134
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
feel the need to present themselves as hard and realistic." The chief
point of Riesman's article and many of his recent political writings was
that he wished to change the debate about the cold war, which he saw
as not a simple contest between America and Russia but as "the failure
of a way of life." He took a radically critical position on the problem
of Germany and on nuclear testing; he seemed almost a pacifist.
All of this is surprising from the man who had so much disliked,
as Norman Birnbaum says, "the pretensions of spiritual heroism," and
who had reserved "an acerbity, uncommon for him, for those who do
manifest a critical politics." Riesman had shown a suspiciously agile gift
for accomodation to post-war America. One might ask oneself about the
new pacificism, the desperate worry about nuclear war, the need to
examine again the Soviet view on certain points-was all this just
another quick shifting of the gears, another finger testing the wind?
Perhaps the "hard anti-communists" would name it just that, but the
answer would depend upon which direction you felt the wind coming
from.
It
is hard to imagine popularity will follow such serious distaste
for so many of our national attitudes.
The present activities of Riesman, his Pauline conversion, so to
speak, bear a relation to his work as a sociologist; they change his pos–
sibilities even more than he seems to realize. This new book,
Culture and
Social Character,
points up the curious nature of Riesman's career.
First of all, his every essence seems to contain a high degree of restless–
ness, a vigilant need for self-examination and a natural tendency to
revision. The mere idea of collecting essays about his work treats him
as if he were a completed story, like, for instance, Max Weber. And, of
course, it is not only that his professional career is far from finished, but
that his past work is constantly being altered and revised and, because of
the way he arrives at his opinions, being put out of order by history.
Time, even a very short time, makes a great difference. For instance,
there is a new preface to the new paperback edition of
The L onely
Crowd,
a new preface to the paperback edition of Riesman's
Veblen,
a
"reconsideration" (written with his collaborator, Nathan Glazer) of
The Lonely Crowd,
appended to this present collection of essays. Even
all these second thoughts still do not give a sufficient idea of the
actual changes and shifts in Riesman's position. In the preface to
the new paperback edition of
The Lonely Crowd
he explains some of his
previous optimism in the following way: "We were writing at a time
when the miasma that settled in the land during the era of the Cold
War and the Eisenhower Administration was not yet at hand, com-
