RIESMAN CONSIDERED
555
Veblen's queerness is somethi g of a pose, a temper tantrum, the clever
peasant's way of clogging up the works; Freud's gloom is cold mutton
from old Vienna. But in the end it is all well. After his lengthy
animadversions, Riesman redeems his men with a flourish. "In fact,
it is just Veblen's irreverence which we stand in need of in a day when
total commitment is being asked of everyone." And Freud: "Having
made these criticisms of Freud's view of religion, I think we must grant
his tremendous contribution to our understanding of it." The ship rocks,
one is vaguely distressed, but the forward course is maintained.
Individualism R econsidered
is certainly an impressive volume,
thirty essays, many of considerable length and dealing with a large
number of subjects. Still, the work is very often of that peculiar glassy
brightness which leaves one in a mood of discomfort. There are many
awkwardly written passages, reminding one all too readily of sociology
books: "Athletic prowess may be declining as an unequivocal assurance
of status, and certainly no other prowess can substitute for interpersonal
competence as a guarantor of social success." High culture is some–
times recommended in jazzy tones, like an effective singing commercial.
Those who read books are called "hard-cover men" and are to be
distinguished from their soft, light-reading brothers. "Yet it is precisely
on the good-sized, hard-cover book that the bookworm is nourished. He
cannot bury himself in a moving image. . . . He is a creature who
needs wide margins. For he tries to create amid all the pressures of
contemporary culture a kind of 'social space' around himself, an area
of privacy. He does this by tieing himself in his thinking and feeling
to sources of some relative permanence-hence impersonal-while re–
maining somewhat impermeable to the fluctuating tastes, panics, and
most menacing of all, the appeals to be 'adjusted' from his contempo–
raries."
From such thoughts and from the title of the book, one is urged
to conclude that Riesman is on the side of "individualism." And yet
it is a "vamety" of individualism and not the pure thing we are used
to. Its most personal note is not the appeal for culture or "autonomy"
but that part of Riesman which most yearns for complete acceptance
of our world, for a good opinion of ourselves, an admission of well–
being. This is reasonable therapy, but it may not pass as history or
philosophy.
Muckrakers, reformers, expatriates, pessimists, sectarians-Riesman
dreads these as a star dreads a meeting with a has-been. This writer
is not so much a conservative as an optimist: he wants to enjoy the
