The Lonely Crowd Read online

  Among the reasonably well-to-do, and especially among their children, American levels of consumption are often attacked as extravagant. Yet, given the political structure of the veto groups, it is hard for me to imagine how it will ever become politically possible to integrate the really poor inside America, let alone outside, without at the same time greatly raising the levels of living of lower, but not poor, socioeconomic groups. That is, the still only insecurely affluent lower-middle and upper-working classes cannot be persuaded to be generous to the truly deprived, especially if these are black and obstreperous (even though the majority of the poor in America are white) if they themselves do not live on an ever-rising incline of consumer satisfaction. The poor, white and black, and their conscience-stricken affluent allies are minorities (and veto groups too), who are tactically effective in many local situations (with the power to create turbulence), but unable nationally to promote a more just distribution of rising resources. Indeed, tactical success is often gained at the expense of long-run strategic decline.7 The Lonely Crowd did not take seriously enough the problem of continuing the expansion of resources to moderate the envies and resentments of the morally indignant not-quite-poor.

  I have been a member of the National Commission on America’s Goals and Resources of the National Planning Association, whose work suggests that in order to cope with the demands the American economy already makes on itself to deal with poverty in the ghetto and elsewhere, we need vastly expanded production, in addition, of course, to a shift away from spending on war and preparation for war. The commission tried to cost the goals so far generally accepted as legitimate, such as the greatly increased health care, better housing, welfare, control over pollution, etc., that we seek; to achieve these, even if the war in Vietnam were to be ended, would greatly exceed even our massive production in the foreseeable future—and without attention to the demands for aid among the developing countries.8 Contrary to what I once thought, the economy is not self-propelling. We can see in the United Kingdom the problems that arise when a society becomes psychologically postindustrial long before the economic infrastructure is sound enough to bear the weight of steadily rising expectations. The most talented young Americans are continuing to avoid careers involved in any way with production and economic affairs, and they are also now avoiding careers in the physical sciences (other than medicine)—these are regarded as lacking in meaning.9 Yet our increasingly sophisticated economy demands both more conscientious work and more free-wheeling imagination than it may get if young people’s concept of management is one of a career for stooges, “organization men.”

  The Lonely Crowd contributed to the snobbish deprecation of business careers, in its discussion of the shift from craft skill to manipulative skill, by underestimating the intellectual component of much work in complex organizations. To move away from physical toward conceptual manipulation and away from working with things toward working with people should not have been seen as a deterioration. Large corporate business today depends much more on ideas and less on brute trial and error than was the case earlier. And The Lonely Crowd did point out the greater sensitivity and lower tolerance for exploitation in our corporate life. Yet as always, such advances give rise to new problems. Our greater awareness of the fact that men are interdependent has led to a greater awareness of the manipulative relations that remain. In a larger population, the massiveness of the organizations in which men work and their greater distance from the end product do give rise to feelings of unreality for many professional and white-collar employees. Abundance, although unevenly distributed, allows those who possess it to demand meaning in their work and to be dissatisfied with mere subsistence, and the relative lack of challenge that abundance produces makes it harder for many to find such meaning. In an earlier and in some respects more innocent day, Americans were often exploitative without realizing it, or without caring one way or the other; they wanted results and did not yet seek meaning as such.

  A generation ago, Joseph Schumpeter talked about the withdrawal of affect from the entrepreneurial system. As children of the affluent renounce greed as a motive as well as traditional work-mindedness, they may find it hard to discover other more liberating sources of commitment. I see many young people today who expect to fall into a commitment or into an identity or into a meaning for their lives, the way romantic young people expect to fall in love. They are unwilling, often, to extend themselves in order to find themselves. With the continuing decline in the legitimacy of adult authority, the hegemony of the peer group has continued to increase. In terms of social character, this may involve some measure of other-direction. But the others to whom one responds tend to be drawn from a narrow circle of intimates; hence there has not been an increase in other-direction in its aspect of openness to others. Tolerance and openness are extended only to small, marginally connected networks, whose norms include intolerance toward others outside the networks.

  A small minority of this minority has thrown itself into politics, finding in the antiwar, civil rights, and antiuniversity movements a new secular religion and often a new family, for they are freer than heretofore of their parental families, their ethnic or religious seen as a deterioration. Large corporate business today depends much more on ideas and less on brute trial and error than was the case earlier. And The Lonely Crowd did point out the greater sensitivity and lower tolerance for exploitation in our corporate life. Yet as always, such advances give rise to new problems. Our greater awareness of the fact that men are interdependent has led to a greater awareness of the manipulative relations that remain. In a larger population, the massiveness of the organizations in which men work and their greater distance from the end product do give rise to feelings of unreality for many professional and white-collar employees. Abundance, although unevenly distributed, allows those who possess it to demand meaning in their work and to be dissatisfied with mere subsistence, and the relative lack of challenge that abundance produces makes it harder for many to find such meaning. In an earlier and in some respects more innocent day, Americans were often exploitative without realizing it, or without caring one way or the other; they wanted results and did not yet seek meaning as such.

