She wrote of the cooperative Pueblo of the American Southwest, the paranoiac and rivalrous Dobu of New Guinea, and the highly competitive Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest (the group famed for its inversion of Veblen's notion of conspicuous consumption). Status among the Kwakiutl is measured not by what one can accumulate and display but by what one can give away at the potlatch. (First it was furs; then, in Franz Boas's day, it was blankets. More recently, according to the anthropologist Jerry Hyman, it is cases of Coke. One expects that soon it will be transistor radios and digital watches.) Riesman reports that he asked his students at Chicago which of the three tribes Americans most resembled. Most said the Dobu; the rest, the Kwakiutl. But, in pointed disagreement, Riesman argued that, in fact, there is (or was in the late 1940s) a rising tendency toward "Zunification," toward increasing conformity, the judging of the self by the approval or disapproval of others, the desire to fit in and not to be too much of a rate-buster. (He further suggests that, as there is a good deal of repressed hostility lurking beneath the Glad Hand

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of Anglo-Americans, it also exists in the subconscious of those Pueblo-Americans with whom he claimed there was a characterological affinity.) Not all Anglo-Americans succumb to the enticements of Zunification in the era of other-directedness. (Nor, presumably, did they take to Dobuanism in a period dominated by the values of inner-directedness and the main sanction for non-conformity--guilt.) E a c h ' 'historical type" has its modes of adaptation. Each era has its conformists, those who are "adjusted"; its anomic types, those thought to be "maladjusted" (as Riesman defines Durkheim's more restrictive concept); and its autonomous individuals, who seem able to maintain some sense of detachment while still functioning within the parameters of the social order. Part III of the book is on that last category and on "autonomy" itself. It is, to me, the most interesting and the most frustrating section, not least because it is here where the author returns to his "curve of population" which, to many, is the weakest link in the chain. This last part is also a potpourri of commentaries on work and play and on the obstacles the modern society imposes, ever threatening to restrict autonomy even while fostering senses of "false personalization" on the job ( " I may be the boss, but you can call me Charlie") and "packaged sociabilities" outside the workplace, including those among ethnics which, Riesman again suggests, in-

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hibit independence (what was later to be called meritocratic mobility). The Lonely Crowd concludes with Riesman's famous Tocquevillian reprieve: "The idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading: men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like each other." The publication of the book stirred a good deal of interest. Initial reviews were mixed, ranging from high praise for the originality of thought and clarity of exposition to criticism for saying what others, such as Philip Wylie, supposedly had already said "with swift intuition and w i t . . , and with less cumbersome verbiage." Anthropologist Margaret Mead found it a stimulating and provocative book. Historian Oscar Handlin said: "[The Lonely Crowd] is a rare book which will be read with pleasure and profit even by those who reject its central conclusions." In a review in The Nation, Irving Howe described the book as "very uneven but always provocative, alternately brilliant and sluggish, exciting and exasperating." Most sociologists who reviewed The Lonely Crowd tended to agree with Howe. They liked parts of the book but found others problematic. Morroe Berger, for example, put it this way: Throughout the book Mr. Riesman is often arresting in describing some facet of current behavior which supports his thesis. Yet the cumulative effect on the reader is one of dissatisfaction with the book's frequent lack of clarity, irritation with its overabundance of jargon and unnecessarily obscure terminology, and weariness with its obvious effort continually to shock the reader with novel and unconventional observations (not always meaningful or relevant) about familiar things. This is unfortunate because despite these shortcomings and its excessive length " T h e Lonely Crowd" contains much that will interest not only the scholar but also the general reader who is concerned about the integrity of the individual in a "mass society." Another commentator, G.W. Johnson, said of The Lonely Crowd: His title is brilliant, and his subtitle, " A Study of the' Changing American Character," is exact. But he relates sigflificant changes in that character to the population curve, and right there this reviewer began to lose touch, for it seems to him that the relation is postulated, rather than established. Maybe it exists, but David Riesman hasn't proved it here. Johnson's sort of criticism was not uncommon, as others delved into Riesman's major thesis itself and found it wanting for lack of evidence. (Riesman anticipated such criticism in his preface, stating that he was

offering a model to be tested not a series of empirically verified generalizations.) Whatever the case, if certain influential members of the intellectual community did not find Riesman's paradigm a major breakthrough, it

