DAVID BARBOZA
An Interview with David Riesman
DB:
One of the most significant of your many contributions, I think, has
been your commentary on the antinomian character of the 1960s. You
have suggested that the countercultural pressures of that era seem to be
part of the reason why America is suffering now from an extended bout
of cultural relativism. If I have read you correctly, you have recently ar–
gued that since the publication in 1950 of your book
The Lonely Crowd,
the pendulum has swung too far. Bland conformity has given way to an
arrogant individualism, characterized by a victim mentality and by polit–
ical correctness. You suggest that, in a sense, in American society the
"lonely crowd" has given way to the "angry mob."
Of course,
The Lonely Crowd
is one of your most famous books. Let's
begin with how you came to write it. Didn't Erich Fromm, who I be–
lieve also influenced you in your personal life, have something to do with
it?
DR:
Well, I hadn't had any previous contact with social psychology. And
Fromm had an influence on my book because he presented a version of
psychoanalytic social psychology that was not Freudian but was best illus–
trated in a book he wrote with Michael Maccoby,
Social Character in a
Mexican Village.
Fromm had also written a book with Ernest Schachtel,
who later taught at the New School. They had done a study in the
twenties on the German working class in which they discovered among
people who were nominally socialist a potential for an authoritarian, and
therefore fascist, affiliation. Fromm was a dissident member of what's now
calJed the Frankfurt School. I realJy gained the idea of social character
from him.
The first year that I was at Yale working on what became
The Lonely
Crowd,
the Yale anthropology department put on an interesting experi–
ment. I attended a seminar at which two Yale anthropologists were pre–
senting material about the island ofTruk and trying to determine whether
Fromm could say something about the social character of the Trukese.
They were very skeptical about whether he could. Ralph Linton chaired
Editor's Note: This interview took place in Winchester, Massachusetts, in the
summer of 1993.
