David Riesman
David Riesman was a prominent American sociologist and educator known for his influential works on American character and society. Born into an intellectual family, he graduated from Harvard University in 1931 and later earned a law degree from Harvard Law School. Riesman served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis before embarking on an academic career that took him to several prestigious institutions, including Columbia University and the University of Chicago, ultimately joining Harvard's faculty in 1958.
He gained national recognition with the publication of "The Lonely Crowd" in 1950, co-authored with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, which explored the shifting dynamics of American society through the lens of three personality types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. Riesman’s work often reflected on the implications of modernity, noting how advancements in society could lead to a loss of individuality. His later research focused on the impact of societal changes on higher education, culminating in "The Perpetual Dream" in 1978, which examined how the youth movements of the 1960s prompted significant curricular reforms in colleges and universities. Through his studies, Riesman contributed to a deeper understanding of the interplay between social structures and individual identity in contemporary America.
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David Riesman
- Born: September 22, 1909
- Birthplace: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Died: May 10, 2002
- Place of death: Binghamton, New York
Biography
Born into an intellectual family, David Riesman was the son of a physician and medical school professor, David Riesman, Sr., and his wife, Eleanor Fleisher Riesman. After graduating from Harvard University in 1931, Riesman continued his studies at Harvard Law School, where he received the LL.B. degree in 1934. Upon passing the bar examination in both Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., the following year, he became a clerk in the office of Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis.
After a year of legal practice from 1936 to 1937, he became a professor of law, first at the University of Buffalo and then at Columbia University. He joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1946, remaining there as professor of the social sciences until he was appointed Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard in 1958, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Married to Evelyn Hasting Thompson, an art historian and writer, he was the father of four children.
Riesman gained national prominence with the publication in 1950 of a sociological study, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, on which he collaborated with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney. In this book, the authors attempted to assess American society in terms of three general types: tradition-directed, inner-directed, and other-directed. They related these types to populations trends and concluded that at mid-twentieth century, the United States was typified by the third type of emphasis.
Riesman continued his study with the publication in 1952 of a sequel to The Lonely Crowd, a collaboration with Glazer entitled Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics. In both books, the authors investigate how the price of living in a scientifically and technically advanced society makes life easier for workers but also causes a loss of individuality. This observation presaged some of the social upheaval that would erupt in American society in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Riesman observed that dynamic leaders, people like John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford, would, in upcoming societies, be replaced by teams of people devoted to collective decision-making. As the workplace demanded less-arduous labor, people would have increasing periods of leisure, but this could be a negative rather than a positive if they were not steered toward developing satisfying avocations.
Riesman’s greatest contributions in his later years were his sociological investigations of American higher education. The very changes in the American workplace that he wrote about in his earlier studies had a profound effect on education at all levels, but particularly on higher education, where the emphasis shifted from achieving broad, humanistic educational goals to an increased emphasis on more narrowly focused curricula that would satisfy specific, often quite limited, vocational ends. The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (1978), written with Gerald Grant, investigates how the youth movement of the 1960’s forced colleges and universities to alter curricula drastically and to offer experimental programs.