If there is a theme running through Riesman's early work, it is the search for a meaningful and productive place in an increasingly amorphous society.

was widely discussed. Despite the very small print run of the original press (Yale), an abridged Doubleday Anchor edition published in 1953 took off like the proverbial rocket--and, to push the metaphor, stayed in orbit for years, kept there in large part by generations of student readers. Riesman's typology became the basis for innumerable academic debates about inner- versus otherdirectedness, undoubtedly enhanced by the publication of William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1956) and its discussion of the shift from the Protestant to the social ethic and the new values of belongingness, togetherness, and scientism, a thesis grounded in empirical research by various social scientists, including Herbert Gans. Whatever Riesman had hoped for, fewer and fewer students of American society and culture seemed interested in his dubious " S curve" theory but did appreciate, and use, his characterological typology. And, rereading the book, it is apparent how many sparks touched off by his own near stream-of-consciousness writing have influenced the thoughts of many writers on American social structure. (In this sense Riesman is appropriately likened to the iconoclast, anarchist, analyst, and guru, Paul Goodman.) The Lonely Crowd, along with other related works of Riesman such as Faces in the Crowd (1952), a volume of individual studies in personality and politics written with Nathan Glazer, and a number of essays on changing American character, was the subject for one of the three books in the limited series, Continuities in Social Research, published by the Free Press in the 1950s and early 1960s. The first two were examinations and critiques of two of the most notable studies conducted during the war years, known by the generic titles as " T h e American Soldier" and " T h e Authoritarian Personality." In those books, the major concern of the commentators was methodological. While that was an issue in some of the essays written for the third in the Continuities series, Culture and Social Character: The Works of David Riesman Reviewed (1961), edited by Seymour Martin Lipset, it was secondary to the principal focus of Riesman's ideas. Culture and Social Character is mainly an examination of the ideas of a man whom the

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late Paul Kecskemeti, in the first essay, called one of the foremost American and interpretive sociologists of our time. Rereading Kecskemeti's thesis underscored what I had jotted down and later tried to convey in remarks about Riesman's earliest published works. That double vis i o n - D a v i d Riesman as American, as interpreter--is a leitmotif reappearing time and again in most of the early essays in Culture and Social Character, including those by Margaret Mead, Leo Lowenthal, Arthur Brodbeck, Sheldon Messinger, and Burton Clark, and an excellent critique by Lipset, " A Changing American Character?". Equally important are essays that examine some of Riesman's theories, such as Kornhauser's previously mentioned piece on "Power Elite" or "Veto Groups" (first published here), Ralf Dahrendorf's essay on "The Politics of the Other Directed M a n , " and Norman Birnbaum's on "David Riesman's Image of Political Process." Also noteworthy are the reports of several empirical tests of the typology itself. Riesman and Nathan Glazer, co-author of The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd, have the last word in Culture and Social Character. They begin, most generously, by indicating that, " I n general, we have been impressed by the care our critics have taken to understand and to be fair to us." Then they proceed to examine and comment upon the points made by the various authors, spinning new thoughts on each page, thoughts that would appear in altered form in later works, especially those on youth and education, the subject of Riesman's next major contribution. In addition to Culture and Social Character, there were also other retrospective analyses of The Lonely Crowd, including a review written by Jonathan Yardley 22 years after the initial publication of the book. Yardley pays considerable attention to the staying power of Riesman's basic ideas, but also points to the ambivalence he revealed then--and continued to reveal for some time--about other-direction. As Yardley correctly states: . . . R i e s m a n ' s defense of other-direction does not disguise a certain ambivalence. He eschews value judgments, he says, but there is a rather damning judgment of other-direction in his portraits of the "glad-hander," the "inside-dopester" and the "false sincerity" of some business and social relations. He is far less sympathetic to those who have "adjusted" to other-directed society--"those who reflect their society, or their class within the society, with the least distortion' ' - - t h a n to the man who is seeking to become "autonomous," to acquire the "heightened self-consciousness" that enables him to "recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, his own limitations." It is not surprising, says Yardley, that the emphasis on autonomy in the book's final chapter in large part explained its popularity. Perhaps. But my recollection is

