The Lonely Crowd, Revisited

Up on the main page, we’ve got a monster of an article about David Riesman’s largely forgotten masterwork of sociology, The Lonely Crowd. You hear echoes of the book every so often if you read your Brooks carefully, but by and large, the book’s insights and descriptive vocabulary have largely been lost on our generation.

Douglas Robertson argues that both Brooks (on the right) and Robert Putnam (on the left) largely misunderstand the lessons of The Lonely Crowd, and therefore misapply its theories in each crafting their nostalgic portraits of a bygone American era. This is necessarily so, he argues, because we are all today—Brooks and Putnam included—increasingly cut off from even the possibility of living “inner-directed” lives, and are poorer for it.

The article has many great passages goring sacred cows, and is well worth your time and effort. One of my favorites:

Did not the young American men who fought in the Second World War collectively comprise “the Greatest Generation”?; was not every man Jack of them a virtual Yankee paladin wholly dedicated to his do-or-die crusade to save not only Europe and Japan but the entire world from the menace of totalitarian fascism? Apparently not; rather they were at best, a passel of phlegmatic of Average Joes who had to be roused from their sleepy political torpor into fighting, and who after the war’s conclusion “bring scarcely a trace of moral righteousness into their political participation [and] ‘ain’t mad at nobody.’”

There’s much more where that came from.