  A generation ago, Joseph Schumpeter talked about the withdrawal of affect from the entrepreneurial system. As children of the affluent renounce greed as a motive as well as traditional work-mindedness, they may find it hard to discover other more liberating sources of commitment. I see many young people today who expect to fall into a commitment or into an identity or into a meaning for their lives, the way romantic young people expect to fall in love. They are unwilling, often, to extend themselves in order to find themselves. With the continuing decline in the legitimacy of adult authority, the hegemony of the peer group has continued to increase. In terms of social character, this may involve some measure of other-direction. But the others to whom one responds tend to be drawn from a narrow circle of intimates; hence there has not been an increase in other-direction in its aspect of openness to others. Tolerance and openness are extended only to small, marginally connected networks, whose norms include intolerance toward others outside the networks.

  A small minority of this minority has thrown itself into politics, finding in the antiwar, civil rights, and antiuniversity movements a new secular religion and often a new family, for they are freer than heretofore of their parental families, their ethnic or religious may at times give hegemony to the complacent, at other times to those capable of great moral outrage and dedication. My collaborators and I, both when we wrote The Lonely Crowd and still today, take a more benign and nonviolent view of what is possible historically, and hence believe that the best hope for change in the direction of our ideals does not lie in efforts at total improvement in oneself and in society but in patient work toward incremental change in the light of a tentative sense of many possible futures.

  Stanford, California

  April 1969

  Preface to the 1961 Edition


  When in the fall of 1947 I had the opportunity to go to Yale under the auspices of the Committee on National Policy, I was teaching in the Social Science program of the College of the University of Chicago. I had been chairman of a committee to develop an interdisciplinary course in “Culture and Personality”—one that would not only include the contributions of anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists, but would spread out beyond these circles to make possible the cooperation of economists, political scientists, and historians. The excitement of trying to build a nondepartmentalized curriculum in the social sciences was shared by a number of colleagues, including a friend of many years, Reuel Denney, who came to an interest in mass communications from the side of the humanities and literary criticism. In my first few months at Yale, I recruited Nathan Glazer, whose incisive critiques of leading work in the social sciences I had been reading in the “Study of Man” Department of Commentary. My co-workers and I brought a variety of intellectual approaches together in the work that led to The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd. Retracing some of these earlier steps in preparation for this edition of The Lonely Crowd, I am struck by how much has changed in American intellectual and academic life since 1948; these changes in part refract the larger changes in our national life and in the world situation, and in part autonomous developments within the social sciences themselves.

  Prior to the war, I had been working as a law professor on the social psychology of defamation, seeking to understand the different meaning of insults and of wild political abuse in the different social strata, and in a number of Western countries.1 I had been excited by the development of the public opinion survey both as a way of answering some of the questions raised in this research and of understanding more broadly the meaning of opinion; indeed, when polling began to be used in a systematic way in the 1930’s it seemed to promise—as community studies did in another way—to bring the inarticulate and relatively powerless into the orbit of the student of society. In an effort to understand this tool better, I drew on the work of my friends at the Bureau of Applied Social Research and in the Eastern Office of the National Opinion Research Center; and the first work that Mr. Glazer and I did together was an effort to grasp the sort of communication that went on in a political survey and to see what a “don’t know” response might mean.2

  At that time, less than a decade and a half ago, social science research lacked its present polish, its massiveness of process and output. The change is perhaps especially striking in cultural anthropology, which interested us as much as public opinion research.

  While Lloyd Warner had led or stimulated important expeditions into modern communities, most anthropologists had remained until World War II the somewhat peripheral academic representatives of what we might call “underprivileged” data—data from tribes without writing, without a navy, without what used to be called “culture.” Furthermore, anthropologists had necessarily been forced by the nature of their one-man expeditions into a kind of amateurism in which the arts, the economics, the mythology, the child-rearing practices, the legal system, and the kinship system were all within their purview, needing to be organized in some holistic way. When anthropology was poor, it could not afford to send more than one person to one place; and the tribes, too, were poor, in the sense that they could not protect themselves against white contact and could not be assumed to remain intact for the next field trip. Moreover, when anthropology was poor, anthropologists were autocratic and aristocratic; by this I mean that, like the early psychoanalysts, they were prepared to generalize on the basis of scanty evidence. They practiced an art requiring imagination and confidence in themselves, as well as ability to observe and record. Such brave adventurers as Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Geoffrey Gorer were willing under the impact of the war to attempt holistic or configurational interpretations of the United States, Japan, or the Soviet Union.

