The emergence of radical student protest by the end of the 1960s led David Riesman to regret the success of the best-selling book he had published nearly two decades earlier. The Lonely Crowd, he complained, had inaugurated a spate of “self-criticism” that had morphed into “a hatred for America which dismissed all efforts at reform as palliatives and all efforts at perspective as equivocation.” At the start of the 1960s, Riesman had allied himself with student radicals involved in antinuclear activism. Now, he attacked New Left organizations as “inchoate and disorganized to the point of collapse, quite without leadership or procedure, and explicitly anti-adult.”Footnote 1 In a 1968 letter to The Lonely Crowd coauthor, Nathan Glazer, Riesman commented,
I was astonished to meet a Brazilian journalist . . . who said that Marcuse and Riesman were the most important influences on students and others. And someone who was recently in Paris said the same thing—even more perplexing. And of course for me very troubling since I have always thought of Marcuse as despicable.Footnote 2
By stressing the need for American society to find more fulfilling roles for its members, The Lonely Crowd had validated a younger generation's striving for autonomy. Yet in a 1969 interview with Psychology Today, Riesman claimed that while young radicals believed themselves to be psychologically liberated, they had in fact subjected themselves to ever stronger peer pressures. “As adult authority disintegrates,” he asserted, “the young are more and more the captives of each other.”Footnote 3 However, not all liberals shared Riesman's rejection of the New Left. One who differed was the man who interviewed him: T. George Harris, a long-time associate of Riesman. Harris dubbed left-wing campus protestors “children of the Lonely Crowd.”Footnote 4 He meant not only that young radicals were literally children of the Americans described in Riesman's book but also that they were philosophically descended from the ideas expressed in The Lonely Crowd. Harris was taken aback by the vehemence of Riesman's rejection of the New Left, which was uncharacteristic of a man whose judgment was normally nuanced and circumspect. “You are depressed and fearful in a way I never expected you to be,” Harris told Riesman.Footnote 5
While Harris concurred with Riesman's rejection of the New Left's most extreme elements, he stressed its positive aspects. “Only people who can hear the inner voice of feeling, rather than docilely march to the commands of society,” Harris concluded, “will dare to fight for their ideals.” Versus Riesman, Harris urged middle-aged intellectuals to engage students constructively rather than denounce them. Adults, he claimed, should “respond to deep student concerns more than to surface rhetoric.”Footnote 6 Harris's sympathetic view of the New Left was shared by others in Riesman's intellectual milieu, including two men whom Riesman had mentored, Kenneth Keniston and Robert Jay Lifton. In publishing prominent, positive accounts of young radicals, Keniston and Lifton applied not only the methods of social character analysis that Riesman had pioneered in The Lonely Crowd but also Riesman's specific ideas about how to achieve autonomous personalities in a post-scarcity society.
Examining how Riesman and his circle reacted to the New Left sheds light on the fate of a particular strand of postwar social thought embodied by The Lonely Crowd: qualitative liberalism, a tradition with deep roots in twentieth-century thought. As Howard Brick has argued, many American liberals throughout the twentieth century advocated a gradual transition from laissez-faire industrial capitalism toward a society that shared wealth more equitably and in which a new ethic of cooperation and self-expression would displace older values of competitive individualism.Footnote 7 Qualitative liberalism can be traced more proximately to the post-World War II period, where it distinguished itself from a “growth liberalism” that valued “quantitative” economic progress above all else.Footnote 8 However, qualitative liberals too traced their roots to the reforms of the New Deal era, which had spread the benefits of economic security to more Americans than ever before, dramatically expanding the ranks of the middle class. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr, who coined the term “qualitiative liberalism,” wrote in 1962, “solving the quantitative problems of living only increases the importance of the quality of life lived.”Footnote 9 Qualitative liberalism gained some purchase within the reform wing of the Democratic Party. Its distinctive argument was voiced by as powerful a figure as President Lyndon Johnson, who in a 1964 speech declared, “in the past we fought to eliminate scarcity. In the future we will also have to learn the wise use of abundance.”Footnote 10
Though proponents of qualitative liberalism were not so blind as to believe that all Americans were affluent, their focus on middle-class quality of life slighted the persistence of poverty in the postwar US. Since economic inequality was deeply racialized and gendered, qualitative liberals overemphasized the problems of American society's most privileged group: well-off white men. Nevertheless, the questions they raised about the social uses of affluence were significant. While some qualitative liberals such as John Kenneth Gailbraith focused primarily on how to strengthen underfunded public institutions that fostered a higher quality of life, others such as Riesman turned their attention to questions regarding the self: what kind of individuals would Americans become? How would they would find meaning in their work in an economy increasingly dominated by large corporations? How they would spend their considerable leisure time to develop a sense of individuality? Riesman believed that middle-class Americans, unconstrainted by the need to secure scarce economic resources, had the luxury of attempting to achieve more autonomous selves. Americans who were individuated, flexible, and tolerant would lead the most fulfilling lives in a post-scarcity society. By stressing the development of each individual's capacities in addition to such other conventionally liberal values as representative democracy and freedom of speech, Riesman echoed a longer liberal tradition that stretched at least as far back as to the nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill.
Qualitative liberalism was an important influence on the New Left, defined here as the campus-based movement associated with a broader left-wing turn in American politics during the long 1960s.Footnote 11 The young radicals of the 1960s era were centrally concerned with the possibilities of a post-scarcity society and the development of authentic selves, though they developed sharper critiques of the stifling and repressive nature of American society than did liberals. Scholars have begun to recognize how young radicals were reared on the liberalism embodied in The Lonely Crowd. Doug Rossinow has argued that the New Left emerged from a broader search for personal “authenticity” in the postwar US.Footnote 12 Howard Brick has emphasized how the New Left grew out of radicalized variants of a “postcapitalist” vision. In addition, Jamie Cohen-Cole has demonstrated the New Left's roots in the discourse of liberal postwar psychologists who valorized individual creativity as a hallmark of democratic personalities. Postwar psychologists, he writes, praised the “autonomy, rationality, tolerance, and open-mindedness” of democrats, which they contrasted to the “conformity, rigidity, and narrow-mindedness” found among authoritarian personality types. Though the work of such psychologists often served the ideological needs of the Cold War, the New Left adapted their psychological orientation and idiom of creativity for more subversive political ends.Footnote 13
While historians have explored liberalism's influence on the New Left, they have mostly missed how the New Left's emergence altered liberalism. Reactions to the New Left fractured qualitative liberalism. Horrified by what they perceived as the irrationalism and destructiveness of the radical left, many liberals placed renewed emphasis on defending a vulnerable social order and backtracked from promoting the utopian possibilities of affluence for self-development. Others, however, perceived the New Left as a welcome renewal of social and political criticism that would push American society to realize the promise of post-scarcity.
