As depicted in The Lonely Crowd 19 years ago, Americans were all too well adjusted to the gray-flannel goals of "success." That is no longer so. David Riesman, who wrote the book with two colleagues and added its title to the American idiom, now finds that after two decades "the earlier tendency toward glib self-satisfaction" has been succeeded by "an atmosphere of what seems to me extravagant self-criticism."
Writing in Encounter, Sociologist Riesman argues that the children of the lonely crowdwhether protesting the war or campaigning for Eugene McCarthyreject adjustment to the mores of their affluent elders as "immoral compromise."...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
