One of the famed US sociologists of the Cold War era, David Riesman, died on May 10th aged 92. His 1950 study, The Lonely Crowd, marked the beginning of an age of best-selling readership for a handful of academics attempting to gauge the temper of a burgeoning consumer society.
He became known, in later decades, as the leading expert on the complexities and contradictions of university life - the growing "knowledge industry" of the US.
The son of a German-born professor of clinical medicine, he attended a Quaker academy, then Harvard, where he edited the daily Harvard Crimson and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1931. Most interested in biochemistry as an undergraduate, he attended Harvard Law School, studied with Felix Frankfurter, and became an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After attaining a law degree in 1934, he was admitted to the Bar in several states, was, for a time, a clerk to Justice Louis Brandeis on the US Supreme Court, and served as assistant deputy attorney in Manhattan.
It was there, in 1940, that he helped prepare briefs for the prosecutorial counterpart of the state legislature's Rapp-Coudert committee hearings, barring Communist Party members from teaching positions in New York public colleges and jailing those who had declined membership under oath.
He spent the second World War in a non-combat position, as an executive of the Sperry Gyroscope Company. Shortly afterwards, he decided on an academic career. Although lacking any advanced degree outside law, he was invited to the University of Chicago as a visiting lecturer in 1946, and became a full-time professor three years later, remaining there until 1958, when he moved to Harvard.
Earlier, after graduating from Harvard, he had studied with the leading neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan, and undertaken analysis with Eric Fromm. Like other prominent writers of the early 1950s influenced by neo-Freudianism, he chose the mode of character-studies in social context, evolving a theory of personality across historical epochs.
Co-authored with Reuel Denney and the sociologist Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd was a surprise best-seller for Yale University Press; and by 1977 it had sold its millionth copy.
The Lonely Crowd had been perfect for the "age of anxiety", the decade or so after the outbreak of the Cold War when the benefits of the second World War effort materialised in individual private prosperity, but were scarcely realised in other hoped-for ways. In David Riesman's view - and in that of some of his closest readers - The Lonely Crowd had been intended less as social criticism than as broad theoretical speculation.
It was easy for US intellectuals critical of "conformism" -- the word had been coined by David Riesman's admirer, Irving Howe -- to read The Lonely Crowd as a condemnation of consumerist passivity. But David Riesman also appealed to a much wider audience of educated, paperback readers, who fretted about the widespread reports of alienation, juvenile delinquency and loss of religious faith.
In 1950, he joined the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a militantly anti-communist body of prominent intellectuals later revealed to have been funded by the CIA. Within a few years, he drifted away, resuming his criticism of McCarthyism, and urging global disarmament. Meanwhile, he wrote or co-authored more than a dozen books, though none were as prominent as The Lonely Crowd. Faces In The Crowd: Individual Studies In Character And Politics, co-authored by Nathan Glazer, was a less successful companion study to The Lonely Crowd.
The best hope for change, David Riesman wrote in the 1969 edition of The Lonely Crowd, was not in "efforts at total improvement" of society or of the individual, but rather through "patient work toward incremental change". He was especially outspoken in deploring the radicalisation of the sociological profession's younger ranks, effectively isolating his own generation.
He remained, in the decades after his retirement in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a buoyant public image of the lively liberal academic, more interested than the large majority of his colleagues in reaching the educated public, and far more able than others to articulate that public's concerns about the supposed ivory towers. He was a model liberal for the postwar age of the socially critical intellectual.
His wife Evelyn died in 1998; two daughters and a son survive him.
David Riesman: born 1909; died, May 2002