Debates over the New Left among qualitative liberals illustrate one element of a broader splitting of liberalism, one of the most important—and most historically neglected—developments of the 1960s period. Most accounts of the long 1960s focus on how liberalism was challenged from the left and the right, while ignoring what happened to liberalism itself. The standard account of a post-World War II liberal consensus that “collapsed” or “unraveled” in the mid-1960s misses the diversity of postwar liberal opinion. It also overlooks the different ways liberals reacted when faced by key political challenges of the period such as the radicalization of the Black Freedom struggle, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and the anti-Vietnam War movement's critique of the Cold War. Diverging liberal responses to the New Left marked one aspect of this crucial chapter in the history of American liberalism. Liberalism split into two halves: one pulled leftward to offer a more expansive critique of American society, the other pushed rightward toward a defense of established social institutions. Riesman's own story demonstrates both sides of this divide, as he first leaned left by engaging with young radicals in the early 1960s but moved right by the decade's end in revulsion against the New Left's radicalization.
THE LONELY CROWD AND QUALITATIVE LIBERALISM
David Riesman was born in 1909 into a wealthy, secular Jewish family. After initially pursuing a career as a lawyer, Riesman became a sociologist, landing a position teaching social science at the University of Chicago in 1946. Though he lacked a PhD, Riesman became one of the most famous sociologists of the twentieth century. While a wide-ranging and prolific writer, Riesman is best known as the author of The Lonely Crowd, written with two collaborators: the poet Reuel Denney and the sociologist Nathan Glazer. Much to the surprise of its authors, The Lonely Crowd became a best seller. Published in 1950 by Yale University Press, the first edition won critical acclaim and attention. But it was the 1953 abridgment prepared by Glazer and published by Doubleday's new paperback imprint, Anchor, that won it a truly popular audience and landed Riesman on the cover of Time magazine in 1954.Footnote 14
The Lonely Crowd appeared among a spate of post-World War II books that considered the changing American character. Riesman drew on the “culture and personality” school of cultural anthropology, whose leading exponents, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, saw personal character as rooted in broad social factors. He was also influenced by revisionist Freudians who explored the social roots of personality formation such as Erich Fromm, who psychoanalyzed Riesman in 1941 and became his friend. Riesman drew from Fromm's Frankfurt school critique of mass society while combining it with American research traditions and shearing it of its Marxism and its more thoroughgoing critique of modern capitalism.Footnote 15 Finally, Riesman was influenced by the nineteenth-century French writer Alexis de Tocqueville, whose classic work, Democracy in America, was rediscovered in the US after World War II.Footnote 16
Riesman drew on a wide range of sources to construct his analysis of the changing American character, synthesizing the insights of classic social theorists with analysis of child-rearing practices, examination of popular culture, and in-depth interviews. Though best known for advancing a specific thesis, The Lonely Crowd is an essayistic work that reads as a series of insightful observations rather than a tightly argued social-scientific tract. Eric Larrabee correctly characterized it as “highly discursive, following no systematic plan and continually qualifying and correcting itself as it went along.”Footnote 17 Riesman's style was epitomized by the sentence, “Having said this, I must immediately make certain qualifications.”Footnote 18
Nevertheless, The Lonely Crowd was most influential for its argument that the American character was in the midst of a momentous shift from “inner-directed” to “other-directed” character types. Inner-directed types are self-reliant individuals who have clear goals, having internalized their values during childhood; other-directed types look to peer groups and to mass culture for guidance. The latter personality type, Riesman observed, especially characterized the urban upper middle class. Though Riesman had interviewed women for The Lonely Crowd and commented at times on the particular challenges faced by them, the book as a whole focused primarily on the problems of men. However, it is mistaken to interpret Riesman's work as part of a broader postwar “crisis of masculinity.” Riesman criticized the “inner-directed” type who embodied such traditionally masculine traits as self-reliance.Footnote 19
To Riesman's continual frustration, The Lonely Crowd was often misinterpreted as favoring inner-direction over other-direction. In fact, Riesman described the inner-directed type as rigid and repressed. He insisted, “The authors of The Lonely Crowd are not conservatives harkening back to a rugged individualism that was once a radical Emersonian ideal.”Footnote 20 Riesman also admired aspects of the other-directed type, particularly its capacity for flexibility, tolerance, and sociability. In Riesman's view, the other-directed were no more “conformist” than the inner-directed. It was only the type of conformity that differed, with the other-directed less reliant on parental guidance and more attuned to broader social influences.
Despite Riesman's explicit disavowals, some of the most prominent historical interpretations of The Lonely Crowd hold Riesman himself largely responsible for readers’ understanding of the book as favoring inner-direction. For example, Wilfred McClay argues that The Lonely Crowd advocated inner-direction in spite of itself, serving as a “secular jeremiad” about fears of the loss of individualism in the postwar US.Footnote 21 Though McClay correctly characterizes some of the popular reception of The Lonely Crowd, he exaggerates inner-direction's attraction to its author and to many of the book's readers. Riesman looked forward to the possibilities of a post-scarcity society, not backward to the early stages of industrial society. Rather than a jeremiad about the loss of individualism, The Lonely Crowd is better understood as an early expression of qualitative liberalism.
Riesman hoped not for a return to inner-direction but rather for the development of “autonomous” individuals who were free both from the self-repression required of the inner-directed type and from the outward conformity of the other-directed type. To be “autonomous,” Riesman argued, meant being able to choose one's own goals, rather than simply accepting those given by society. In constructing his ideal of autonomy, Riesman drew on Tocqueville's analysis of the stifling of individuality in a society that stressed equality. The Lonely Crowd concluded that men “lose their social freedom and their individual autonomy in seeking to become like one another.”Footnote 22 John Stuart Mill also influenced Riesman. Drawing an analogy from legal scholarship, Riesman noted, “I would like to incorporate by reference here the writings of Mill which deal with individuality.”Footnote 23 The book's section on autonomy opened with a quote from Mill, “Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model . . . but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.”Footnote 24 Thus Riesman drew on a long liberal tradition that stressed the values of individuality and self-development. In this view, individuals were most fulfilled when able to develop their own unique talents and interests. Riesman contended that societies—the contemporary US in particular—should be judged by “the degree to which they evoke a social character that in the process of socialization fills up, crushes, or buries individuality.”Footnote 25
For Riesman, autonomous personalities were people of any era who were “capable of transcending their culture” at times and in certain respects.Footnote 26 His main concern was finding a way to develop autonomous personalities in an age of other-direction. In the modern US, he argued, “false personalization” at work pressured individuals to adopt blandly cheerful personalities while “enforced privatization” in leisure left individuals disconnected from one another. Above all, other-direction threatened to stamp out marks of individuality. The increasing power of the peer group meant, “The effort is to cut everyone down to size who stands up or stands out in any direction . . . All knobby or idiosyncratic qualities and vices are more or less eliminated or repressed.”Footnote 27 At the same time, Riesman argued that other-direction's positive qualities—sensitivity, flexibility, and self-consciousness—suggested “the possibility of an organic development of autonomy out of other-direction.”Footnote 28
Riesman believed that the economic abundance of the postwar US allowed greater possibilities for developing autonomous personalities than ever before, as the decline of scarcity allowed individuals to embrace values other than the work ethic. Written during the late 1940s, when many still expected another economic depression, The Lonely Crowd was remarkable in predicting the sustained economic boom of the postwar years. “Most people in American today,” it argued, “can afford to attend to, and allow their characters to be shaped by, situational differences of a subtler nature than those arising from bare economic necessity and their relationship to the means of production.”Footnote 29 Many Americans, Riesman claimed, had “develop[ed] a character structure more constricted than the society's institutions require.”Footnote 30 In the postwar US, Riesman contended, autonomy would take a different form than in the earlier industrial era, focused more on self-development in leisure than on the acquisition of property or self-advancement at work. By placing its hopes in the “effort to develop a society which accepts rather than rejects new potentialities for leisure, human sympathy, and abundance,” The Lonely Crowd was an early expression of qualitative liberalism.Footnote 31
ABUNDANCE FOR WHAT? RIESMAN AND THE EARLY NEW LEFT
Historians generally interpret The Lonely Crowd as a classic work of the 1950s. Yet the book sold nearly as many copies during the 1960s as it did during the 1950s.Footnote 32 In the 1960s, the book became bound up with discussions about emerging youth rebellion. At the start of that decade, left-wing students believed with good reason that Riesman would be one of the liberal adults most sympathetic to their cause.
