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CHAPTER TWO

Reconsidering the Authoritarian Personality in America: The Sociological Challenge of David Riesman

IN A 1961 revision of an Art News article, “New York Painting Only Yesterday,” Clement Greenberg, reflective and triumphant, proclaimed that “someday it will have to be told how ‘anti-Stalinism,’ which started out more or less as ‘Trotskyism,’ turned into art for art’s sake, and thereby cleared the way, heroically, for what was to come.”¹ Greenberg’s celebratory comparison between anti-Communism and modernist aesthetics validated Kenneth Burke’s prescient claim that ulterior motives lurked behind the disinterested stance of high modernism. Indeed, besides their heroic attempt to defend the humanities in a world that had succumbed to the tools of instrumental reason, high modernists in the 1940s and 1950s fought a desperate struggle to salvage the individual from the trappings of modern authoritarian movements threatening the foundations of Western civilization. Although never engaging in the reactionary forms of nationalistic display like many of their intellectual compatriots, high modernists such as Lionel Trilling, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Clement Greenberg, and Allen Tate echoed the rhetoric of many anti-Communist organizations. They also offered their theoretical perspectives to analyze not just the tremors of the Cold War landscape but, more important, the historical developments that had led so many of their fellow citizens on both sides of the Atlantic to abnegate their freedom for the illusionary dreams found in mass movements. High modernists joined with American sociologists, psychologists, and political scientists in dissecting the mental condition of those who had joined totalitarian organizations to determine if such ideologies had any widespread appeal in the United States. The result was a sustained investigation into the psyche of the American people, an investigation that supposedly revealed the frightening possibility that recent historical trends—ranging from economic catastrophe to postindustrialization—had given rise to the same pathological mental state that had plunged Europe into turmoil.

In this sense, the debates over modernist aesthetics that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s were not merely about formalist practices versus spontaneous poetics or disinterested contemplation versus rhetorical persuasion. Modernists of all stripes were swept up into this larger discussion about the threat that totalitarian ideologies posed to the American public. This debate, which was obviously not confined to modernist circles, was in fact about the fate of the self in an age of mass politics and mass culture—about whether or not the scale of political and economic institutions had usurped the critical capacities of the individual and had thereby paved the way for collectivism. Most high modernists answered in the affirmative; other modernists were less convinced. For instance, many romantic modernists such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer criticized high modernists for inciting a panic over the so-called authoritarian personality in America, a panic that they argued ironically reinforced the compulsive conformity about which Trilling, Adorno, and others were so worried. Similary, those artists and critics who composed the tradition of late modernism fretted over the almost compulsive anti-Communist stance of most high modernists. For instance, in a paper given to the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in 1951 titled “On the Limits of Totalitarian Power,” sociologist David Riesman expressed reservations about the overreaction on the part of European commentators who, in their effort to warn the Western world about the appeal of mass movements, failed to understand how the complexities of modern society might mitigate against such movements instead of merely producing them. Speaking to an audience that included Hannah Arendt, Bruno Bettelheim, and Nathan Leites, Riesman suggested that such critics had overestimated the “psychological pressure” of totalitarian ideologies, particularly in the United States where such fanaticism had made little advance.² His argument was that liberal organizations such as the Committee for Cultural Freedom had done a much too efficient job of awakening their fellow citizens to the dangerous appeals of authoritarian ideologies, making everyone begin to “greatly overestimate the capacity of totalitarianism to restructure human personality” (415). In his paper, Riesman took to task writers from George Orwell to Aldous Huxley to Theodor Adorno to Hannah Arendt, all of whom falsely assumed that the fragmentation of traditional social life had automatically produced broken personalities.

In many ways, Riesman offered the most famous discussion of the so-called American character in the 1950s, a discussion that centered on the critical capacities of ordinary citizens to resist the allure of political movements and to challenge the pressures of social conformity. His 1950 best-selling book The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character was just one of many books published by critics that detailed how postwar social and economic changes had unsettled the lives, expectations, and outlooks of most Americans. But unlike high modernists such as Theodor Adorno or Lionel Trilling, who saw nothing but confusion and uncertainty in the eyes of ordinary citizens in an age of mass politics and mass culture, Riesman saw a new American character that, while still beset by many of the same psychological hang-ups as past generations, had developed a more flexible personality structure. This American character possessed the capacity for positive adjustment and mutability, traits that not only helped individuals escape the lure of political movements but also pointed to a more open form of selfhood than that imagined by other critics. According to Riesman, high modernist critics, who held fast to a notion of “psychological integration,” had underestimated “the amount of disintegration and inconsistency of response that an individual can stand” (424). In response, he called for “a more robust view of man’s potentialities, not only for evil, about which we have heard and learned so much, not only for heroism, about which we have also learned, but also for sheer unheroic cussed resistance to totalitarian efforts to make a new man of him” (425). In this sense, debates over modernist aesthetics were also about the nature of identity in modern America. In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman, like other late modernists, offered an entirely different vision of man’s capabilities and capacities for change.

Discovering the Authoritarian Personality

In a 1954 Saturday Review article on Allan Valentine’s The Age of Conformity, William Barrett, the associate editor of Partisan Review, argued that Valentine’s indictment of the authoritarian tendencies within American life was “nothing new.” For Barrett, “there could hardly be a subject that has been so thoroughly scoured and picked apart by this time by journalists, sociologists, pundits, and assorted visiting firemen from foreign shores.”³ Indeed, the firemen from abroad to whom Barrett referred helped to shift discussions dramatically within the United States about a general breakdown of Western society. Growing fears about the concentration of power within the United States had of course already appeared in diverse works such as James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution (1941), Peter Drucker’s Future of Industrial Man (1942), and Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man (1946), but the emigration of prominent European intellectuals who had firsthand experience of totalitarianism added a certain gravitas to the American debate. From psychologists such as Erik Erikson, Wilhelm Reich, and Bruno Bettelheim to writers such as André Malraux, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler to critics such as Hannah Arendt, Paul Tillich, and Franz Neumann, arriving European intellectuals taught a horrifying lesson to their American listeners, and their concerns were quickly translated into the pages of Partisan Review, Commentary, New Republic, Encounter, and Politics. As fanaticism, nationalism, and ethnic and racial intolerance swept through Europe, chastised American and emigrant European intellectuals surveyed the landscape of the United States for evidence of such burning embers.

The book that first attempted to explain the rise of totalitarianism in the heart of civilized Western Europe and the book that first implored American intellectuals to begin fretting over the situation in their own country was Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom (1941). A practicing psychoanalyst and former member of the Institute for Social Research, Fromm emigrated from Germany in 1933 and established himself as a penetrating critic of the socioeconomic conditions that had produced fascism. Blending psychoanalysis and empirical studies, Fromm linked recent historical changes in capitalism to the widespread psychological malaise affecting the millions of Europeans who were willing to sacrifice themselves to the authoritarian state. The breadth of his historical perspective accounted for the appeal of his book as did his trenchant depiction of the loneliness of the modern individual, who, according to Fromm, had begun, in a tragic reversal of history, to bemoan the litany of freedoms provided by Western civilization. Borrowing themes from Max Weber and Karl Marx, Fromm sketched the historical emergence of the modern individual: the development of the capitalist market system had freed the individual from bondage and servitude; the rise of Protestantism had challenged the authority of the church; and the French and American revolutions in the eighteenth century had ushered in civil and political liberties. Freed from the “primary ties” of family, church, and caste found in medieval society, the individual had emerged upon the world’s stage, “independent, self-reliant, and critical,” liberated from the “old enemies of freedom” in the name of self-discovery.⁴ But this sense of freedom, cautioned Fromm, was illusionary and ignored the “new enemies of a different nature.”⁵ In fact, the individual now needed to confront the “inner restraints, compulsions, and fears” that arose with the collapse of “outer restraints.” Free to determine his way within the democratic state, the individual had been deprived of any markers for a positive sense of freedom, leaving him “more isolated, alone, and afraid” (104). Overwhelmed by the bureaucratic indifference of modern organizations, the modern individual came to consider the demands of freedom too burdensome. Unable to withstand the feelings of “isolation and powerlessness,” the individual tried to “escape from freedom” (133). Under such conditions, the modern individual, according to Fromm, had developed sadomasochistic impulses. This “burden of freedom” was overcome by forgoing “the independence of one’s own individual self” and masochistically fusing “with somebody or something” (140) in order to acquire the strength the individual lacked. These “masochistic strivings” were satisfied by subordination to a “bigger and more powerful whole” whether in the form of “a person, an institution, God, the nation, conscience, or a psychic compulsion” (154). According to Fromm, this new “authoritarian character” took pleasure in submission to state authority and joy in the willful destruction of others as scapegoats for the individual’s own powerless condition.

