Elizabeth Hardwick
RIESMAN CONSIDERED
David Riesman's collection of essays,
Individualism Recon–
sidered, '
establishes this writer as a novel fact, a kind of invention whose
value may be uncertain but whose conspicuous existence has to be faced.
Riesman has come upon the scene like the bubble house, television,
cinemascope; that is to say he has been a possibility for some years but
was not actually on the market until fairly recently. Expected, needed,
he stepped forth all smiles to meet the call. His role is difficult to
name-is he a teacher, psychologist, sociologist, historian, philosopher?
But
that does not mean it is easy to escape his notions and effect. A
traveler returned from afar might well, for a quick readjustment to the
local intellectual life, read
The Lonely Crowd
in a hurry and set aside
the latest works of literature for his leisure.
Moderate, energetic, Riesman's originality is to have chosen the
utter present. His sheer contemporaneity, his briskly marching in the
forward ranks-by comparison with this, many a younger man appears
a bit sallow and run-down by the world of comics, television, pop tunes,
"crazy" teen-agers, all the raw diet Riesman thrives upon. His fate is
this present postwar decade of prosperity; the two suit each other; the
man, we feel, has been waiting around for the time. There is often
here too the atmosphere of a new administration after twenty years of
reform, lamentation and national doubt.
But
struck as one is by the timeliness of Riesman's references, there
is also a perplexing sadness about him. He is a cheerfully curious and
lively observer, as free of "liberal piety" as one of the teen-agers he is
so much interested in; yet he has his secret sharer, a tortured image
hidden below the deck, the outcast (or rather the
outmoded
in Ries–
man's case) whose claims make even this bustling man uncomfortably
itchy. Riesman is, for that reason, a somewhat nervous and uncertain
thinker. There is a great deal in his works of "however" and "neverthe–
less" and "on the other hand it must be remembered"-expressions of
1 Individualism Reconsidered.
The Free Press. $6.00