The Lonely Crowd found a large audience among adolescents. In 1963, Riesman observed to the director of Yale University Press, “high school students have been buying the book . . . in the drug stores as if it were Catcher in the Rye or something.”Footnote 33 Riesman was surprised and delighted with his book's success among young people; replying to one such reader in 1963, Riesman wrote, “Actually The Lonely Crowd wasn't written for high school students . . . But the fact is that many high school students like yourself have taken dictionary in hand and tried to read it.”Footnote 34The Lonely Crowd was also popular among college undergraduates who frequently encountered it as assigned reading. The book appealed to young readers in particular because of its explanation of adult social norms, concern for the values of an emerging generation, and openness to future possibilities.
“Youth” was an important category in The Lonely Crowd and Riesman paid close attention to adolescents in his other writings. He expressed a common concern among postwar thinkers that adolescents of the 1950s were too complacent. “Young people today,” he concluded, “by playing it cool and fearing to be thought squares, may create a style of life . . . which is less full, less committed, less complex, and less meaningful than mid-century opportunities allow.”Footnote 35 Riesman was the rare professor in the postwar university who cared more about teaching undergraduates than about training graduate students. At the University of Chicago, he taught in the core undergraduate curriculum. In 1957, he was appointed the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University. His post was the first of several independent university professorships established by Dean McGeorge Bundy that freed their receipients from the usual departmental responsibilities. With this freedom, Riesman focused on undergraduate education. Eric Larabee observed that at Harvard Riesman gave “more attention to undergraduates—even to freshmen—than they are accustomed to get from the luminaries of that university.”Footnote 36 Riesman's legendary lecture course, “Social Science 136: Character and Social Structure in America,” drew hundreds of students every year.Footnote 37
Riesman's interest in working with adolescents was evident in his close collaboration with student activists who shared his passionate commitment to peace. After the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, Riesman developed what he later described as an “overriding preoccupation [with] the danger of nuclear war and the destruction of entire populations,” a concern he shared with the scientists who in 1945 founded the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, to which Riesman contributed.Footnote 38 Riesman's major contributions to the antinuclear movement came in the early 1960s in collaboration with young radicals. Beginning in the late 1950s, the peace movement revival offered new challenges to the Cold War. Though an international phenomenon, in the US the antinuclear movement linked itself to the national resurgence of liberalism. Along with the movement for African American civil rights, it provided inspiration for the nascent New Left.Footnote 39 In 1960, Riesman took the leading role in establishing the Committee of Correspondence, a small but influential group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that advocated nuclear disarmament. Riesman founded the committee's newsletter, which evolved into a journal, The Correspondent, with a circulation of five thousand. Published from 1960 to 1965, the newsletter had an eclectic group of contributors, bringing together middle-aged liberals such as Riesman with young radicals such as Roger Hagan, a Harvard graduate student who became The Correspondent's editor.
The committee formed part of a network of antinuclear activism revolving around Harvard University. Riesman worked closely with TOCSIN, a student organization formed in 1960 to advocate nuclear disarmament. TOCSIN's faculty advisers were Riesman and H. Stuart Hughes, who campaigned in the 1962 US Senate race in Massachusetts as a TOCSIN-backed third-party peace candidate. As many as three hundred undergraduates attended TOCSIN meetings and the group enlisted many graduate students from the social sciences. In 1962, it co-organized, with the Student Peace Union, a national protest in Washington, DC with ten thousand participants, the largest student demonstration since the 1930s. In 1964, TOCSIN dissolved, but it served as an important precursor to the Harvard chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Riesman's involvement in peace activism gave him ample opportunity to influence young activists such as Todd Gitlin, a TOCSIN leader and later national president of SDS.Footnote 40
Riesman believed that the New Left could help reinvigorate liberalism. “In the past,” Riesman argued, “liberalism suffered from complacency and a lack of radical critique.”Footnote 41 Praising the young radicals’ idealism, Riesman concluded, “The young people who are entering the Peace Corps . . . or engaging in non-violent civil rights action in the Deep South . . . possess a generosity, spontaneity, and practical idealism, a lack of greed, and a gift for empathy which are among our most precious national resources.”Footnote 42 Thus Riesman not only viewed young idealists as allies in the fight to control nuclear weapons, but also hoped that they might lead the transformation of American character from other-direction to autonomy outlined in The Lonely Crowd.
Riesman voiced his antinuclear activism in the dialect of qualitative liberalism. In a 1960 article, “The American Crisis,” Riesman linked the Cold War arms race to American society's failure to confront the challenges of post-scarcity. He wrote the essay with Michael Maccoby, a former graduate research assistant of Riesman's who was also active in the Committee of Correspondence. The essay's publication history reflected Riesman's connections to both the resurgence of reform liberalism and the emergence of a New Left. It was initially prepared for the Liberal Project, a short-lived consortium of liberal Democratic Congressmen critical of the Cold War, but was later published in the British New Left Review.