Fromm’s book had an immediate impact. Most, if not all, discussions of totalitarianism in the United States were filtered through his analytic lens. Fromm’s discussion of the sadomasochistic structure of the modern personality was appropriated, for instance, into psychologist Abraham Maslow’s oft-cited 1943 Journal of Social Psychology article “The Authoritarian Character Structure,” which was the culmination of his five-year study of authoritarian beliefs in America. Social scientists, such as Harold Lasswell, Hadley Cantril, and William Kornhauser, all of whom conducted extended investigations into political pathologies, borrowed from Fromm’s speculative framework. The book, however, that most readily translated Fromm’s analytic framework into an American vernacular was Arthur Schlesinger’s 1949 book The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. He argued, with a certain Eliotic inflection, that modern America, with “its quota of lonely and frustrated people, craving social, intellectual and even sexual fulfillment they cannot obtain in existing society,” had become a breeding ground for individuals who “want to be disciplined.”⁶ According to Schlesinger, the impersonality of American society had forced the individual to find “outlets for the impulses of sadism and masochism” (54). For most of these critics, three factors in particular seemed to be producing the sadomasochistic character that Fromm had analyzed. The first was the economic turmoil of the Great Depression. The effect of the unemployment crisis of the previous decades was a tremendous amount of uncertainty and confusion, effects that seemed to linger into the 1950s when the surprising postwar abundance should have mitigated such anxieties. For example, contributors to Daniel Bell’s The New American Right (1955) noted that the hysteria surrounding the threat of Communist subversion in the United States, which had produced the demagoguery of Joseph McCarthy, was linked to a perpetual “status anxiety” on the part of a rising lower middle class fretting that international events might disrupt its recent socioeconomic gains.

The second factor supposedly producing this sadomasochistic personality was the gradual disappearance of early industrial society of the late nineteenth century. The apparent completion of the industrial revolution through advanced automation and computer-based technology had prompted the transition in the 1950s from a goods-producing to a service-centered economy, as labor was slowly removed from the production process and transferred to clerical, technical, professional, and managerial positions. In 1962, sociologist Daniel Bell detailed this transition in a talk titled “The Post-Industrial Society,” which he gave at the Columbia University Seminar on Technology and Social Change. Arguing that the major institutions of American society were now “a vast new array of conglomerations of universities, research institutes, [and] research corporations,” Bell presented a vision of social life turned upside down, as the “exponential growth” of scientific research had made it “more and more difficult” on the “cultural level of society” to develop “terms for expressing what is occurring in the realm of science and in life itself.”⁷ The public imagination was stirred by this shift, as the American worker symbolically transformed from the brawny, muscular industrial laborer from the turn of the century into the weak, conformist white-collar worker of the 1950s. The representations of “manly work,” as Barbara Melosh has shown, that dominated the state-sponsored art of the New Deal in the 1930s were erased by caricatures such as those found in sociologist William Whyte’s 1956 work The Organization Man of the “unmanly arts of persuasion” of professional life.⁸ No longer engaging in the harsh physical demands of productive labor, the middle-class male of the new corporate order bore little relation to his ancestors. According to Whyte, the replacement of the nineteenth-century Protestant ethic of “individual initiative and imagination” by the social ethic of cooperative group dynamics within the corporate world had made “morally legitimate the pressures of society against the individual.”⁹

This transition from a goods-producing to a service-centered economy had, according to most critics, produced an intolerable cultural asphyxiation, the third factor producing an authoritarian character. In this sense, the modernist defense of high culture was not merely a reaction to the unsettling prominence of scientific language in everyday life; it was also a challenge to the degradation of intellectual life by the culture industry. In a series of highly influential essays including Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Dwight Macdonald’s “A Theory of Popular Culture,” and Theodor Adorno’s “On Popular Music” and “How to Look at Television,” high modernists noted the psychologically damaging effects of the standardization of consumer goods on American society. The steady flow of cheap cultural goods not only competed with the artifacts of high culture for audience attention but also had led to the degradation of the intellectual faculties of most consumers. Inundated with standardized slogans, the modern individual had fallen prey to a culture industry that had produced a form of psychological dependency in the consumer who masochistically subjected himself to its pleasures in the same fashion as “the prisoner who loves his cell because he has been left nothing else to love.”¹⁰ Consequently, the individual was unable to discriminate not only between the relative merits of consumer goods but between politicians supposedly speaking in his interests and economic structures supposedly operating for his benefit. Even the most sophisticated minds were unable to comprehend “the complexities of a highly organized and institutionalized society” in the “plain terms of consistency and reason.”¹¹ The tools of sophisticated discrimination and contemplation were expelled from the minds of mass consumers in the name of profit and social control.

All of these concerns were funneled into the most comprehensive study of the irrational nature of the modern individual, The Authoritarian Personality, a collaborative investigation commissioned by the American Jewish Committee and authored by Theodor Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford. The project was initiated in 1944 after Max Horkheimer was appointed head of the Department of Scientific Research for the American Jewish Committee and helped to launch a five-volume study on modern anti-Semitism titled Studies in Prejudice.¹² Because of its experimentation with depth psychology and projective testing, The Authoritarian Personality became the definitive postwar study of modern prejudice. Initially restricted to a small sampling of female students at the University of California, the study was expanded to include an examination of the psychological dispositions of middle-class professionals, psychiatric patients at a California clinic, working-class men and women in local unions, members of parent-teacher associations, church groups, women’s clubs, inmates at the San Quentin State Prison, female public school teachers and social workers, and students at the University of Oregon and George Washington University.

Finding themselves “in perfect agreement with the description of the authoritarian character given by Fromm and Maslow,” Adorno and his collaborators argued that the increasing isolation of the modern individual had become a breeding ground for compulsive conformity.¹³ Rejecting the assumption that latent authoritarian tendencies were apparent only in overt action or consciously stated opinions, the authors turned to psychology to investigate those “established patterns of hope and aspirations, fears and anxieties that dispose [individuals] to certain beliefs and make them resistant to others” (10). Most influential was the development of the famous F-scale, an attitudinal scale that measured the presence of “antidemocratic tendencies at the personality level” (223). Through a series of clinical interviews, thematic apperception tests, and detailed questionnaires, the F-scale was supposedly able to measure the authoritarian potential of individuals according to a series of traits that included a rigid adherence to conventional values, a submissive attitude toward authorities, and an overly aggressive reaction to outsiders. Although these traits were not comprehensive of “all the features of this personality pattern,” they did, according to the book’s authors, form “a more or less enduring structure in the person that renders him receptive to antidemocratic propaganda” (228). Such receptivity was linked to the psychological weakening of the individual. The apparent causes were numerous, including widespread ignorance about the current economic and political situation and a growing inability to balance the conflicting psychic demands of internal and external forces. This last conclusion became the dominant paradigm for most discussions of authoritarianism. As the study explained, “weakness in the ego is expressed in the inability to build up a consistent and enduring set of moral values within the personality; and it is the state of affairs, apparently, that makes it necessary for the individual to seek some organizing and coordinating agency outside of himself” (234). Thus, ego weakness was marked by several character traits, including an opposition to introspection, a prejudiced use of stereotypes, and a revulsion against individual weakness.

Reactions in the United States to the study were overwhelmingly positive. In his 1950 Commentary review, Nathan Glazer praised the Studies in Prejudice series (and The Authoritarian Personality in particular) for making scientific research into the subject of prejudice “immeasurably richer” through the analytic methods employed.¹⁴ Even Paul Lazarsfeld, who had personal difficulties with Adorno when the two worked together on Lazarsfeld’s Radio Research Project at Princeton University in the late 1930s, praised the methodological achievements of the study. But due to the long delay in publication, the abiding criticism of the book when published in 1950 was its failure to consider the problem of left-wing authoritarianism. For instance, Edward Shils, in his contribution to a 1954 review, Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” argued that the recent upsetting of the traditional left-right political dichotomy by both “Fascism and Bolshevism” exposed the limitations of Adorno’s study.¹⁵ Of course Adorno, in his more interpretive discussions of character typology, had already noticed this similarity. As he explained, the Berkeley study revealed a number of “‘rigid’ low scorers” who were involved extensively in “some progressive movement” and who exhibited “features of compulsiveness, even of paranoid obsession” that “could hardly be distinguished from some of our high extremes.”¹⁶ In fact, Adorno, more than other contributors, often elided the distinction between left-wing and right-wing versions of the authoritarian personality.