that most who discussed The Lonely Crowd did not read it very carefully and rarely recognized that Ri~sman did provide them with ways of coping with whatever concerns they might have had about becoming organization men (and, at that time, organization wives). Moreover, it is likely that many of today's young readers might find it a reflection of what Joseph Featherstone has recently called "the aristocratic fish eye [that] The Lonely Crowd casts on American culture retraced in the meritocratic and anti-populist mood of many after World War I I . "

Inside the Academy During the 1950s and 1960s, the name David Riesman was immediately linked to The Lonely Crowd. For most of the reading public it still is. Yet those working in or concerned about higher education also associate Riesman with that institutional arena and have ever since Constraint and Variety in American Education was published in 1956. Riesman's interest in the subject dates back to childhood and the stimulation of parents who stressed the importance of ideas and the value of learning. His comments on it probably were first recorded when, as a member of the Crimson staff at Harvard, Riesman chose "Education" as his beat. (An autobiographical account of his experiences at Harvard, beginning in 1927 when he entered as a freshman, is offered in the second of the two lengthy essays published in 1975 as Education and Politics at Harvard). The content of Constraint and Variety in American Education, like many of Riesman's essays, began as a series of lectures (these presented at the University of Nebraska). The first, " T h e Academic Procession," traced the development of higher education in the United States, stressing the dialectics between the parish and the world, the locals and the cosmopolitans, the privately oriented and publicly minded, and traditional and experimental institutional perspectives. Here, as elsewhere in this and other volumes, Riesman's analysis is informed by and infused with his own ideas about what the academy should be and what he does or does not like about one or another type of college or university. His subtitles often reflect such thinly veiled views: consider " T h e Highbrow-Lowbrow Alliance" or " T h e Stragglers in the Procession." The second lecture, on " T h e Intellectual Veto Groups," describes the academic domestication of the natural sciences, the developinent of economics, and the challenges of the newer social sciences----especially anthropology, sociology, and social psychology--to the defenders of the more traditional subjects. Riesman also considers the rise of disciplinary professionalization and the concomitant transcendence of "the parish boundaries" leading to the organization not only of more learned societies but of professional associations that act as guilds for members and counter-reference groups, which often weaken institutional loyalties.

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In the third lecture, Riesman downshifts from higher education to the secondary level and details the particular vulnerability of public high-school teachers and administrators, especially in the realm of academic freedom, constrained as they are by a very old version of community control. He describes the secondary school as less a forum for the exchange of ideas and more a society of captives urged to do the bidding of local authorities reluctant to allow deviation from their fixed agendas and controlled curricula. Unlike the sharp differences of opinion expressed by reviewers of The Lonely Crowd, the reviews of Constraint and Variety, while taking issue with certain points, were almost unanimously enthusiastic. Reviewers tended to agree with David Schneider, who, writing in the American Anthropologist, said that "Riesman has written a fine and useful book, and his observations and insights seem perfectly consistent with other observations of American culture," and with George Homans, who was a bit more elliptical in a review in the American Journal of Sociology: As description this book has to a high degree the wonderful Riesman qualities: an utter inability to look at anything like the rest of us with eyes fixed in a frame. It is the movement of the head that lets us see things in the dark, and so with Riesman. So, too, a catholic sympathy with any human endeavor setting some excellence as its goal. Many thoughts expressed in the Nebraska Lectures and published in various articles and in Constraint and Variety were to be put to empirical test in a series of studies conducted, supervised, co-authored, or edited by Riesman, beginning with The Academic Revolution (1968), and followed by Academic Values and Mass Education: The Early Years of Oakland and Montieth (l 970), Academic Transformation: 17 Institutions under Pressure (1973), the previously mentioned Education and Politics at Harvard (1975), and The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (1978). The Academic Revolution, co-authored by Christopher Jencks and David Riesman is, as stated in its introduction, " a sociological and historical analysis of American higher education." Throughout its 12 chapters, a reader familiar with Riesman's earlier works will see how ideas presented there germinated into theories of everything from the growth and development of the university, to generational conflict and the role of student subcultures, to stratification and higher education and stratification in higher education, to the old dichotomy between localism and nationalism. In addition, Jencks (who organized the project and did the quantitative analysis and reanalysis of a number of surveys, as well as a good deal of the writing) and Riesman (who visited many of the colleges described and conducted many of the interviews) focus on a variety of species in the taxonomy of American universities: professional schools, including seminaries, mili-