The Cold War, Riesman and Maccoby argued, exposed “the failure of a style of life.”Footnote 43 It provided a false sense of purpose to Americans who no longer needed to struggle so hard to make a living. In order to reduce Cold War bellicosity, Americans would have to abandon their “psychology of scarcity.”Footnote 44 Riesman and Maccoby viewed the nation's heavy investment in the military–industrial complex as more unimaginative than nefarious, a symptom of a society that had yet to find better uses for its ample resources. The authors admitted that many Americans suffered from poverty and that African Americans lacked basic civil rights. Nevertheless, they primarily contended that American society “must readjust to face the problems that have suddenly become visible because of abundance: lack of participation in life and lack of opportunity and education for self-expression.”Footnote 45 In the dozens of essays Riesman published in the 1950s and 1960s, collected in Individualism Reconsidered (1954) and Abundance for What? (1964), he continued to reflect on the possibilities for individual growth available in an affluent society. Riesman looked in particular to young Americans to adopt new social values. In one essay he praised “the recurrent romanticism and individualistic utopianism of the young.”Footnote 46
Along with his peace activism, Riesman's qualitative liberalism allowed him to influence early New Left figures such as Staughton Lynd. Lynd was born in 1929, over a decade before the young radicals who came of age in the 1960s, but he became an important leader of the New Left who played a prominent role in the civil rights and antiwar movements.Footnote 47 In a 1961 letter, Riesman described himself as “closely identified with Staughton.”Footnote 48 Riesman knew Lynd through his sociologist parents, Robert and Helen. In 1953, Lynd, then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, spent the summer with Riesman at his farm in Brattleboro, Vermont, where he helped Riesman complete his book on Thorstein Veblen. In their cowritten introduction to the book's 1960 edition, Riesman and Lynd alluded to the possibilities of “a post-industrial world both abundant and fraternal.”Footnote 49 In a clear critique of Cold War liberalism, they further declared “that political moderation is not a lasting or creative quiescence; that an age of reform looks better than an age of stagnation; that the end of ideology could betoken the end of ideas.”Footnote 50
Riesman remained a reformer committed to working within the established political and economic system. However, in the early 1960s, as he collaborated with New Leftists, he began to emphasize the more radical dimensions of his own thought. In a 1962 essay, Riesman declared his support for “democratic socialisms . . . as alternatives to traditionally exploitative developments in both capitalism and communism.”Footnote 51 In a 1963 letter to the French translator of The Lonely Crowd, Riesman wrote,
Your view of me as a “radical” in the same tradition as C. Wright Mills would surprise many readers both in America and elsewhere. Yet it is more correct than the more common view that I am a conservative liberal in the tradition of Tocqueville . . . whereas Mills is a slashing crusader in the tradition of Marx and Veblen.Footnote 52
Riesman's qualitative liberalism bore similarities with the ideas of more radical critics often cited as influences on the New Left such as Paul Goodman. Riesman cited Goodman favorably both in the original version of The Lonely Crowd and in its 1961 preface, in which he wrote, “We agree with Paul Goodman, in Growing Up Absurd, that men need to feel adequate: to hold down a job, and then to be related to life through consumership, is not enough.”Footnote 53 The notion that American values had yet to catch up to the possibilities of post-scarcity was widespread among early New Leftists. Their critiques of American society emphasized not class inequality but bureaucracy, inauthenticity, and the lack of outlets in American society for personal expression. Young radicals believed that civil rights and peace activism offered opportunities to find greater personal meaning as well as to fight for social justice. For example, the 1962 SDS manifesto, the Port Huron Statement, famously focused on “values.” Written from the perspective of students “bred in at least modest comfort,” it declared that men have “unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.”Footnote 54 Echoing qualitative liberals, it argued that the affluence of the postwar order opened up new possibilities for personal meaning, which could be found in both self-expression and social commitment. In addition, the Port Huron Statement reached out to sympathetic liberals such as Riesman to make common cause, contending that a new left “must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.”Footnote 55
Riesman's opening to the left was evident in his preface to the 1961 edition of The Lonely Crowd. While he repeated his belief that an oligarchic power elite did not govern the US, as C. Wright Mills had argued it did, he expressed grave concern for the “bi-partisan deep freeze” of Cold War politics. He validated the sense of many young people that American work and leisure were insufficiently fulfilling, and reiterated his support for the utopian goal of achieving more autonomous personality types. His preface to a 1964 French edition positioned the book even more explicitly on the left. He noted that it was written in 1948 when “the Communist-influenced left . . . had not yet been completely decimated . . . and intellectuals had not yet begun defensively to retreat from politics or to engage in what came to be called . . . the American celebration.” He proudly added that the book's “authors have more recently all been active on behalf of disarmament.”Footnote 56 Riesman's own reading of The Lonely Crowd in the early 1960s endorsed it as a possible inspiration to the emerging young left. By the end of the decade, however, Riesman would not only reverse his support for young radicals but also disavow aspects of qualitiative liberalism.
FROM ALLY TO CRITIC
“What does it feel like to be tear-gassed? I ask because it has always seemed to me . . . that chemical warfare of this sort was so much less savage than guns that it ought to be encouraged rather than thought revolting.”Footnote 57 Writing to Seymour Martin Lipset in July 1968, just months after police dragged protestors from occupied administration buildings at Columbia University, Riesman sought more humane methods for dispersing student protest. In a few short years between 1964 and 1968, Riesman, who had once allied himself to young radicals, advocated using teargas against them.
Riesman's shift in views was a reaction to changes within the New Left. The later New Left adopted militant protest tactics, bringing to campuses the methods of nonviolent direct action used in the civil rights movement. Petitions and demonstrations were supplemented with occupations of university buildings. Within the New Left, other concerns displaced the issue that mattered most to Riesman: nuclear disarmament. After the mid-1960s, many New Leftists adopted the styles of the emerging youth counterculture, widening the cultural distance between young radicals and their elders. Most significant, New Leftists by 1968 drew sharper contrasts between themselves and liberals than they had before 1964. Frustrated with liberal gradualism on African American equality and outraged by the Vietnam War, many young radicals became convinced that the reformist rhetoric of American liberals was merely a cover for the power of big business. In the parlance first developed by the New Left journal Studies on the Left in the early 1960s and popularized thereafter, American liberals were “corporate liberals.”Footnote 58 Often, New Leftists expressed their rejection of liberalism in generational terms. As some young radicals cautioned, “Don't trust anyone over thirty.”Footnote 59
Rifts between New Leftists and liberals resulted from the exacerbation of tensions that already existed in the early 1960s. Riesman was always more inclined to work within the system for reforms than were young radicals. In a 1961 issue of the Committee of Correspondence newsletter, Riesman criticized leftists who dismissed the possibility of working with President Kennedy to achieve limited aims such as a nuclear test ban. Radicals, Riesman jibed, “would like to start gathering a small, indeed infinitesimal, group of forces on the Left that cannot hope to take control of the jet or indeed survive the crash, but that might at least prepare another flight plan.”Footnote 60 In its early years, the committee thrived because it embraced a creative tension between liberalism and radicalism. Later in the decade, however, such differences intensified, contributing to the committee's disbanding. In the last issue of The Correspondent, published in 1965, Riesman attacked “radical students who regard their liberal parents or professors as the representatives of the whole square world.”Footnote 61
Riesman's transition from sympathizer to critic of the New Left was prompted by his negative reaction to the Free Speech Movement (FSM) at the University of California, Berkeley. By chance, Riesman was on the Berkeley campus during a pivotal event on 2 October 1964 when students outside the main administrative building on Sproul Plaza surrounded a police car to prevent it from transporting an activist who had been arrested. Speakers addressed the crowd from on top of the car. The event dramatized the importation of militant direct-action tactics to college campuses, a development that disturbed some liberals. Though Riesman credited FSM leader Mario Savio for dispersing the crowd after an agreement with the administration had been reached, he was concerned by the demonstration's tenor. He sensed that a “considerable number of students wanted to be arrested, wanted to demonstrate, even if all their points had been granted,” and worried that student radicals were becoming too uncompromising. He had earlier argued for political action as a means of self-expression, but he still conceived of politics as a method for achieving specific ends. In addition, he thought FSM supporters were too critical of their liberal elders: “as I could see at Berkeley, there is a good deal of enjoyment in tormenting the adult generation, including parents, about their hypocrisy—watching the liberals squirm.”Footnote 62