Indeed, by the time Cold War anxieties emerged after the Potsdam conference in 1945, the theoretical differences between Fascism and Communism were not easily translatable. The movement of American intellectuals, including many high modernists, from Stalinism to Trotskyism to liberal anti-Communism, particularly in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, has been well documented.¹⁷ In 1949, the anti-Communist organization Americans for Intellectual Freedom famously picketed the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, arguing that the conference was merely a façade for pro-Communist organizers. Inspired by the demonstrations and encouraged by anti-Communist intellectuals living in Europe, the Americans for Intellectual Freedom directly led to a much more prominent organization. Founded in 1951, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, an affiliate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom that had been formed the previous year in Berlin, united the various strains of liberal anti-Communism in the United States, counting intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Daniel Bell, James Burnham, Norman Thomas, and Diana Trilling as members. Although the high modernists who joined the American Committee for Cultural Freedom approached the cause of anti-Communism in different ways (Clement Greenberg leading a direct campaign against fellow travelers at the Nation, Lionel Trilling reluctantly supporting investigations into Communist academics at Columbia University, and Allen Tate occasionally writing anti-Communist polemics), all of them saw Communism and Fascism as merely two variants of the same affliction. Even Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, seeing the sources of both ideologies in the regressive tendencies of the Enlightenment, adopted a form of liberal anti-Communism when they returned to Germany in the early 1950s, and both, like their intellectual companions in America, warned against political subversion in their own country.¹⁸

Consequently, American critics appropriated the analytic lens of their German counterparts and applied it to the problem of Communism, painting a disturbing portrait of American society as psychologically weak and therefore particularly vulnerable to political infestation. Since the writers of The Authoritarian Personality openly admitted that they had not given Communism “any special attention,” a host of other social scientists rushed to fill in the gaps.¹⁹ For instance, psychologist Milton Rokeach, in his book The Open and Closed Mind, extended the F-scale to measure not simply intolerance but also “dogmatism and opinionation,” two traits supposedly shared by Communists and Fascists.²⁰ Examples of this shift in perspective were ubiquitous in American intellectual circles. Beginning in 1953, an anti-Communist liberal organization, The Fund for the Republic, sponsored a scholarly series titled “Communism in American Life.” Most of the volumes, including Theodore Draper’s Roots of American Communism (1957), Robert Iverson’s The Communists and the Schools (1959), and Nathan Glazer’s The Social Basis of American Communism (1961), detailed the influence of the Communist Party in the preceding decades and warned about the irrational allure of authoritarianism. What united these works, along with other independent studies including Irving Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party: A Critical History (1957) and Daniel Bell’s Marxian Socialism in the United States (1952), was the common belief that party members were driven by an “orgiastic chiliasm.”²¹ As Daniel Bell noted, the problem was “explaining the tremendous emotional hold that communism has on tens of thousands of persons” (186). Claiming that the answer rested on “a mythopoeic and psychological level,” Bell argued that party ideology provided a “set of satisfactions” for the average Communist, including a sense of “‘purpose’ in a world where most people’s energies are dissipated in a set of violent but aimless quests” (187).

Most of these speculative arguments concerning the threat posed by Communism were based upon myriad social scientific investigations conducted throughout the 1950s into the psychology of party members, research that borrowed heavily from the analytic methods of The Authoritarian Personality.²² Such studies broadened the scope of The Authoritarian Personality by considering the effects of class position, educational level, cultural sophistication, voting behavior, and family background on ideological receptivity and by extending the analytic samples to include not just middle-class Californians but almost every possible racial, ethnic, religious, and class group in the country, an almost absurd extension that led Paul Lazarsfeld to suggest jokingly that only “contributors of money to the Boy Scout movement” had not yet been studied.²³ The most notable of these works was a 1954 investigation, The Appeals of Communism, conducted by political scientist Gabriel Almond of the Center of International Studies at Princeton University. After interviewing hundreds of party members, Almond concluded that party recruits exhibited a certain “neurotic susceptibility” to Communist indoctrination, caused by deep psychological feelings of inadequacy that resulted in a willingness to merge with “the corpus mysticum of the party.”²⁴ Irving Howe, in his and Lewis Coser’s history of the Communist Party, pointed to Almond’s findings to demonstrate that most recent party members had weak psychological constitutions. Arguing that “ego strength and weakness are grounded in historical contexts,” Howe noted that the current feelings of alienation had led to “caesaristic identification” with party authorities as compensation for individual lack.²⁵ The Communist Party as such was a haven for neurotics. Indeed, this was the lesson learned, as Howe and Almond argued, from the myriad confessions written by former Communist Party members who tried to explain the appeals of Communism in relationship to their own individual lives. Testimony from ex-Communists and undercover federal agents—Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Louis Budenz’s This Is My Story (1947), and Elizabeth Bentley’s Out of Bondage (1951)—offered firsthand accounts of the supposedly masochistic strivings of party members. Even more influential was Whittaker Chambers’s Witness (1952), the most famous account of life inside the Communist underground, which received considerable critical attention from the New York intellectuals. Although most commentators, including William Phillips, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Irving Howe, disagreed with his political and religious beliefs, all noted that Chambers had offered a window onto “the appeals of communism,” explaining why a man “with no friends, no social ties, no church, no community” stumbled into fanaticism.²⁶

High Modernism and the Problem of Ego Autonomy

High modernists such as Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, and Theodor Adorno appropriated these social, historical, and autobiographical arguments to show that the main psychological condition of most individuals after World War II was a demonstrable ego weakness. The widespread appearance of the authoritarian personality proved that the ego, resting precariously between the compulsions of the superego and the atavistic impulses of the id, was neither as transparent nor as stable as modern psychology presupposed. As Max Horkheimer explained in Eclipse of Reason, “the individual subject of reason tends to become a shrunken ego, captive of an evanescent present, forgetting the use of the intellectual functions by which he was once able to transcend his actual position in reality.”²⁷ Deafened by the “giant loud-speaker of industrial culture,” the individual was left merely “echoing, repeating, [and] imitating his surroundings” until, in a final abdication of responsibility, he ended “adapting himself to all the powerful groups to which he eventually belongs” (141). In such a world, mimicry had become the only form of survival and the primary form of submission. High modernists followed Freud in viewing man’s ego as nothing more than a “poor creature” subservient to three separate masters—the external world, the impulses of the id, and the disciplinary superego. In The Ego and the Id, Freud had posited the ego as merely a vicissitude of the drives, that is, as the result of the transformation of object-libido into narcissistic-libido. In the name of self-preservation, the original libidinal cathexis with the primary love object was severed and this lost relationship was internalized through the formation of the ego that served as a substitute for the external object. But the ego, whose tasks included the rational ordering of experience, was often overwhelmed by the incomprehensibility of modern life. Having no independent source of its own, the ego only too often considered itself “deserted by all protecting forces” and allowed itself to perish.²⁸ Under such conditions, submissiveness became the predominant character trait. High modernists agreed with Freud that the ego was merely a secondary formation, noting, as Lionel Trilling asserted, that “mind came into being when the sensations and emotions were checked by external resistance or by conflict with each other.”²⁹ As such, the ego almost exclusively served defensive functions that were too often abandoned. In his 1951 essay “William Dean Howells and the Roots of Modern Taste,” Trilling argued that the lure of totalitarianism rested in the “irresistible temptation” to yield the self to the forces of grandeur.³⁰ Trilling rooted this problem in the willingness of party members to abandon lived reality with its attendant class dynamics for an imagined Communist society where the “spirit” was capable of “making its own terms” (214). Individual psychology, which had once served the function of reason, had given way to group psychology, making the ego merely a historical relic.

Even worse, the individual was now defenseless against intrapsychic tensions. Freud’s warning in Civilization and Its Discontents had taught high modernists about the psychological significance of the death instinct. In his later works, Freud had postulated that the fundamental drive for pleasure inherent to man’s nature was balanced by a corresponding drive to return to a state of inertia or even nonexistence. But given the vicissitudes of the drives, this death instinct often morphed into an impulse for aggression. In a 1944 conference titled “Psychiatric Symposium on Anti-Semitism,” held at the University of California at Berkeley, Theodor Adorno joined a number of psychologists including Ernst Simmel, Gordon Allport, and R. Nevitt Sanford in an attempt to delineate “the most powerful energy” threatening mankind—“the human instinct of destruction hidden within the unconscious and emanating hatred from there.”³¹ Other high modernists, including Lionel Trilling, issued similar warnings, arguing that the “impulse toward charismatic power” originated in “not only the threat to being which comes from without but also the seduction to non-being which establishes itself within.”³² With such an understanding came a radical revision of traditional images of human nature. Most famously, Reinhold Niebuhr and Dwight Macdonald urged their fellow New York intellectuals to dispense with seemingly naïve and overly optimistic attitudes about human behavior, arguing that there was “evil as well as good at the base of human nature.”³³ In contrast to the images of man’s perfectibility offered by Progressives and radicals, many European and American intellectuals pointed to the bloodshed of the twentieth century in their defense of Freud’s theories.