tary academies, teachers' colleges, engineering institutes, medical schools, graduate schools of arts and sciences; Catholic and Protestant denominational colleges; Negro colleges; "anti-university colleges," with particular attention to the community college movement and that of general education; and the single-sex college. The last type is dealt with by Jencks and Riesman in a chapter on "Feminism, Masculinism, and Coeducation." It is an excellent summary of the origins and changes in attitudes toward the education of women, with ample references to the character of early feminist crusades and the attitude and demeanor of many of its prime movers (and the antagonism they had to deal with not only from men who "felt personally threatened by female emancipation" but from traditionally minded women). The chapter also shows the resistance to coeducation at many women's colleges long after the battle for equality in admission to most institutions of higher education had been won. The authors see the anachronism but offer explanations for it based, by and large, on their assessment of how women in many of the colleges, particularly those of the original "Seven Sisters," argued for the right to have their own places where they would develop as individuals rather than sex objects. This is a position to which Riesman is still quite sympathetic. In an interview withNew York Times writer Nan Robertson in December 1980, he said that women's colleges continue to have a place and to play critical roles, especially in the training of women for fields still often thought inappropriate for them to enter. He pointed out that "Mt. Holyoke still turns out more scientists than Harvard." It should be noted that much of the chapter on singlesex vs. coeducational institutions is based on observations of then-prevalent attitudes. Between its publication and the present, women have passed through a major phase of their struggle for recognition and are beginning to enter what Betty Friedan has recently described as "the second stage" of true equality. Many contemporary

Riesman's questions in The Lonely Crowd pick up where Tocqueville left off. students and recent graduates of the schools Jencks and Riesman describe--including Smith College, which I know best--would find the views (and the rhetoric) dated, and, though the authors would deny it, somewhat sexist; this despite the fact that some, at least, also would know Riesman's own strong and outspoken commitment to the women's movement. The Academic Revolution was to have been followed by a second volume, The Academic Enterprise, which Jencks and Riesman said would deal with the ecology of American education in two states: Massachusetts and California. So far as I know, it was never published in

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that form, although a number of articles dealing with such places as Boston College, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and San Francisco State were already in print and several other profiles were to appear in different places. An academic traditionalist in some ways and a maverick in others-----especially regarding the education of women, the stifling narrowness of disciplinary pillaring, and the growing tendency toward pre-professional training rather than broad-based grounding--Riesman welcomed the chance to advise, comment upon, and later assess the development of a number of experimental colleges, some independent and some "anti-university," others more "autonomous," such as those non-elite high-quality undergraduate colleges connected to public institutions, including two in Michigan: Oakland University in Rochester, and Montieth, a part of Wayne State in Detroit, both founded in 1959. With fellow sociologists Joseph Gusfield and Zelda Gamson, Riesman assessed the early years of Oakland and Montieth. In Academic Values and Mass Education (1970) they present their "findings" on the two experiments in what they referred to as "non-elite education." In a detailed description of the not-so-natural history of Oakland, the authors describe the promise and the problems of trying to build an academic oasis in the hinterlands; a place that was to be special in its orientation toward intellectual and cultural "upgrading," and anticareerist in its curriculum (half of the courses were to be outside the students' fields of specialization). There were difficulties from the start, not least over admission policies. Despite the hope of some of its early supporters, to assure its non-elitist character it was to admit not to select the students, many of them commuters from the area. Oakland was plagued with political conflicts from outside and internal dissension within the ranks. Riesman and his colleagues learned that many faculty members " h a d they truly known what they were getting into.., would not have come to Oakland at all." For those who stuck it out----either because of their continuing commitment or the difficulty of moving on---compromises were eventually made and Oakland was turned around. Faculty expectations came to be tempered by the realization that Oakland would never become "the Oberlin of public education." Montieth's origins were less tied to the state and national ambitions of a major university like Michigan State. Its beginning was, in the words of Riesman, Gusfield, and Gamson, "somewhat more intermural." It was to be an experimental college of Wayne State University with a curriculum more akin to that of the University of Chicago in Hutchins's day than that of most then-contemporary programs. All students would be exposed to three areas: "Man and Society"; "Man and Science"; "Man and the Arts." Courses would be chosen from either the pre-professional curriculum of the University or from the College of Liberal Arts, and s t u -