That Riesman's turn against the New Left began with the Free Speech Movement is striking given that FSM won the support of most liberals on the Berkeley faculty. However, Riesman's closest friends who taught at Berkeley were leading critics of the FSM and shaped his views of events there. Both Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset were intimately connected to The Lonely Crowd: Glazer as coauthor and Lipset as coeditor of an important volume of essays on the book. Criticizing the FSM on liberal grounds, Glazer argued that the movement's use of direct-action tactics was manipulative and coercive. Instead, students should have expressed their views in reasoned debate. Glazer asserted that targeting the university ultimately damaged free speech, since universities advanced deliberative discourse in American society.Footnote 63 Following the FSM, Glazer and Lipset left Berkeley and joined Riesman at Harvard, where they found students imitating their Berkeley peers. In 1966, members of Harvard SDS confronted Defense Secretary Robert McNamara following a speech; McNamara was forced to flee through Harvard's underground steam tunnels. In 1967, challenging Harvard's ties to the military–industrial complex, SDS surrounded and detained a recruiter for Dow Chemical. The radical movement at Harvard reached an apex in April 1969, when students occupied University Hall and were removed by police.Footnote 64
Glazer and Lipset portrayed the New Left as extremist and destructive, driven by irrational hatred rather than a reasoned effort to effect social change. For Lipset, “the new left student movements appear ready to destroy all existing structures, including the university, and to use tactics which alienate the great majority, in order to make manifest their contempt, their total rejection of the intolerable world created by their elders.”Footnote 65 Similarly, Glazer criticized the New Left's “radical rejection, an impatience with problems not yet solved, compromises still in existence.”Footnote 66 Both Glazer and Lipset believed that New Left protest would damage liberalism and aid conservatism. Lipset claimed that student use of “extralegal methods” not only “sharply divided the campus communities” but also “heightened the anti-intellectual right-wing backlash.”Footnote 67
Riesman concurred with Lipset and Glazer's analysis of the New Left. He was particularly concerned by the danger of right-wing backlash, which he felt young radicals neglected and of which he was especially aware because his brother, a surgeon in New Haven, was an enthusiastic supporter of Barry Goldwater.Footnote 68 Having lived through McCarthyism, liberal intellectuals such as Riesman feared universities’ vulnerability to the intrusion of conservative politicians. Moreover, for Lipset, Glazer, and Riesman, Jews whose world views had been shaped during World War II, mass demonstrations smacked of fascism. Riesman later recalled going to New Left meetings with German émigrés who noted parallels between these protests and mass fascist rallies: “At evangelical mass meetings where speeches were made . . . twice-burned refugees listened to the music rather than the frequently idealistic words—and the music was indeed often ominous.”Footnote 69
To Riesman, the direct-action tactics adopted by young radicals were inappropriate for a university setting that already permitted free discussion of ideas. Riesman complained about a general breakdown in student discipline and loss of respect for professors evident in the classroom: “students now come and go at any time . . . they munch sandwiches and drink coffee; their pets wander up and down the aisles . . . hardly anyone enforces the posted regulations against smoking.”Footnote 70 Riesman resented the later New Left for introducing a “crisis” atmosphere on campus that interfered with education in a way that TOCSIN never had. “Students who worked in the early sixties for a moratorium on nuclear testing,” he complained, “did not ask for a moratorium on examinations.”Footnote 71
While Riesman sought to protect universities from attacks by students, however, he did so without idealizing American higher education. In his 1969 book The Academic Revolution, cowritten with Christopher Jencks, Riesman criticized the culture of academic professionalism. The book concluded with a measured discussion of student radicalism that faulted universities for failing to properly guide young radicals: “What . . . angry, rebellious, but idealistic students need is a sense of purpose, direction, discipline, and sympathetic criticism. What they get is a great deal of tolerance, relatively little interest, and a chance to observe the academic profession at work.”Footnote 72
For one who had previously mentored student leftists, Riesman undoubtedly experienced strident New Left attacks on adult authority as a personal rejection. Riesman's colleague and former TOCSIN faculty sponsor H. Stuart Hughes remembered the differences in the earlier and later New Left in these terms:
My own impressions of the student Left went back to my senatorial campaign of seven years before. Then I had felt a warm bond of sympathy with “kids” who exemplified a spirit of fraternity and good will, whose tactics were invariably nonviolent, who sought to banish hatred from their hearts . . . The new harshness and impatience of those only a few years younger bewildered and distressed me. I also discovered in their militance little that was intellectually rigorous or rewarding . . .Footnote 73
As Hughes's reference to the “kids” of the early 1960s indicates, older intellectuals were frustrated that the young radicals of the later 1960s failed to show them proper deference. Similarly, speaking for an older generation who “feel hurt and resentful at this radical criticism by the young,” Glazer wrote, “Contrasted with the world that faced present-day adult leaders in their youth, they know there has been substantial achievement, and they cannot understand why they are reviled as conservatives and hypocritical fuddy-duddies.”Footnote 74
Many liberals connected their criticism of the campus-based left-wing student movement to concern for broader developments in American radicalism. For example, in a 1967 exchange with radical African American intellectual Joyce Ladner, Riesman argued against Black Power advocates and their “white devotees” among the New Left. Both groups, Riesman argued, viewed American society as “more corrupt, and perhaps even more racist than it ever was.” For Riesman, American society was bland, unimaginative, and unnecessarily belligerent, but not fundamentally repressive, unjust, or violent. Advocating patient work for reforms, Riesman argued that demands for more radical changes would generate “revolutionary tactics without a revolutionary situation . . . revolutionary rhetoric that may in turn bring about a new and even deeper cynicism and nihilism.”Footnote 75 Riesman saw rejections of the US political system as not only dangerous but also irrational, given the improvements that the civil rights movement had recently brought about in the lives of African Americans.
Riesman viewed the later New Left as a threat to liberal values; its radical tactics endangered free speech and representative democracy. To Riesman, it also represented a setback in the struggle to achieve autonomous personalities in a post-scarcity society. Riesman employed the categories of The Lonely Crowd to debunk New Leftists’ claims of attaining personal liberation and authenticity. To him, young radicals lacked the virtues of other-direction while embodying its worst quality: submission to the tyranny of the peer group. Writing to historian Richard Hofstadter, Riesman commented,
Among young people, we have . . . little peer groups of saints, where extravagance has more sway than moderation. This is closer to other-direction in lacking internalized or adult-oriented direction, but it is not other-direction as The Lonely Crowd described it, as a wide-ranging tolerance for the opinion of a great many different sorts of others.Footnote 76
In Riesman's view, young radicals were not becoming autonomous, but were instead subjecting themselves to even more intense peer pressures. In a 1968 letter Riesman wrote, “Radical college students today . . . think they are establishing their individualism and they prate much of this. In my observation, they are succumbing to conformity . . . They belong to the ‘herd’ and must prove their individualism by non-conformity in the non-approved ways.”Footnote 77
To be sure, Riesman's ideal of “autonomy” was never identical to some notions of “authenticity” that circulated among the New Left and counterculture. For Riesman, social conventions were not automatically obstacles to the achievement of personal autonomy. Rather, autonomy required that an individual become self-conscious regarding which conventions he or she chose to follow and why. In contrast, many versions of authenticity that circulated among radical students assumed a more stark contrast between individual expression and social expectation.Footnote 78 Nevertheless, Riesman's attack on the personalities of young radicals represented a significant shift in views given his earlier critique of American society's failure to find more fulfilling lives for its members, not to mention his praise of frankly utopian thinking and of youthful idealism.