Although high modernists argued that the ego needed to remain resistant to the excessive demands of the reality principle and to the dark impulses of the id, they also worried about the damaging effects of the ego’s own projective fantasies. Consequently, high modernists originally constructed a notion of ego autonomy only to dismantle it. In The Ego and the Id, Freud had argued that the ego suffered in both its futile attempt to disguise the id’s inherent conflict with reality by transforming itself into the object of choice and its futile attempt to satisfy the overbearing demands of the superego by covering over the gap between itself and its ideal. Consequently, according to Freud, the ego “only too often” became “sycophantic, opportunist and lying” in the midst of this impossible situation.³⁴ Following Freud’s logic, Adorno worried that the narcissistic tendencies of the ego encouraged the individual to apprehend reality in terms of its own projective fantasies. Having no independent source of its own, the ego was inherently fragile, an instability that often resulted in either its negation or its irrational and unyielding rigidity. Because the “id’s libido quantum” was “so much larger than that of the ego” and therefore “always bound to regain the upper hand,” the ego often distorted the nature of external reality in a pathological and hallucinatory manner to disguise the id’s inherent conflict with the reality principle.³⁵ Violence was the only foreseeable outcome. The weakened ego was no longer able to restrain “the aggressive wishes which originate from the id,” and consequently the ego projected those wishes onto the outside world as “evil intentions,” paving the way for the seemingly justified domination of a hostile world in the name of “self-defense.”³⁶ In this sense, the domineering character of Enlightenment thought stemmed from the ego’s own narcissism. As Horkheimer and Adorno explained in the pages of Dialectic of Enlightenment, “objectifying (like sick) thought contains the despotism of the subjective purpose which is hostile to the thing and forgets the thing itself, thus committing the mental act of violence which is later put into practice” (193). Unable to project anything but “its own unhappiness,” the ego gave into the most destructive urges.

Other high modernists issued similar warnings about the domineering tendencies of the ego. In a 1952 lecture, “The Man of Letters in the Modern World,” given at the International Exposition of the Arts in Paris, which was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, Allen Tate presented “the man of letters” with the formidable task of recreating “the image of man” in an age of “mass control.”³⁷ Tate traced the recent enslavement of mankind by the forces of terror to Descartes’s philosophical separation of mind from body and rationality from desire, an intellectual revolution that isolated man from his true nature. Echoing Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment, Tate argued that the historical era of the Cartesian ego had culminated with the specter of totalitarianism. The violent dissection of the realm of nature in the name of rationality had morphed into the violent dissection of mankind in the name of social betterment and expert planning. With a naïve belief in the rational mind’s infallibility, the so-called enlightened subject had separated “means from ends, action from sensibility, matter from mind, society from the individual, religion from moral agency, love from lust, poetry from thought, communion from experience, and mankind in the community from men in the crowd” (13). According to Tate, too many individuals in the modern age refused to temper their own intellects with a sense of humility and were unwilling to accept a life lived with contradiction.

This of course was the basis for the high modernist critique of fellow travelers, Progressives, and party members, those who had tied “the liberal imagination” to the demands of political movements. Lionel Trilling’s vitriolic attack on the ideological posturing of Communists, for instance, was in response to his larger fear that the individual, in the name of moral righteousness, was trying to impose upon his fellow men “a similarity which would be himself” and was trying to negate “their differences from one another” as a cure for his own confusions.³⁸ As a literary example, Trilling pointed to Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima as an “incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization” (176). James’s novel tells the tale of Hyacinth Robinson, the poor illegitimate son of a French seamstress and an English nobleman, who becomes involved in a number of revolutionary anarchist groups but who begins, through his relationship with an Italian aristocrat, Princess Casamassima, to question the usefulness of violent action. According to Trilling, Hyacinth learns that revolutionary passion is by its very nature “guilty,” arising not from some empathetic “response to human misery” but from a need for “certainty” (171). Conversely, the Princess, because of her guilt over her privileged position, befriends Paul Muniment, a working-class companion of Hyacinth, and commits herself to revolutionary activity. The Princess, for Trilling, is “the very embodiment of the modern will,” one that clings to its own sense of virtue but that “hates itself” and hates the complexity of the world in which it lives, a will that “longs for an absolute humanity” (176) without differences. Political action wrapped in ideology was, for Trilling, nothing more than a veneer for “the impulses to revenge and to dominance” (171).

In this sense, high modernists established a nearly impossible project for themselves—safeguarding the highly unstable autonomy of the ego from the domineering force of the drives and from the repressive authority of the superego while simultaneously muting the narcissistic tendencies of the ego itself. The fact that the latent aggressiveness inherent within each psychic component had apparently been so easily captured by the nihilistic philosophies of the twentieth century testified to the intractability of the problem. In his 1951 essay “The Poet as Hero: Keats in His Letters,” Trilling referenced the “mature masculinity” of John Keats as a model for a life in which such psychic tensions were held in delicate balance.³⁹ Keats was a man and a hero before he was a poet, “the last image of health” before the “sickness of Europe began to be apparent” (258). Keats balanced the conflicting forces, internal and external, that threatened to overpower him, matching his passion for friendship and community with his enjoyment of solitude, taking pleasure in “the sensory, the sensuous, and the sensual” but exhibiting “probity” in the face of life’s complications. Moreover, Keats had tempered the sadistic impulses of the death instinct not by ignoring “the problem of evil” but by confronting it in all its manifestations. Keats recognized the tragic consequences of “passivity” and “melancholy,” those impulses seeking to return the individual to a state of inertia, or worse, a state of nothingness. Keats’s countered this drive to “surrender to the passive, unconscious life” with an affirmation of “the active principle,” but he also remained keenly aware that any such “masculine energy” needed to be assuaged by a “diligent indolence” (243). The mature self, as Trilling explained, was endowed with Keats’s “negative capability,” the intellectual power to find answers not in “a formula of any kind, not a piece of rationality” but rather in “a way of being and of acting” (251). This “negative capability,” according to Trilling, was dependent upon a certain personal strength, found in a self that was “certain of its existence” and that could do “without the armor of systematic certainties” (249).

Other high modernists found similar intellectual heroes. In his portrait of Thomas Mann, with whom he had collaborated when the two were in exile in southern California during the early 1940s, Theodor Adorno described a man living “in a world of high-handed and self-centered people” who knew that “the only better alternative” was to “loosen the bonds of identity and not become rigid,” an artist with “two extremely different handwritings,” one of “heaviness” and one of “involuntary starts,” and a man whose rhythm of life was “not continuity but rather an oscillation” between the extremes of “rigidity and illumination.”⁴⁰ The modernist hero of Dwight Macdonald’s The Root Is Man was a slightly more distant figure—the American modernist Henry James, who possessed the maturity to recognize the “imperfections” of “present knowledge.”⁴¹ Willing to accept the “tragic limitations of human existence,” James, according to Macdonald, taught the importance of moderation, exhibiting a life lived “with contradictions” and “skepticism” (145). Similarly, Clement Greenberg, years after Jackson Pollock’s death, claimed that the artist had possessed “what Keats called Negative Capability: he could be doubtful and uncertain without becoming bewildered—that is, in what concerned his art.”⁴² Of course, since Pollock was not able to maintain such a temperament in his personal life and since he was, much to the chagrin of Greenberg, an acknowledged Stalinist for most of his life, high modernists like Greenberg had difficulty in translating this negative capability to the general public as an antidote to antidemocratic sentiments.

Modernist Aesthetics and the Tempering of the Self

Some Cold War intellectuals, most notably Sidney Hook, placed considerable faith in progressive education to reinforce liberal tolerance. Even Max Horkheimer, in one of his more optimistic moments, argued that irrational politics stemmed from a “lack of enlightenment.”⁴³ In his contribution to a United Nations–supported investigation into the “tensions that cause war,” Horkheimer observed that “the task of those engaged in education on all levels, from the high school history class to the mass media of communication, was to see to it that the experiences of the last war of aggression, which came very close to success, become deeply engraved in the minds of all people” (241). This was also the conclusion of Life magazine’s 1948 “Round Table on the Pursuit of Happiness,” featuring “eighteen prominent Americans” including Edmund Walsh, Sidney Hook, and Erich Fromm, all of whom concluded that “editors, educators, the clergy and various individuals and institutions immediately concerned with the enlightenment of the people” needed to help stem the tide of dread threatening democratic society.⁴⁴ Of course pedagogical indoctrination was not very appealing to many high modernists who were quite skeptical of the nation’s educational system. The other solutions offered by social scientists—mandatory therapy sessions for suspected political deviants and compulsory physical activity to sublimate aggression—were similarly untenable to those who worried about the pressures of conformity. Instead, the danger of identity thinking, argued many high modernists, might also be tempered by the aesthetic experience provided by modern art. As an order of knowledge and a cognitive experience separate from the instrumental world of science, the realm of art, even more than progressive education, supposedly softened the hostile tendencies of the ego. For instance, Lionel Trilling argued that the “negative capability” taught through the experience of art emancipated the individual from the compulsive need to grasp reality in a strictly cognitive manner. The “practical usefulness” of the novel, according to Trilling, arose from its “unremitting work” in forcing the individual “to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it.”⁴⁵ Modernist art, according to Trilling, presented a direct challenge to utopian illusions and moral crusading in the name of maturity, sobriety, and skepticism.

