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social changes of recent decades, although it is also connected with the
dissolution of the religious beliefs upon which the traditional values
depended. In a relatively stable period, like the nineteenth century, the
individual could proceed successfully through life under the guidance of
the psychic gyroscope acquired in infancy. In our own age this is no
longer possible; survival depends upon responsiveness to a wider range
of signals. I suppose that few modern parents feel that they can pass
on moral guidance to their children with much sense of conviction
about its permanent validity.
Obviously the most important question is whether contemporary
man can regain a more positive sense of value without reverting to
the authoritarianism and the irrational religiosity from which our an–
cestors emergcd in earlier centuries. Otherwise, he is not likely to survive
in competition with those groups in our society who have remained at
an earlier stage of cultural evolution; birth-rate trends, for example,
suggest that the population of the United States a century hence will
consist mostly of Catholics and fundamentalists. To this question Mr.
Riesman gives what may be regarded as the traditional liberal answer,
although his specific formulation is derived from Erich Fromm. The
free individual should need neither gyroscope nor radar; he can trans–
cend both guilt and anxiety and become "autonomous" (in Fromm's
terminology, "spontaneous," or "productive"). In a concluding section
Mr. Reisman discusses what social changes are desirable in order to
encourage the growth of autonomy.
As a social program this does not seem very adequate, and Mr.
Riesman does not succeed in conveying much sense of conviction about
it. Fromm's main example of a "productive" person is the creative
artist. Obviously anything that encourages the individual with creative
potentialities to resist the pressure of the mass mind is good. But such
individuals are never likely to be more than a tiny minority, and a
society in which they became numerous would probably (like ancient
Athens and Renaissance Italy) lose the cohesion necessary for survival.
Creative individuals are usually egotistical and unresponsive to social
discipline. Fromm's "productive" man (like the natural man of Rousseau
and eighteenth-century liberalism) is based on the hypothesis of an
underlying harmony between private wishes and group interest; in pro–
portion as men become spontaneous, he supposes, they will be moti–
vated by love for other people. Such a hypothesis seems highly utopian
when contrasted with the Freudian view of a necessary and tragic
tension between the emotional drives of the individual and the require–
ments of social discipline (so that some degree of neurosis is an inev-