Ultimately, the radicalization of the New Left led Riesman to re-evaluate The Lonely Crowd. At times, he rued the book's influence on student radicals. Writing to Glazer, Riesman lamented, “The ideals of The Lonely Crowd took very little time to go from rare autonomy to mass solipsism.”Footnote 79 Riesman now worried about the book's appeal to adolescents that had once so pleased him. Young readers, he claimed, tended to “oversimplify” The Lonely Crowd's arguments in ways that “facilitated their anti-authoritarian outlook and their rejection of contemporary society.”Footnote 80 Riesman's 1969 preface to a third abridged edition of The Lonely Crowd had a decidedly different tone than his 1961 preface, reflecting his shifting views about the book's impact on young radicals. Riesman wrote self-critically:
In however small a degree, the book has contributed to the climate of criticism of our society and helped create or reaffirm a nihilistic outlook among a great many people who lay claim to moral or intellectual nonconformity or who simply want to be “with it” in order to escape being considered geriatric cases.Footnote 81
Riesman accused young radicals of creating “an atmosphere of extravagant self-criticism” that exaggerated social problems.Footnote 82
Riesman remained a liberal. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1968, he organized a committee of social scientists to advise antiwar Democratic presidential primary candidate Eugene McCarthy. He recruited students to work for McCarthy in order “to turn their defeatist sense of outrage into political channels.”Footnote 83 Riesman rejected radical calls for systematic overhaul in favor of gradual reforms, declaring that “the best hope for change in the direction of our ideals does not lie in efforts at total improvement in oneself or in society but in patient work toward incremental change.”Footnote 84 Yet he no longer viewed young radicals as allies in the cause of advancing liberal reform, as he once had. In a 1970 letter Riesman wrote, “We are critical of the conservatives in America when they don't curb their own mindless Right Wing; we have to do exactly the same with our impulsive, expressive, rationalizers of violence who regard themselves as on the Left.”Footnote 85
Riesman shared his critique of the New Left with other left-leaning intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Irving Howe. Like Riesman, these intellectuals believed that the protest tactics of young radicals were too extreme; feared that radical protest would alienate most Americans and produce a right-wing backlash; worried about the New Left's apparent lack of appreciation for the liberal accomplishments of American society, particularly its institutions of representative democracy and freedom of speech embodied by the university; and were personally disappointed that young radicals ignored or rejected the counsel of their elders.Footnote 86 Riesman's reaction to the New Left, however, is perhaps best compared with that of humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, with whom he shared a framework of qualitative liberalism. Maslow was famous for advocating “self-actualization” rather than social adjustment as the goal of therapy and for positing a “hierarchy of needs” which placed the material requirements of individuals at the bottom and their psychological, social, and spiritual ones at the top. Maslow's ideas influenced both the New Left and the counterculture, most notably his former student, Abby Hoffman. Yet, like Riesman, Maslow turned against young radicals, whom he felt had distorted his critique by amplifying it. He denounced student leftists, including his own daughter, as the “Spit-On-Daddy Club,” who acted out of immaturity rather than reasoned critique and were “doomed to depression, disillusionment, and eventually feeling stupid . . . [unless they] compromise.”Footnote 87 However, not all liberal intellectuals rejected the New Left. There were others in the late 1960s who still viewed young radicals as attempting to fulfill the promise of qualitative liberalism.
KENISTON, LIFTON, AND LIBERAL SUPPORT FOR THE NEW LEFT
Riesman mailed to close friends drafts of his preface to the 1969 edition of The Lonely Crowd. Kenneth Keniston was unimpressed. “Your preface makes it impossible to understand why anyone would read the book,” he complained, “Yet the fact is that it has proved durable and continuously relevant for almost a generation.”Footnote 88 Though Riesman and Keniston had once been close, their relationship became strained by their differing views on the New Left. Like another younger scholar whom Riesman had mentored, Robert Jay Lifton, Keniston offered a positive analysis of the young radicals of the late 1960s. In so doing, he applied both the method of character structure analysis offered in The Lonely Crowd and the book's specific ideas about the promise of post-scarcity. Keniston's analysis was just as consistent with the qualitative liberalism expressed in The Lonely Crowd as was Riesman's hostility to the New Left.
Keniston came to know Riesman while a graduate student in social psychology at Harvard, where he studied with Henry Murray. Beginning in 1958 and continuing for several years, Keniston worked as Riesman's teaching assistant for Social Science 136, ultimately serving as Riesman's “head section man” for the class, helping to administer the large, popular course. In 1966, with Riesman's support, Keniston obtained a position at Yale University.Footnote 89 Keniston worked on adolescents and was particularly interested in exploring connections between personality and social structure. Responding to Riesman's draft preface, Keniston remarked how significantly his own approach had been molded by The Lonely Crowd: “the method of the book—the free and light-handed use of insights from psychoanalysis, anthropology, and the study of contemporary societies—is a method that you, more than anyone else, pioneered, and that people have been imitating ever since, only not as well.”Footnote 90
Keniston's first book, The Uncommitted (1965), was a psychological study of alienated undergraduates at Harvard University. Keniston argued, just as Riesman had before, that even many privileged members of American society led unfulfilled lives. The alienation of Keniston's subjects spoke to broader problems in an American society that had failed to adjust its values to an age of abundance. Keniston introduced the book with a classic statement of qualitative liberalism:
I think we already hear enough from the pulpits of Academia as well as the megaphones of the mass media about the opportunities, challenges, productivity, material standards, and achievements of our society. We attend too superficially to the human price we pay for these achievements, rarely entertaining the thought that our society's accomplishments may have outrun its purposes, leaving us with outlived and outworn values.Footnote 91
Keniston suggested that only a social and political transformation could properly address the alienation of its youths.