Of course high modernists described the tempering nature of art in different ways. In his essay “The Sense of the Past,” Trilling defended the modernist canon for the “historical sense” it provided readers, serving as a quelling agent for the will’s innate aggression.⁴⁶ Trilling argued that the literary work functioned as a form of estrangement because it opened a window to a moment of reality no longer recoverable and no longer understandable. In contrast to liberals and Communists who sought redemption in forthcoming utopias, Trilling turned to the past. This sense of history provided a moment beyond ideology—“without the sense of the past we might be more certain, less weighted down and apprehensive” (185). Naturally, Trilling was not promoting some antiquarian impulse. To acknowledge the “pastness” of a work of art, he argued, was to acknowledge it as a “thing we can never wholly understand.” Aggressive contemplation was retarded by “the mystery, the unreachable part” of the artwork that was irreducible to “ideological or subjective distortion” (180). Any particular meaning derived from a historically distinct piece of literature was therefore incomplete. For Trilling, “we ought to have it fully in mind that our abstraction is not perfectly equivalent to the infinite complication of events from which we have abstracted” (189). This “historical sense” provided by art counted as “one of the aesthetic and critical faculties” that aided the individual in escaping his own subjective “abstractions” (188).

Like Trilling, Theodor Adorno argued that if totalitarian ideologies strove to awaken the primal aggression of man, modern art might serve to temper that impulse. But in contrast to Trilling, Adorno described the reception of the aesthetic object as a form of mimesis. He reformulated the concept to refer not to the imitative reproduction of nature but to the spectator’s role in the consumption of the aesthetic object.⁴⁷ In order to avoid the reductive translation of the artwork by preformed categories of thought, the spectator needed, according to Adorno, to imitate or mimic the movements within the object itself. The spectator was to trace mentally the internal dynamics of the work, following the contours of the painterly strokes, the trajectories of the musical refrain, and the rhythmic articulations of the poetic verse. In other words, the spectator did “not understand a work of art” when it was translated “into concepts” but rather when the spectator was “immersed in its immanent movement,” that is, when the work was “recomposed by the ear in accordance with its own logic, repainted by the eye, when the linguistic sensorium speaks along with it.”⁴⁸ The aesthetic experience was receptive and sensuous, offering a form of knowing separate from conceptual domination. Since the spectator did “not actually think” but instead made himself “into an arena for intellectual experience, without unraveling it,” the aesthetic experience produced a momentary hesitation in the individual and a sense of wonderment, effects that served to loosen the rigidity of the individual ego.⁴⁹

The spectator of course was not entirely passive. The aesthetic experience required active effort—an attentiveness to artistic detail and a knowledge of previous artistic traditions. High modernism was nothing if not deeply intellectual. But the experience of high art was not reducible to an understanding of technique; indeed, the works themselves produced their own standard of judgment to which the spectator submitted. As Adorno argued, “the ability to see works of art from the inside … is probably the only form in which aesthetics is still possible.”⁵⁰ This aesthetic experience avoided both the complete loss of self associated with total immersion in the object and the domination of it associated with cognitive manipulation. Mimesis taught the spectator to respect the otherness of the other by momentarily relaxing the need to grasp and repress and by momentarily suspending the cognitive for a form of perception much closer to the erotic. As such, the aesthetic experience “may contain the potential to counteract the deterioration of human capacities—what would be called ‘ego weakness’ in current psychological terminology” (102). Adorno was not alone in his speculations; his reconsideration of mimesis as the elemental principle of aesthetics was in fact prefigured by the New Critics. For example, in his 1938 essay, “The Mimetic Principle,” John Crowe Ransom argued that “the doctrine of mimesis” was “the best foundation for any aesthetic.”⁵¹ Mimesis, according to Ransom, aimed for “a kind of cognition” that “grows increasingly difficult for us in practical life”—the ability to carefully attend to the particularities of the aesthetic object by “[tracing] its configurations, colors, planes, [and] objects” in the spirit of an erotic “love” that ran counter to the motives of “power,” “appetite,” or “greed” (206). As such, the aesthetic experience taught patience and respect, loosening the borders of the ego but without loosening the destructive tendencies of the drives or the hostile forces of the superego.

In this way, the aesthetic experience became the antidote to the compulsions of the liberal imagination and pointed to a form of identity that was less petrified—a mature and nonrepressive ego with a more intimate relationship to itself and to the natural world. The aesthetic experience, at least one that was uninvolved in persuasion or propaganda, was a way to sway the boundaries of the ego and force the subject to abandon itself, if only for a moment, to the irreducible particularity of the art object. This experience helped to transform a self that was hopelessly and aggressively trapped within its own immediacy into a self that was attentive to the variegated nature of reality. Aesthetic contemplation also prodded the return of the sensuous from its repression by the ego and the superego. Naturally, such a return served neither as a form of orgasmic release nor as a means for simple enjoyment. Instead, it provided a release from the compulsive nature of the ego and a general openness to the individual’s lost archaic impulses. Moreover, it served to channel desire in and through the aesthetic object so that such desire was neither captured by the glittering appeals of the culture industry nor funneled into mass politics. Modern art taught the spectator to “not become stupid, not to be lulled to sleep, not to go along” but also not to dominate and not to coerce.⁵² Of course, since the current landscape had fallen into the hands of administrators, any reconciliation of the self with the larger world was impossible. The fundamental divisions within modernity prevented any such reconciliation, leaving individual subjectivity mediated only by a relationship to the aesthetic sphere. This notion of a nonrepressive ego autonomy became for high modernists the best solution for dealing with the aggression of the self produced paradoxically by its exhaustion.

The Challenge of David Riesman

Thus, despite the rigor of its theoretical formulations, high modernism seemed to breathe desperation—over the apparent liquidation of the subject, over the failures of prewar and postwar social movements, and over the creeping tide of totalitarianism. As Clement Greenberg observed, “the present age as much as any in history lacks an operative notion, a viable concept of the human being—a lack that is one of the ‘still centers’ around which the crisis of our times revolves.”⁵³ Consequently, utopian speculations were found in high modernist discourse in a strictly negative way. The reconstitution of ego autonomy through the tempering impulse of modernist art was a benign response to an intractable situation. Adorno himself admitted his frustrations in his 1951 memoir, Minima Moralia: “In face of the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is only with a bad conscience.”⁵⁴ Since any reconciliation of the individual with his surroundings seemed more and more improbable as the years passed, high modernists could only conceive of art as the last vestige of reason against the domineering tendencies of technological rationality. In their frustration, as we will see in the following chapter, high modernists turned from their original adversarial stance and began to accept the more conservative assumptions of orthodox psychoanalysis, a move that deeply impacted their political critique.

Other social critics, however, were not convinced that this high modernist vision was accurate and searched for alternatives to the notion of a nonrepressive ego identity that discovered itself only in the aesthetic realm. A range of other modernists came forth in the postwar period to challenge this argument about a fundamental weakness in the American character. One of the most forceful of these late modernist critics was sociologist David Riesman, whose 1950 book The Lonely Crowd: A Study in the Changing American Character became a key marker of this shift in perspective. Riesman, however, was an unlikely candidate to challenge the hegemony of high modernism.⁵⁵ In fact, his relationship with many of the New York intellectuals and many members of the Frankfurt school contributed to his early pessimism about American society. For instance, Riesman, having been introduced to Hannah Arendt through Daniel Bell, befriended the German intellectual and began a correspondence with her while she was completing work on The Origins of Totalitarianism in the late 1940s. Riesman read versions of Arendt’s book in manuscript form, and the two exchanged opinions on “the terror, the liquidation, [and] the atomization,” as he put it in a letter in 1949, that characterized life under totalitarianism.⁵⁶ Riesman was quite laudatory in his remarks to Arendt, expressing to her in the same letter “how stimulating it is to confront your own understanding of what is going on and to find myself at every point, with negligible qualifications, in agreement.” Indeed, Riesman was “overwhelmed” by the historical scope and sweeping grandeur of Arendt’s manuscript, and he told her in the summer of 1949 that her book had inspired him to rename his own manuscript “Passionless Existence in America.”⁵⁷ Riesman’s enthusiasm was also reflected in his 1951 Commentary review in which he praised Arendt’s “extraordinarily penetrating book” into the “fanatical ideals” motivating totalitarian movements.⁵⁸ But Riesman’s review was slightly more critical than his letters to Arendt had been two years prior; by then, Riesman was not wholly convinced of her argument. First, he questioned Arendt’s causal claims, arguing, for instance, that her attempt to locate the origins of Hitler’s maniacal drive toward European occupation in the expansionist tendencies of Lord Cromer and the British Empire in nineteenth-century Egypt was much too overdrawn. More important, Riesman argued that her book tended to “overinterpret” totalitarianism by making it appear “consistently fanatical” and by ignoring the “more or less accidental concatenations of bureaucratic forces, slip-ups, careerisms, as explanatory factors” (397). Riesman’s growing hesitations in respect to Arendt’s book signaled in some measure his own confusion over theories that supposedly explained the appeal of totalitarian movements.