dents would also take an interdisciplinary Senior Colloquium. Those to be enrolled would be admitted from the general pool of Wayne students on the basis of desire, not merit. Once in place, rivalries quickly developed between those involved in the College and those outside, especially among faculty in the Liberal Arts who felt their most exciting students would be siphoned off. This was exacerbated by invitations to attend Montieth sent to random samples of students admitted to the various schools of Wayne State. Perhaps the biggest problem, as the authors point out, was that Montieth, like Oakland, had difficulty sustaining an anti-careerist orientation (and Montieth's anti-departmental one) at a time when most

Riesman was and remains committed to seeing people free themselves from the fetters of ascribed group membership. students, and especially the working- and lower-middle class ones who attended these commuter colleges, were most interested in gaining credentials in order to move into the mainstream. In one of the most important chapters, Riesman and his colleagues discuss the recruitment of faculty for the experimental colleges and the problems of the careers of those hired. Most telling is the finding that selection committees at Oakland and Montieth and similar institutions followed traditional universities in favoring those with PhDs from prestige graduate schools rather than those whose undergraduate experiences and educational philosophies were in tune with the directions toward which the new schools were moving. (The latter practice was followed at Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts. In many instances, by hiring graduates of Black Mountain and Goddard and Antioch or those who had taught in non-traditional institutions, Hampshire was able to realize many of its founders' objectives. However, it should be noted that the population from which it was to draw its students was very different from that of Oakland or Montieth: it was cosmopolitan rather than local, upper-middle class, and already anti-careerist, very like its mentors. Riesman's studies of Hampshire's early years and those of several other innovative new colleges in California, Florida, and New Jersey, are discussed in The Perpetual Dream (1978), co-authored with Gerald Grant.) By contrast, many Oakland and Montieth faculty members, disillusioned by the failure of the experimental colleges to live up to the promises made, became embittered. They found themselves trapped and "labeled" and often unable to move. I dwell on this part of the Riesman, Gusfield, and Gamson book because, in many ways, it is in sharp contrast to the sort of thing the senior author had written in