As Riesman became increasingly critical of the New Left, Keniston was drawn into the movement's orbit. As a result of his work on The Uncommitted, the organizers of Vietnam Summer, a New Left antiwar group, invited Keniston to conduct a social-psychological study of its members. He published his study in 1968 as Young Radicals; it became the most influential sympathetic scholarly account of the New Left. Keniston praised New Leftists for their flexibility, creativity, and political commitment. He contested the claims of Riesman and other liberals that New Leftists totally rejected American society. Contrasting young radicals with the alienated youths he had studied in The Uncommitted, Keniston wrote,
alienated students are far more global in their criticisms, since they reject not only the patterns of careerism, familism, and materialism that are also rejected by the radical, but the validity and meaningfulness of a great many of the basic American values that radicals accept, e.g. responsibility, trust in others, optimism, outgoingness, and social involvement.Footnote 92
Keniston also challenged the notion that young radicals were irrational. “Apart from the ‘impracticality’ of some of their views,” Keniston argued, “today's dissenting youth . . . sometimes seem to be the only clear-eyed and sane people in a society and a world where most of us are systematically blind to the traditional gap between personal principles and practice, national creed and policy.”Footnote 93 One of Keniston's most important findings was that young radicals were often children of liberal families. Rather than illiberal, then, New Leftists were acting on the liberal principles they had learned from their parents. Keniston's analysis proved influential on Richard Flacks, the leading New Left sociologist, who also sought to account for the social and psychological origins of the New Left.Footnote 94
As Keniston portrayed them, young radicals were the “autonomous” personalities that Riesman had praised in The Lonely Crowd. While Riesman portrayed New Leftists as closed-minded ideologues, Keniston depicted them as “non-dogmatic, anti-ideological, and intensely hostile to doctrines and formulas.”Footnote 95 Keniston argued that young radicals pioneered a “post-modern style” well suited to the postindustrial world in which “survival, subsistence, and starvation are no longer at issue.”Footnote 96 To Keniston, the young radicals’ “flexibility, openness, [and] adaptability” were the new values best suited to “a rapidly changing world.”Footnote 97
Keniston traced the positive characteristics of New Leftists to their largely middle-class background that had allowed them to benefit from postwar abundance:
Their affluence provided them not only with economic security, but with the preconditions for the independence they exhibit in later life: families generally free from acute anxiety over status, thoughtful and well-educated parents, schools and colleges that—whatever their limitations—exposed them to many of the riches of world tradition, and the extraordinary privilege of a lengthy adolescence and youth in which to grow, to become more complex, to arrive at a more separate selfhood.Footnote 98
For Keniston, then, young radicals benefitted from being the children of the earlier generation described by Riesman in The Lonely Crowd.
Keniston wrote as a liberal who had been pulled to the left through his engagement with radical students. “Working with, and writing about, the leaders of Vietnam Summer was in some respects a ‘radicalizing’ experience for me,” Keniston concluded.Footnote 99 Nevertheless, he insisted, “my own politics are in some ways more ‘liberal’ than theirs.”Footnote 100 Keniston still believed that social reforms could be achieved within the established democratic political system and questioned the effectiveness of the young radicals’ militant and confrontational tactics. He criticized what he saw as the most destructive organizations of young radicals, such as the Weather Underground and Maoist groups, but he insisted that these were only small elements of the New Left as a whole. “There has been a change toward militancy, anger, and dogmatism in the white student movement,” he concluded, “but . . . it has been greatly exaggerated.”Footnote 101 Nevertheless, he perceived young radicals as key allies who shared liberal goals. Like Riesman earlier in the 1960s, Keniston saw young radicals as a positive force pushing liberalism to realize its broadest commitments.
Like Keniston, Robert Jay Lifton was another liberal attracted to young radicals. Born in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn in 1926, Lifton was seventeen years younger than Riesman, though a few years older than his colleague at Yale, Keniston. A psychiatrist who specialized in East Asia, Lifton had helped arrange Riesman's visit to Japan in 1961.Footnote 102 Lifton was a pioneer in the field of “psychohistory.” In 1966, he founded the Wellfleet group of psychologists, which has since met yearly at his Cape Cod home to discuss interrelations between the social, the psychological, and the historical.Footnote 103 In his efforts to link social and psychological phenomena, Lifton was influenced by The Lonely Crowd. He also shared Riesman's commitment to antinuclear activism and was a founding member of the Committee of Correspondence.
Two of Lifton's essays in his important collection, History and Human Survival, examined the New Left. Lifton dedicated the book to Riesman and Erik Erikson, to whom he later referred as his two “mentors.”Footnote 104 In “Protean Man,” Lifton hailed the youth generation as presaging a “new kind of man” suited for a world of rapid change.Footnote 105 Protean man was marked by openness, flexibility, and adaptability, all traits designated as among the positive features of the other-directed type in The Lonely Crowd. Indeed, as an antecedent to his idea of the “protean man,” Lifton cited “David Riesman's concept of other-directedness, which suggested a great deal about the evolving responsiveness to environmental influence in post-modern society.”Footnote 106 Lifton articulated the hopeful possibility expressed in The Lonely Crowd of other-direction transforming itself into autonomy. Though not wholly concerned with analyzing the New Left, “Protean Man” suggested that young radicals were leaders in formulating new styles of life better suited to the postindustrial world. Refuting Riesman's view of the New Left as irrational and ideological, Lifton portrayed “protean man” as “incapable of enduring an unquestioning allegiance to the large ideologies and utopian thought of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”Footnote 107
In his 1969 essay “The Young and the Old: Notes on a New History,” Lifton addressed the New Left more directly. Here he drew explicitly on The Lonely Crowd to construct a portrait of the “young rebels” of the New Left and counterculture as striving for psychological autonomy and political commitment in an unjust world. Like Keniston, Lifton criticized what he viewed as the most “totalist” elements of the New Left, including Maoism. However, Lifton saw in most young radicals a “frequent combination of flexibility and inclusiveness.”Footnote 108 With Riesman perhaps in mind, he chided older liberals for their “angry and unyielding disassociation from the young, sometimes with searching criticism of their programs, but all too often with a petulant and willfully uncomprehending declaration of generational warfare.” Instead, Lifton urged “middle-aged Leftists” to open themselves to the “‘psycho-historical logic’ of the young.”Footnote 109 Lifton's cooperation with the New Left was evident in the role he played in the 1969 student uprising at Yale, where he helped form a group of “Concerned Yale Faculty” that sympathized with concerns of students and endorsed their right to protest yet helped avoid the kind of destructive campus confrontation that had occurred at other institutions.Footnote 110
Riesman contested the analyses of the New Left offered by Keniston and Lifton, even as he recognized the influence of his earlier work upon them. Writing about Keniston's The Uncommitted in a 1966 letter, Riesman complained,
He sees in organization mostly constraints, not opportunities. In this, he shares the very qualities of the young with whom he is sympathetic and whom he is describing. To the extent that he has used my own work to bolster his case here, he has not misunderstood it, but I myself would not presently write that way.Footnote 111
Riesman respected Young Radicals enough to assign it to his students at Harvard. Yet he warned his class to be skeptical “about Keniston's interpretation of the psychological openness and humaneness of some of the young radicals.”Footnote 112 In another lecture, Riesman disputed how Keniston, Flacks, and others interpreted the finding that many New Leftists came from liberal backgrounds. According to his notes, Riesman interpreted the “phenomenon of young carrying forward adult values as not hypocrisy [on the part of the old] but impatience on part of the young with not only delayed gratification but delayed justice or delayed peace.”Footnote 113
Riesman warned Keniston that Young Radicals legitimated the most destructive elements of the New Left.Footnote 114 Similarly, Riesman informed Lifton that “Notes on the Young and the Old” “evokes in me an uneasiness which I had partly felt with respect to the Protean Man essay—that you have let yourself become too euphoric and even sentimental about revolutionary stirrings, upheavals, profundities.”Footnote 115 Reeling from Riesman's sharp criticism, Lifton confessed he was “a bit stunned by the tone of your remarks.”Footnote 116 Lifton would have been even more alarmed had he known that Riesman was writing about him to others. In correspondence with their mutual friend Erich Fromm, Riesman railed that Lifton “went over to the far left, and resents any criticism of Communism whatsoever; at any rate, Chinese Communism.”Footnote 117 Riesman's anger had clearly led him to misrepresent Lifton's position, especially given that Lifton's first book was a study of Chinese Communist methods of “thought control” that had clearly seen them as threats to liberal values.Footnote 118
Riesman's dispute with Keniston and Lifton revolved around to what extent the New Left as a whole was represented by its most extreme groups. In 1968 Riesman wrote to Lifton,
I see more totalism in the New Left than you do or than Ken does . . . Whatever was the case in the early civil rights movement or in the protests early and late against the Vietnam War, much of the American student movement today is not concerned with injustices but with theatre . . . the students of 1968 are not those of 1964: the ones today are sullen, destructive, confrontationist, often Maoist or Mau-Mauist.Footnote 119
Lifton believed Riesman was focused narrowly on the actions of a minority and missed more positive developments among the majority of young radicals. He told Riesman, “you have become so angry at what is happening, at the young in particular, that you too quickly dismiss from view all but the very negative and destructive tendencies of the young.” And he asked him,
Couldn't it be true, as I suspect it is, that there are two simultaneous trends among very young white middle-class student radicals: the apocalyptic pattern of intransigence and irresponsibility and everything else. . .and an increasingly thoughtful reappraisal of things . . . often . . . accompanied by independent-mindedness, great intelligence, and a knowledge about many aspects of the world . . .?Footnote 120
Lifton insisted that Riesman distinguish between the New Left's extremist fringe and its mainstream.