This was not the first time Riesman challenged such theories. In fact, Riesman had used the same argument previously in his review of The Tensions That Cause War, a collection of essays stemming from a 1948 UNESCO conference in which a number of intellectuals, including Max Horkheimer and Hadley Cantril, debated the usefulness of the social sciences in dissipating psychological insecurities. Despite his appreciation of such efforts, Riesman chided the essayists for their overestimation of the efficacy of social scientific tools and for their enthusiasm for “the clichés of conventional Marxism” and “the clichés of the psychological approach.”⁵⁹ Pointing to the determinism within Horkheimer’s argument, which delineated man “as the prisoner of industrialism, standardization, and mass culture” (521), Riesman encouraged the UNESCO participants to broaden their understanding of man’s resiliency. Horkheimer had argued that the problem with modern forms of identity was the “personae phenomenon,” a concept he borrowed from psychologist Gordon Allport, who had noted the dispersion of the modern subject into a “set of masks.” The collapse of an “integrated ego” had forced the individual to become “one person in the barber shop, another in an interview situation; a tender husband and father at home and a hard-boiled, hard-driving businessman from nine to five.”⁶⁰ In contrast, Riesman stressed the flexibility of the modern personality, that is, the ability to function as “split personalities,” which signaled a level of maturity and resistance. According to Riesman, instead of “cutting men down to the size of categories,” intellectuals needed to allow them “to play the multiplicity of roles, with the multiplicity of emotional responses, that we constantly show ourselves capable of.”⁶¹ Unwilling to hold fast to the image of ego autonomy offered by high modernists, Riesman searched for an alternative that better expressed the dialectical relationship between self and society.

The book that emerged from Riesman’s confrontation with the high modernist investigation into the modern authoritarian personality was his hugely successful 1950 study of the American character The Lonely Crowd, a book that would sell by the thousands and that would eventually place the well-known author on the September 1954 cover of Time magazine. An almost accidental sociologist, Riesman was an unlikely candidate to write such an influential study. The project, which one reviewer referred to as “the Catcher in the Rye of sociology,” began in 1947 when Riesman received a two-year research appointment at the Committee on National Policy at Yale University in which he planned, with the help of sociologist Nathan Glazer, to study the relationship between political opinion and mass communication.⁶² Preliminary information was culled from interviews conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, interviews sociologist C. Wright Mills had done for his book White Collar: The American Middle Classes, Glazer’s studies at the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, and interviews Riesman’s research assistants conducted at a boarding school in New Haven. Originally interested in the causes of political apathy among American voters, Riesman broadened his focus to include the relationship between political behavior and changing character structures in modern society. From this sampling, Riesman categorized his interview subjects according to their mode of social conformity, originally labeling the two most prominent as conscience-directed and other-directed. In this sense, his book fit in with the larger trend within American sociology that measured the link between politics and personality in light of the horrific scene overseas.

Indeed, The Lonely Crowd was inspired much more by the Studies in Prejudice series than Riesman originally acknowledged. Despite the myriad references to Alexis de Tocqueville and Thorstein Veblen, Riesman was just as interested in the problem of political deviance as he was in theories concerning national character; as he admitted years later, he and his collaborators had worked “in the vein of Escape from Freedom and of the research tradition that led to The Authoritarian Personality.”⁶³ For instance, the interview guides used by Riesman and his researchers were modeled in part on those used by Adorno and his colleagues, although Riesman shied away from their projective testing methods (Rorschach and thematic apperception tests) and used conventional interview practices. Riesman was also well versed in the recent theoretical attempts to merge psychoanalysis with more conventional sociological approaches, a project inaugurated by Sigmund Freud in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego and continued in more contemporaneous works such as Harold Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics. Like many such works, Riesman’s book drew heavily upon individual case studies of social behavior. In total, Riesman and his colleagues gathered 180 interviews between February and July 1948 for their study. Respondents included Harlem residents at the Neighborhood Center for Black Organization, students at a vocational trade school in Connecticut, residents of a small, middle-class Vermont community, teenagers at a progressive school in California, and graduate students in medical and academic programs at several major universities, as well as a number of single interviews from professional actors, missionaries, small farmers, and manufacturers. Twenty-one of Riesman’s interviews were later collected, along with his lengthy interpretations of the political orientation of each interview subject, in Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics, his 1952 addendum to The Lonely Crowd in which Riesman further explained his interview and research methods.

Although Riesman envisioned his work as less clinical and more historical than The Authoritarian Personality, he was deeply influenced, like Adorno and his colleagues, by the theoretical path opened up by the work of Erich Fromm. In fact, Riesman had engaged in what he termed “conversational” analysis with Fromm in the 1940s after Riesman’s mother, an analysand of Karen Horney, encouraged him to visit the German psychoanalyst so she might have someone with whom to converse about the nature of therapy.⁶⁴ In particular, Riesman was influenced by the theoretical perspective of Escape from Freedom and, more directly, by an unpublished study of the political attitudes of German workers in the 1930s in which Fromm had attempted to measure their authoritarian tendencies through an analysis of their responses to a series of open-ended questions about work, morality, and politics. Through a statistical analysis of their responses to an elaborate questionnaire, Fromm hoped to uncover discrepancies between the consciously held political ideas of German workers, who routinely voted for left-wing political parties, and the unconsciously held parochial attitudes making them more and more sympathetic to Fascist ideas. For Riesman, Fromm’s perspective offered a version of “psychoanalytic social psychology” that was not merely derivative of Freud’s methods but an extension as well (574). While undergoing therapy, Riesman also had the opportunity to attend seminars held by social psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan at the William Alanson White Institute and lectures by Ernst Schachtel and Fromm at the New School for Social Research.

Borrowing themes from Karl Marx, Max Weber, J. J. Bachofer, and Georg Simmel, Fromm had repudiated theories about man’s character that focused on one particular structural factor or that tended to project onto the past conditions found in the present. Instead, Fromm treated man’s character—his behavior, his social attitudes, his aesthetic preferences, his morality, and so on—as the product of shared traits within a given society during the course of its development. Character, according to Fromm, was formed neither by the vicissitudes of any particular phase of libidinal development nor by the activation of physiologically conditioned drives within a self-contained psychic structure. Instead, character was formed by man’s interaction with the world around him, as his existential need to overcome feelings of finitude and helplessness forced his adaptation to the prevailing social, political, and economic institutions in which he found himself. Echoing the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, Karen Horney, Abram Kardiner, and other social psychologists and anthropologists, Fromm revised the Freudian conception of man’s development. For Freud, character traits such as parsimony and stubbornness were the result of disruptions to man’s instinctual development during the teleological activation of a particular erogenous zone; for Fromm, such traits were imposed upon man by the specific characterological requirements demanded by a specific society. As such, the formation of an anal character structure was a process determined by a particular form of economic relations that prioritized those traits and a process reinforced by institutional, religious, and familial training. For Fromm, “character … is the specific form in which human energy is shaped by the dynamic adaptation of human needs to the particular mode of existence of a given society.”⁶⁵ Character, in this sense, was an orientation toward the world, a learned assemblage of traits, attitudes, and reactions and an internalization of external norms and expectations.

By abandoning Freud’s theory of ontogenetic development, Fromm was able to trace the rise and fall of particular character structures as the result of large-scale historical changes in political, economic, and religious regimes. The channeling of human energy in the name of socialization was quite different under feudalism, for instance, where a learned “receptive orientation” had made individuals passive, dependent, and loyal to the religious and political authorities to which they willingly submitted themselves than under early capitalism, where a learned “hoarding orientation” had encouraged individuals to gain pleasure from the ruthless acquisition of property and goods under new market relations, all at the expense of devotion to outside authority. As Fromm explained, such orientations formed “the essential nucleus of the character structure of most members of a group which has developed as the result of the basic experiences and mode of life common to that group” (277). Political difficulties like those that plagued Europe in the twentieth century stemmed from a lag between changes in economic conditions and outdated character traits from the previous order. Normal psychic dispositions, such as a craving for aggressiveness and ruthlessness in the economic realm, were stunted by a bureaucratic order that interfered with such pursuits. Consequently, the ensuing frustration was transferred from the economic realm to the political, which explained, according to Fromm, the Fascist impulses within the German lower middle classes.

Riesman was quite persuaded by Fromm’s successful integration of psychoanalytic categories with traditional historical and sociological arguments, and the perspective Fromm offered became the starting point for Riesman’s book. As he described, “The Lonely Crowd did not move outward from individuals towards society, but rather the other way around; we started with society and with particular historical developments within society.”⁶⁶ Paralleling Fromm’s description of the emergence of the individual from the bonds of primary ties with the onset of capitalist expansion, Riesman charted the historical development of an inner-directed character structure—the self-sufficient and pioneering individual of early capitalism whose adherence to an ethic of work and productive labor marked the self-discipline needed to confront an ever-expanding and unpredictable environment. In an age of historically new roles and opportunities, the old mechanism of conformity based upon a specific body of social customs and traditions began to collapse and was replaced by a set of behavioral norms and internalized controls instilled by parental authorities, a “psychological gyroscope” that helped the individual commit to his chosen goal or career in the face of social pressures. Reflecting in part Freud’s description of the introjection of parental authority and the subsequent development of “the watchful superego as a socializing agency,” Riesman noted that “the drive instilled in the child is to live up to ideals and to test his ability to be on his own by continuous experiments in self-mastery—instead of by following tradition.”⁶⁷ Embodied in the pioneering spirit of the frontiersmen of American expansion, the inner-directed man confronted the intractability of the world around him through the driving sense of purpose instilled at an early age. Work or productive labor had become the central element in man’s conception of himself, property became a sign of his independence, and discipline became a marker of his self-mastery.