  Hardly had their findings been published than they met a barrage of criticism for their undoubted methodological and conceptual lacunae and overinterpretations, similar to, but more relentless than, the professional criticism that greeted The Lonely Crowd and Faces in the Crowd.3 Despite this criticism, work in the fields of national character and culture and personality continued, although in a less ambitious way; the younger anthropologists seemed to steer clear of so controversial an area. At the present time, anthropologists can no longer be called an esoteric elite, seeking to acquaint their fellow men with what had previously been beyond or beneath their notice: what was esoteric has become part of our common understanding, and anthropologists, now belonging to a stronger and better-endowed profession, are today also burdened with observational and analytic aims which are often beyond the competence of a single explorer.

  During the same period, some analogous developments had occurred in psychoanalytic thought—and it was psychoanalytic psychology which was most stimulating to anthropologists and other social scientists concerned with personality and culture (or, as Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray put it, “personality in culture”). Freud’s theory of psychosexual stages, as elaborated by Karl Abraham, applied the concepts of the “oral” or the “anal” character to whole cultures, thus implying the centrality of a biological universalism for the understanding of history. In contrast, our effort in The Lonely Crowd was to deal with an historical problem that was broader than genitality, though narrower than fate. Thus, we ourselves were in the tradition of the neo-Freudians, particularly Erich Fromm, with whom I had studied. Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself were decisively influential models in the application of a socially oriented psychoanalytic characterology to problems of historical change. Like the anthropologists, the psychoanalysts had been insistent on the importance of previously neglected or underprivileged data: fleeting memories, dreams, the games of children, the modes of weaning, the symbolic content of advertisements, popular stories, and films—all had become the stuff of history. The psychoanalysts had the temerity to tackle whole cultures in an effort to link the creation of a particular type of character structure in childhood to the adult society’s mode of production, love, war, and folklore. In all such work, there was an effort to see what went with what, what hung together, how a society channeled its drives of sex and aggression, and it was this that had been a factor in the encouragement given historians (as Richard Hofstadter has pointed out)4 to think in terms of configuration and style, and thus to delineate patterns as well as to describe events. (To be sure, historians have worked this way in the past when they have allowed themselves to refer to a period as “baroque” or to speak of the “romantic” era, but psychoanalytic impetus involved a broader and more explicit linking of a variety of individual motives to large societal forms.)

  Freud was cavalier, one might say princely, in the handling of data, and some of his more orthodox followers today imitate his stubbornness without possessing his gifts. But other psychoanalysts and psychiatrists have become acclimated in the social sciences; they are understandably diffident about generalizations that are merely extrapolations from individual cases, for they realize that to understand society, one needs not only life histories but history.5

  In my opinion, Freud and many of his followers had assumed too readily that they knew what is basic or “primary” in a particular culture, and they fixed man’s fate too early in assuming it to be solely the playing out of psychosexual experiences mastered or suffered in the early years of childhood. The Lonely Crowd, emphasizing as it does the role of the peer group and the school in adolescence in the formation of character, perhaps itself underestimates the possibility of change as the result of the experiences of adulthood. And while the book as a whole emphasizes specific historical developments from tradition-direction to inner-direction and other-direction, there is nevertheless adumbrated in Part III a more psychological and less historical or cultural sketch of modes of adaptation—there termed “autonomy,” “adjustment,” and “anomie”—that might in principle be found in any society.6
Unfortunately, many readers have tended to collapse the historical and the universal dimensions and, as we shall see more fully in a moment, to regard autonomy and inner-direction as equivalent—and conformity, which is found in all societies, as if it were characteristic of other-direction alone. No doubt our focus on conformity—in other words, adaptation and adjustment—and on deviance or anomie, reflects some of the problems of a large-scale differentiated society such as our own. More generally, whereas the explicitly psychoanalytic typologies (such as Abram Kardiner’s) move “outwards” from individuals towards society, The Lonely Crowd proceeded the other way around: we started with industrial society and with particular historical developments within American society. We concerned ourselves, moreover, with the upper social strata, particularly with what has been called the “new middle class” of salaried professionals and managers. We assumed that there would be consequences for individual character in the loss or attenuation of the older social functions on the frontiers of production and exploration, and the discovery of other frontiers in the realm of consumption and personal relations. We did not assume that an individual would be the replica of his social role, but rather that there might be great tension between an individual’s search for fulfillment and the demands of the institutions in which he had a part, or from which he felt alienated.