Others in Riesman's circle also criticized his stance on the New Left. For example, the Harvard-trained sociologist Robert Bellah rejected Riesman's characterization of New Leftists as nihilistic: “I don't believe there is a revolt against authority as such so much as there is against an authority which has lost its own vitality.” Bellah told Riesman, “I feel you don't have much compassion for them and in a sense their open expression of despair and dismay may be better than the quiet desperation that was so characteristic of my own generation.”Footnote 121
Given their common intellectual framework, what explains the different interpretations of the New Left offered by Riesman, Glazer, and Lipset on the one side and Keniston, Lifton, and Bellah on the other? Certainly, generational differences were significant. Closer in age to radical students, Keniston, Lifton, and Bellah were better positioned to understand their concerns. In addition, they were more able to take for granted the liberal achievements of the earlier generation, including the expansion of mass liberal-arts education, that Riesman and others felt were threatened by the New Left. Yet differences in age alone cannot account for the divergence of liberal views. Others in Riesman's circle of the same generation as him were far more understanding of the young radicals of the late 1960s than was he. Erik Erikson, for example, largely sympathized with the New Left even though he resented the “storming of administration buildings as if they were Winter Palaces.” In his Identity, Youth, and Crisis Erikson claimed, “youth have proven more foresighted than many, many adults.”Footnote 122 Other qualitative liberals such as Riesman's Harvard colleagues John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger Jr were relatively unconcerned about student protests and continued to see the main political issue as the extension of government reforms to enhance American quality of life.Footnote 123
Strikingly, liberals on opposite sides of the debate over the New Left used a common idiom. All claimed the mantle of The Lonely Crowd. They all valued the personality traits of openness, individuality, and flexibility and stressed the need for updated values for a post-scarcity world. At the heart of their debate was whether or not young radicals were the autonomous personalities described in The Lonely Crowd. Qualitative liberalism always had two sides: a reformist dimension looking for incremental improvements within the established order and a more utopian element that imagined more radical changes in American life. The Lonely Crowd contained both impulses. But by the late 1960s liberal intellectuals were pushed in one direction or another as the young radicals’ escalation of tactics and rhetoric disrupted universities and other institutions. As young radicals amplified some of the social criticisms earlier expressed by Riesman and others, liberals had to decide whether they wanted to deepen their own social critique or retreat to protect what they saw worth defending of the postwar order.
CONCLUSION: NEOCONSERVATISM AND THE SPLITTING OF LIBERALISM
In 1972, the critic Jonathan Yardley discovered with alarm that The Lonely Crowd was no longer stocked at his local bookstore. Yardley's bookseller told him, “The Lonely Crowd has given way to its latter-day progeny . . . nobody seems to know now why it was so popular . . . the generation Riesman writes of seems as odd and dated as a Frankie Avalon record.” Yet among the “progeny” he cited as replacing Riesman's book was the work of Keniston, who worked in the same qualitative liberal tradition established by The Lonely Crowd. Such children of The Lonely Crowd suggest overlooked continuities between the liberal social criticism of the 1950s and that of the 1960s.Footnote 124
By the late 1960s, however, Riesman had lost faith in a central premise of his book's qualitative liberalism. He now questioned whether a post-scarcity economy would allow the development of autonomous character types. In his 1969 preface to The Lonely Crowd, he recanted his earlier claims: “The [1961] Preface . . . deals with what I now think was the mistaken notion that economic work was no longer important, and that we can afford the postindustrial attitudes now so widely prevalent.”Footnote 125 Riesman's remark anticipated the arrival of economic turmoil and decline after 1973, when talk of austerity displaced discussion of the social uses of abundance. His rejection of post-scarcity even before the end of the postwar economic boom illustrates how his estrangement from the New Left led him to abandon earlier, more utopian hopes. Now Riesman even seemed to prefer inner-direction to other-direction, the position that he had been mistakenly accused of adopting before. Writing to Bellah in 1971, Riesman commented, “Perhaps the most important issue for [American] society is . . . the Protestant ethic. I just do not believe that a society of 200,000,000 can manage without that ethic. I had not thought so originally.”Footnote 126 Riesman's endorsement of the “Protestant ethic,” for which “inner-direction” had been a synonym, suggests how fully he had broken with qualitative liberalism.
It is tempting to employ the rubric of “neoconservatism” to interpret Riesman's rightward shift. Indeed, the standard narrative of neoconservatism emphasizes how radical student protests helped push some liberal intellectuals to the right; Glazer and Lipset, for example, became prominent neoconservatives. In the late 1960s, Riesman also voiced some key neoconservative themes, such as the need for social stability in the face of radical challenges and a newfound emphasis on the limits to achieving social reform. However, he remained a liberal by virtue of his continued attack on Cold War military buildup and his commitment to incremental social change.Footnote 127
Taking Riesman's development into account offers us a more nuanced understanding of those liberals who drifted to the right during the 1960s. Histories of neoconservatism too often take as paradgimatic the trajectory of prominent neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz who became right-wing Republicans. The original incarnation of neoconservatism in the late 1960s is best understood not as incipient Reaganism but rather part of the splitting of liberalism, the counterpart of other liberals’ leftward shift.Footnote 128
The past decade of historical scholarship on the post-1945 US has focused on conservatism. Though historians have gained a far richer portrait of the right, there is a danger of neglecting the history of postwar liberalism, which remained a crucial political ideology long past the 1960s and the still dominant one among American intellectuals.Footnote 129 Outworn, monolithic notions of “Cold War liberalism” or “consensus liberalism” cannot capture how a liberal such as Riesman could be first drawn to the New Left and later repelled by it. Postwar liberalism remains a fertile field for historical inquiry precisely because it was more diverse and contested than is usually acknowledged. One of the most significant and under-recognized splits within liberalism involved reactions to the New Left, which ranged from sympathy to horror. Qualitative liberalism set the terms by which many older intellectuals viewed the young radicals, but it did not dictate whether or not they supported them. The Lonely Crowd had many children and they did not all grow up alike.