But with the transition from an economy based upon production, manufacturing, and thrift to one based upon consumption, service, and abundance, a subsequent characterological change had occurred. Borrowing from Fromm’s description of the “marketing orientation,” in which the personal values of adaptation and sociability marked an economic regime based upon the salability of goods and services, Riesman described the shift to an “other-directed” character structure in which the source of direction or discipline was no longer provided by the internalized “gyroscope” derived from parental authority but by the demands and commands of contemporaries, peer groups, and social authorities. Forced to become more self-aware of the opinions of others and abandoned by parents whose authority had little say in a consumer-driven, people-oriented, and interpersonal world, the other-directed person was forced to find a “source of direction” from “either those known to him or those with whom he is indirectly acquainted, through friends and through the mass media” (21). Ever sensitive to the expectations of his peers and trained to pattern his desires on the models offered by the mass media, this new character type developed a sensitive “radar screen” to navigate the ever-shifting judgments of value and worth in an endless search for respect, admiration, and acknowledgment.

Besides his descriptive typology, Riesman added a “non-historical” dimension to his analysis and provided categories with which to describe the difficult relationship between the individual and the characterological requirements demanded by a particular social structure, noting that there were great disparities in and a wide variety of modes of reconciliation with such pressures. Recognizing that “social character [was] not all of character,” Riesman detailed three “universal types” of reconciliation between the individual and the dominant social character: the first was a relatively painless conformity to such personality requirements that Riesman termed “adjusted”; the second was a refusal to reconcile with those demands that he referred to as “anomic”; and the third was a mature capacity to decide whether or not to conform to behavioral demands that he termed “autonomous” (241). Riesman knew from the biographical detail his research interviews unearthed and from Fromm’s own work that there was never a clear fit between characterological demands and actual individual behavior. Character types, in this sense, were not ontological categories; instead, they were merely abstractions for understanding the general pattern of assimilation and socialization within a given period. In reality, individuals dealt with the demands for conformity in different ways, and Riesman’s empirical evidence pointed to anomic and adjusted inner-directed personalities as well as anomic and adjusted other-directed ones. Guiding his study, however, was the assumption that such personalities might also become autonomous, that is, they might also possess a reflective capacity for choosing whether or not to conform to a given characterological requirement. In the Time magazine profile of his work, the editors offered Riesman himself as the prime example of “an autonomous man,” someone who “mingled” the best ideas of the social sciences and the humanities together and someone who “has tried hard not to bore anybody—or to be bored.”⁶⁸ Readers were left to decide on the implications of such a perspective.

Published at the nadir of a certain level of national self-analysis, Riesman’s book was quickly linked to the myriad studies that criticized the bureaucratization of American life through recourse to heraldic images of an inner-directed world washed away. Noting his references to Max Weber, Erich Fromm, and other prognosticators of social decline, most early reviewers depicted Riesman as a humanist critic of “‘groupism’ and the zeitgeist.”⁶⁹ Although magazines such as the Nation took him to task for his supposed contribution to the rise of “the new cocktail-and-breezeway Bohemia,” most found his analysis an astute portrait of the ubiquitous malaise under postindustrialism.⁷⁰ Consequently, many high modernists assumed that Riesman shared their critique. For instance, in his review of The Lonely Crowd, Lionel Trilling praised Riesman for avoiding the “jargonistic” and “platitudinous” language of modern sociology and for producing “a work of literature in the old comprehensive sense of the word according to which Hume’s essays are literature, or Gibbon’s history, or Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.”⁷¹ Like the great novels of the past that engaged in “the investigation and criticism of morals and manners,” Riesman’s book, according to Trilling, explored the subtle shifts within American culture by exposing what was occurring in the nation’s factories, schools, families, movie theaters, political parties, and courthouses. Noting that Riesman had detailed contemporary “morals and manners” more thoroughly than any other sociologist, Trilling saw The Lonely Crowd as a compelling rejoinder to the current preeminence of “affability, blandness, [and] lively sensitivity to the opinion of the group” as forms of social adjustment. Trilling asserted that “it is still inner-direction that must seem the more fully human, even in its excess” (97), and he argued that Riesman himself, however hesitantly, echoed such a preference. Autonomy for Trilling meant individualism, and he praised Riesman for salvaging the word from its pejorative and bland uses.

Despite such praise, Riesman spent years after the original publication of his book trying to correct the misunderstanding that he had outlined a tragic historical decline. In several interviews and a number of new prefaces to the book, Riesman argued that “the authors of The Lonely Crowd [were] not conservatives harking back to a rugged individualism that was once a radical Emersonian ideal.”⁷² In fact, he directly challenged two misreadings. First, despite even some ambivalence of his own, Riesman railed against “the panic doctrine” present in many high modernist works and in the pages of many social science journals that the country was “on the road to fascism.”⁷³ While he appreciated Adorno’s inventive combination of psychological and sociological categories, he resisted “the research assumption that authoritarianism is the main problem facing American society today.”⁷⁴ Most of his hesitancy stemmed from the unexpected findings in his interview materials. Not surprisingly, Riesman discovered several interview subjects who bore a strong resemblance to the ego-weakened, authoritarian personalities found in Adorno’s study, including, for instance, Robert Gibbons, a seventeen-year-old student at a Connecticut trade school whose growing feelings of alienation and declining economic status bore a similarity to the “status-threatened youths in Weimer Germany who were early recruits to Nazism.”⁷⁵ Abandoned by his father, a middle-class office manager, and forced to work part-time to support his mother, Gibbons was unable to relate to his working-class associates and unable to find a proper outlet for his pent-up aggression, choosing instead to vent his frustrations within the political arena by scapegoating foreigners. According to Riesman, Gibbons had never gained the ability to overcome his sense of powerlessness either by relating to others in a healthy way or by using the elements of consumer culture to prop up his identity. Instead, Gibbons remained suspended between the other-directed world of his fellow classmates and the inner-directed environment of his middle-class upbringing, a suspension that Riesman believed might lead to self-destruction or to reactionary political attachments. But Riesman hesitated to pass such judgment, claiming that “all this is not enough to permit a prediction that Gibbons will become a fascist rather than remaining, as he now is, a ‘clinical’ case” (220). Indeed, Riesman was much more generous toward his interview subjects than Adorno and his colleagues were to theirs.

In fact, Riesman pointed to Gibbons’s classmate Joseph Pizzeri as a counterexample. An eighteen-year-old son of Italian immigrants, Pizzeri had learned to cope with his declining social status without resorting to compensatory feelings of superiority over others or repressed frustration. According to Riesman, Pizzeri had found a way to adapt to the traditional values of hard work and obedience without reference to the compulsive need for inner-directed self-improvement or for other-directed social acceptance. As Riesman argued, despite his apparent fixation within the oral stage of personality development (which was expressed by his overattachment to primary groups), Pizzeri did “not at all resemble the sado-masochistic type described by Fromm in Escape from Freedom (or the anti-democratic, authoritarian personality described by Frenkel-Brunswik and Sanford)” (163). Whereas Fromm saw orality exclusively in terms of sadistic ingestion, self-aggrandizement, and exploitation, Riesman noted that an oral disposition might also mark a form of receptivity, openness, amiability, and generosity, traits that helped Pizzeri maintain a stable relationship with those around him. In fact, Riesman noted that despite Pizzeri’s tendency toward submissiveness he did not answer in the affirmative any of the questions posed to him that Adorno and his researchers deemed typical of authoritarian personalities. Such examples made Riesman quite wary of holding fast to psychoanalytic categories as explanatory tools.

Riesman’s difficulties with the assumptions embedded in the social scientific perspective on authoritarian behavior was also evident in his analysis of Walter Poster, a sociology graduate student at Princeton University and the son of Jewish immigrant parents in Minnesota. Poster was, according to Riesman, an example of a character type that did not fall easily under his typology, a person who was neither emphatically inner-directed nor other-directed and who was neither clearly destined for an anomic outlook nor an adjusted one. Instead, Poster, as Riesman originally explained, was a prime example of the rebellious and resentful personality whose ambivalence toward his family had resulted in a pathological projection of his anger from his parents to society as a whole. Echoing Harold Lasswell’s claims in Psychopathology and Politics and Adorno’s findings in The Authoritarian Personality, Riesman argued that Poster was an example of how “affects arising in the personal sphere are displaced upon the public sphere and rationalized in terms of the general good” (529). Unable to assert himself against parental expectations, Poster was unable to define his own identity in any meaningful way, choosing instead to give into his “sado-masochistic tendencies” by sacrificing himself in the name of the larger public good to radical politics. As Riesman explained, “at odds with his father, his solution was to run away from himself and to choose one of the totalitarian political positions which is hostile to the cultivation of the individual self, namely Stalinism” (530). As such, Poster used the party apparatus to escape from his family’s authority without ever engaging in any form of self-realization or self-emergence, marking him as neither inner-directed nor other-directed.

