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Riesman thinks that the best roads to personal autonomy lead through "play," meaning the whole area of life that is not getting-a-living work. A man who becomes competent to consume the arts, entertainment or sport with his own tastes and judgment learns there the meaning of competence. If he learns to care about art, entertainment or sport, he learns what it means to care. He can (although he need not) return to politics as another and much better kind of consumer—connected with it by his competence and emotional involvement.
From such models, from men who respect and try to follow daydreams about their own lives, society may learn again to make social daydreams, those models called Utopias. The utopianism of the 19th century, bold and fruitful as much of it was, tended to confuse dream and reality. When some calamitous realities of the 20th century exploded that kind of utopianism, people were frightened away from any social dreaming. But they need it to clarify their values in the real world, to define their ends. Says Riesman: "The fervently repeated American cold-war formula that the end does not justify the means tends to become more than a wholly proper critique of Soviet ruthlessness; it encourages us to forget that we do need ends, precisely to justify, and criticize, our means. The contradiction between ends and means, the inescapable tension, is what Marxism and like ideologies pretend to evaporate."
The Nerve of Failure. Riesman has counseled his fellow intellectuals to stop worrying about whether their judgments are approved in the market place or the ballot box, to pursue the truth as independent men, affecting society as models of autonomy, not as victors on this public issue or that. He notes that the young TV audience tells the "good guys" from the "bad guys" simply because the "good guys" are winning. This he deplores.
No defeatist, no pessimist, he urges intellectuals to cultivate "the nerve of failure," to live with the possibility of disapproval and defeat. Neither in life nor in politics is this a formula for victory. But in both it may be a help in reducing numbness and restoring zest—which is the appropriate style of freedom.
*The Lonely Crowd (373 pp.)—with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer—Yale ($4). Others: Faces in the Crowd (741 pp.)—Yale ($5); Thorstein Veblen (209 pp.)—Scribner ($2.75); The Lonely Crowd (349 pp.)—Doubleday (95¢); Individualism Reconsidered (507 pp.) —Free Press ($6).