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the past. Rather than broad, sweeping ideas about character or culture or the educational enterprise writ large, this volume is a detailed analysis of what went on in two specific institutions and why. While much of the writing is informed by the assiduous research, interviews (somewhat similar to those conducted for The Academic Revolution), and assessments by Riesman's colleagues, the study (and there is far more to it than discussed here) represented a kind of turning point. This was recognized by many, including Esther Raushenbush who, reviewing it in the Teachers' College Record, first praised the book and the extraordinary candor of its authors (based, she said, on the extraordinary candor of the teachers and administrators of Oakland and Montieth), and then, assuming that their assessments were accurate reflections of what was going on in places trying to provide a liberal education for commuting, working-class students, examined the implications of what it reported. There is no discussion of Riesman's sociology, or that of his colleagues, nor is there in Warren Bryan Martin's lengthy essay in the Harvard Educational Review, save for the felicitous statement that, "inAcademic Values and Mass Education, Riesman's evaluative, conceptual approach has been joined with the research orientations of Gusfield and Gamson to provide two institutional case studies that clarify the possibilities of the historical moment and give insight into the problem of thinking about 'the future as history.'" Indeed, such sentiments were expressed by almost all who reviewed what Samuel McCracken described as "[This] extremely informative study." The fourth major work on higher education in which David Riesman was involved was a series of case studies of 17 institutions--Antioch, the University of California at Berkeley, City College of New York, Federal City College, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, Old Westbury, Pennsylvania, Princeton, Rutgers, San Francisco State, Stanford, Swarthmore, Toronto, Wesleyan, and Wisconsin, each written about by a different author, often in a different style. (Neff Smelser's essay on Berkeley and Meyer's on Harvard being far more structured than any of the others.) However, as Verne Stadtman, co-author of Academic Transformation, states, each contributor did focus on such issues as the rights of students, equal opportunities for minorities, the Vietnam war and the draft, and student participation in decision making. In many ways, this volume is a fitting follow-up to Academic Values and Mass Education, for it describes the next stage in what Riesman himself might call the by-play of politics and education. Oakland and Montieth started in 1959 and, in many ways, were products of the 1950s. The issues discussed in Academic Transformation dealt with how established institutions were threatened by external and internal strife, what they were prepared--or, more often, unprepared--to do about it, and what David Riesman thought about it all. In the last chapter, Riesman concludes, as Richard Braungart puts it in the Journal of Higher Education, on a cautious and practical note:

He argues that Americans have lost their love affair with higher education which began with Sputnik and ended in the late 1960s. He is not sanguine about the future and suggests that a new wave of populism may level higher education, especially on the larger campuses in this country. Braungart is correct in highlighting Riesman's concern about what might happen in the future. The future is now and it has happened. We see many of the problems Riesman predicted in Academic Transformation, and he is still concerned about them. Riesman also remains intrigued by the possibilities of experimentation in both public and private settings as evidenced in his aptly titled book, The Perpetual Dream. In that volume three types of curricular innovations-"neoclassical revival" (/i la St. Johns), "communalexperiential" (such as found at Kresge College at U.C. Santa Cruz), and "activist-radical" (the basis of several colleges of human services)--are discussed, and a number of programs are examined. The book ends with " A Modest Proposal," actually a commentary on the promise and pitfalls of academic innovation. Model and Mentor I have thus far concentrated on three groups of works by David Riesman: his essays, particularly those published inlndividualism Reconsidered andAbundance for What?; his magnum opus, The Lonely Crowd; and his extensive writing on higher education in the United States. If only to underscore the catholicity of his interests and the range of his expertise, I might also have mentioned his books on Medicine in Modern Society (1938) and on Thorstein Veblen (1953), and the fact that Riesman is also keenly interested in work and leisure and has written about both in a variety of places. To this list should be added one more title, the only book I know in which Riesman discusses another culture at considerable length. It is called Conversations in Japan (1967) and was written with his wife, Evelyn Thompson Riesman. I had not seen the book prior to going off to Kyoto for a brief teaching stint in 1970. However, reading it upon our return, I wrote to the Riesmans saying, . . . n e v e r got to read [Conversations in Japan] before going to Japan and, in a way, we're glad. Now, we feel, we can compare " n o t e s . " What struck us was how similar our impressions, reactions and conversations were to yours of several years back. Of course we were there a much shorter time (four weeks) and concentrated on K y o t o . . . Your comments on the ugly Kyodai, the beautiful city and the strange alchemy of east and west, of past and future sans present brought it all back. I found the letter from which I quoted in a very thick file labeled "Correspondence with Dave Riesman," a file