However, sensitive to the accusation that his own bias against Poster’s political opinions might have clouded his judgment concerning the young man’s character and maturity, Riesman soon believed that his claims regarding Poster’s political fate were too hasty and decided to interview him again four months later. Much to his surprise, Poster, despite Riesman’s belief that his unsettled psychological state would keep Poster “thrashing about” for a prolonged period, had in fact become more “at peace with himself” by ending his “ambivalence” and “animus” toward his family and accepting their “warmth and positive feeling” (544). Equally surprising was that such a resolution to his family turmoil had also resulted in the “sharpening” of Poster’s political position, enabling him to formulate a much more coherent and consistent critique of American society and strengthening his commitment to the Communist cause. As Riesman explained in his revised discussion, Poster’s case history was “an example of how radical political views may in certain situations be less directly related to the family pattern of emotions than in the picture portrayed by Lasswell and taken as the starting point of my original analysis.” Consequently, Riesman cautioned against the tendency within books such as Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer or Milton Rokeach’s The Open and the Closed Mind to regard any form of political allegiance as a form of fanaticism; if anything, Riesman believed that there was something slightly odd, if not pathological, about those who exhibited no rudimentary political attachment. Unlike Harold Lasswell or Lionel Trilling, Riesman refused to consider politics merely “the dumping ground” for private emotional or familial troubles. For him, studies of the authoritarian personality did “not carry us far” in understanding the outlooks, personalities, and political orientations of most, if not all, Americans.⁷⁶ Consequently, Faces in the Crowd was full of hesitations, corrections, and open admissions of speculation, something Riesman found missing in The Authoritarian Personality.

The second misreading of his book that Riesman challenged was the tendency of hasty readers to equate the rise of other-directedness with everything fundamentally amiss in American culture. Riesman always fretted that the irony and speculation with which he wrote was misinterpreted as nostalgia for an inner-directed world steadily disappearing and as a mockery of the contemporary, other-directed society quickly emerging. In fact, his typology referred only to the mechanisms of conformity, internal and external, that directed individual behavior and not to the actual content or political orientation of any particular character type. All three types, tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed, possessed the capacity for adjusted, anomic, and autonomous behavior. As Riesman explained, “the achievement of autonomy presents quite different problems when it has to be won against a background of inner-direction or of other-direction.”⁷⁷ In fact, he argued that other-directed personalities, continuously attuned to an everyday world of social expectations and demands, possessed a greater sensitivity to others and a greater capacity for understanding individual development. Unlike Erich Fromm, Riesman believed that the loss of the primary ties of blood, soil, and nation allowed for forms of relatedness, care, and compassion missing from earlier forms of social organization and that the weakening of inner-directed restrictions helped to expand everyday notions of the good life. Indeed, Riesman was quite befuddled by reviewers who marked the book as a tragic tale: “Not that Americans today are more conformist—that has always been a profound misinterpretation; and it is not that today’s Americans are peculiar in wanting to impress others or be liked by them; people generally did and do. The difference lies in a greater resonance with others, a heightened self-consciousness about relations to people, and a widening of the circle of people with whom one wants to feel in touch.”⁷⁸ The other-directed self, in this sense, was more responsible and more responsive to the demands for recognition, affection, and love from others within the community of action. Such a self was present to others, for others, and with others in a way that previous character types were not.

Consequently, where high modernists saw only confusion, dread, and uncertainty as the life-denying consequences of recent social changes, Riesman saw mobility, flexibility, and openness as the life-affirming possibilities. As he explained, “Aldous Huxley’s acidly brilliant vision in Brave New World that advancing mechanization and organization require a graded retrogression in personality development may metaphorically describe what has happened to some people and some cultures, but it is no less true that standardization in machinery (once the earlier, more ferocious stages of industrialization are over) allows us greater rather than less variety in character structure.”⁷⁹ Riesman knew that character types were never a perfect fit; indeed, he seemed more interested in the ways in which individuals struggled and squirmed beneath the roles they had been assigned to play. Character was not destiny, the individual was not merely a replica of a particular social role, and personality was not reducible to a particular stage of psychological development. Willing to experiment with alternative roles in an endless struggle for autonomy, the other-directed personality was more self-aware and more self-conscious than his predecessors and therefore more able “to recognize and respect his own feelings, his own potentialities, [and] his own limitations.”⁸⁰ Although the other-directed personality was intruded upon by myriad visages and voices throughout the day, Riesman argued that social interaction was simultaneously threatening and benign, something to fret about and something to enjoy. Agreeing with his high modernist companions that the self was already constituted before it was self-constituted, he also argued that the self gained purpose, direction, and meaning through involvement with the projects of others and through face-to-face interactions with members of various peer groups.

In this sense, Riesman’s formulation of identity bore little resemblance to high modernist notions of aesthetic self-formation. In a series of articles published in early volumes of American Quarterly, including “Listening to Popular Music,” which he had begun in 1947 but did not finish until after the publication of The Lonely Crowd, and “Movies and Audiences,” which he coauthored with his wife, Evelyn, Riesman challenged the disdain with which highbrow critics dissected America’s cultural landscape.⁸¹ Rejecting arguments that the culture industry completely manipulated passive audiences, Riesman criticized high modernists for their failure to address the reception side of cultural consumption and for their inability to appreciate how the divisions of class, race, gender, and religion affected the ways in which the interpretation of goods took place. Borrowing from the findings of Paul Lazarsfeld and his fellow researchers at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, which demonstrated that the meaning and content digested by consumers from mass media was often translated, distorted, or inverted by local opinion leaders and local settings, Riesman argued that “the same or virtually the same popular culture materials” were utilized by American audiences “in radically different ways and for radically different purposes,” and consequently “it may then appear that it is the audience which manipulates the product (and hence the producer), no less than the other way around.”⁸² For instance, in his 1950 article “Listening to Popular Music,” Riesman challenged Theodor Adorno’s argument in “On Radio Music” concerning stereotyped listening habits and called for not merely an analysis of the content of popular music but an investigation into the actual audiences who consumed such cultural forms. As Riesman explained, “the danger exists then of assuming that the other audience, the audience one does not converse with, is more passive, more manipulated, more vulgar in taste, than may be the case.” He pointed to the abrupt shifts in popular music tastes over the years as examples of the music industry reacting to, instead of directing, consumer demands. Riesman distinguished between majority tastes (those who digested popular music uncritically and used it primarily for social purposes such as camaraderie or personal distinction) and minority tastes (those who rebelled against commercialized forms through the development of sophisticated standards of listening). Consequently, he encouraged researchers to examine not only the sites in which music and other cultural goods were consumed but the particular character structure of the individual who used these goods for divergent purposes. As he observed, “we cannot simply ask ‘who listens to what?’ before we find out who ‘who’ is and what ‘what’ is by means of a psychological and content analysis which will give us a better appreciation of the manifold uses, the plasticity of music for its variegated audiences” (193).

In this sense, Riesman was much more encouraged by the often idiosyncratic ways in which commodities were endowed with meaning and argued that the advantage other-directed personalities had over their inner-directed predecessors was precisely in the ways in which cultural consumption allowed for a rapid expansion of forms of identification. He challenged the tendency to divide leisure activities between active and passive forms, in particular, the tendency to promote “craftsmanlike leisure” activities as a way to recover the lost value of craft skill and to denounce the passive consumption of movies, popular music, novels, and magazines. Arguing that it was silly to try to convert a bobby-soxer into a craft hobbiest, Riesman believed that it was “a blind alley for the other-directed man to try to adapt his styles in leisure to those which grew out of an earlier character and an earlier social situation.”⁸³ In contrast to what he considered the “puritan” critique of mass culture, Riesman argued that the “great variety” of cultural products made possible by the standardization of the production process allowed for liberation from imposed characterological conformity. Riesman pointed in particular to Hollywood films as “liberating” agents—“even the fan who imitates the casual manner of Humphrey Bogart or the fearless energetic pride of Katharine Hepburn may in the process be emancipating himself or herself from a narrow-minded peer-group” (291). Where high modernists saw standardization, conformity, and manipulation Riesman saw complexity, discovery, and liberation. Of course Riesman was neither promoting anti-intellectualism nor espousing populist rhetoric; indeed, his defense of popular culture bore little resemblance to the uncritical democratization of popular tastes associated with certain forms of postmodernism in the 1960s. Instead, Riesman was trying to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy between elitism and populism, choosing instead to portray American culture not en masse but as divided into a series of audiences and tastes. This was the challenge he posed in his contribution to a Partisan Review symposium, “America and the Intellectuals.” He sensed within the highbrow rejection of American culture resentment against the success of the project of high modernism. As more and more members of the upper-class and middle-class strata became cultural aficionados themselves, intellectuals such as Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg began to “[fear] the shifts in middlebrow taste which might leave [them] in the position of liking something also liked by a New Yorker or Harper’s audience.”⁸⁴ Lingering battles over literary and artistic canons were, according to Riesman, merely signs of confusion on the part of high modernists over the surprising popularization of such works.