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that goes back to my undergraduate days when I first read Riesman and then got to know him through an exchange of letters. While a student at Syracuse, I was much influenced by three Chicago social scientists; the first two were Robert Park and his son-in-law, Robert Redfield. Like Park, who shaped some of my early thinking about racial and ethnic relations (and which I was later to challenge), Redfield raised--at least for me--important questions about important issues. His little-know essay, " A Talk with a Stranger," perhaps more than anything else he had written, led me to reflect upon the fragility of social life and the commonality of human existence. But David Riesman offered something more. I saw him as a renaissance man in the guise of a modern social scientist. Here was a humanist with a lawyer's sense of order, a sociologist with a scientist's ability to categorize and synthesize, an activist with a willingness not only to get involved but to resist the sloganeering that surrounded so many engaged in fighting good fights. Moreover, he had a flair for communicating not only to his fellow academicians but to the public at large. Riesman, I was told, also had another most appealing characteristic. He was supposed to be a great teacher and, unlike his much-admired Veblen, one who genuinely liked teaching and wanted to help students to answer their own questions. I never sat in his classroom, but, in a sense, I did become his student. It happened to me as it did to others. Sometime in 1953 I sent him a request for some comments on a paper with which I was struggling. A few days later I received a five-page commentary. It was the beginning of a special relationship that still continues. I was to learn that while mine was a special relationship, it was not a unique one. Riesman had and has special relationships with hundreds of people all over the world. Like them, I have learned from suggestions to read this or that, and from pointed and often provocative comments. (Once, after reading a draft of a paper I had written on Black Pride, he said to me that "to understand black narcissism is one thing, but to feed it in a frenzy of white masochism is dangerous for black and white alike. ") I have taken seriously the rhetorical jibes ("But isn't that a rather east coast perspective?"), and pondered the results of his incredible memory ( " I ' m sorry you said that here for I remember in your earlier piece you showed that . . . . "). I also have long appreciated that extra encouragement ( " D o n ' t forget to be sure I get a reprint. I ' m always interested in your views"). Many others have received similar support. A rough analysis of the content of my Riesman file indicates that most of his comments are on papers of mine dealing with student values, civil defense, ethnicity (about which, as I have suggested, I wish he had written more), and, of late, the resettling of refugees; and my comments on papers of his dealing, chronologically, with issues of disarmament and the threat of war, student dissent in the 1960s, community and junior colleges, and, especially, coeducation and the role of women.

Riesman remains eager to have his correspondents' comments on his work. It is taken to heart and, whether particular criticism is accepted or rejected, he never fails to give generous acknowledgment. That acknowledgment is evident in the prefaces to many of his books and in the number of collaborative efforts in which he was quite willing to be the "junior" author. A year ago, my wife and son and I went to visit the Riesmans at their home on Linnaean Street near the Radcliffe Quad in Cambridge. There, over the inevitable teapot, he spoke to a new Harvard freshman about the college he had known for better than half a century. All of the Riesmanesque traits were displayed as he presented his views on subjects as disparate as the house system, coeducation, campus politics, black-white tensions, and curricular changes, and went on to reflect on matters that reached well beyond the boundaries of Harvard Square--national politics, the draft, ERA, international relations, occupational commitments and leisuretime pursuits. We took issue with many of his statements, especially about matters very close to his heart and, now, to our son's, and were struck by the fact that, despite holding center stage (it was his library after all), he was typically eager to hear what we and, especially, Dan, had to say. He was not simply declaiming; he was testing his ideas, even those well fixed in a repertoire of opinions on just about everything related to society and culture. As we left I remembered what Martin Meyerson had written about his old friend: When the intellectual history of the twentieth century is written, the social sciences, particularly in America, will play an important role. Many analysts will no doubt focus on the importance of new methodologies for most of the social sciences. Yet I doubt that it is the methodological contributors whose work will have the greatest impact. Rather, it will be those who, like David Riesman, have combined theory, probing questions, dazzling insights based on limited data, and empirical findings. I would only add that, to me, David Riesman's importance also lies in his rejection of fashionable theoretical orthodoxies and time-bound isms, in his healthy skepticism of many who believe that if you cannot count it it does not count, and particularly his ability to stimulate others to stretch their own minds, to retain their individuality, and to avoid, not so much the loneliness, but the cold comfort of the crowd.[]

Peter I. Rose is Sophia Smith Professor of Sociology and Anthropology and director of the American Studies Diploma Program at Smith College. A specialist on racial and cultural relations, he is the author of numerous books, including They and We, Strangers in Their Midst, and Socialization and the Life Cycle.