If, as Sidney Hook wrote recently, the two great semantic beacons of our time are the terms “transition” and “crisis,” then a third term is perhaps necessary to capture the special quality of this transition and this crisis. That term—the third semantic beacon—is “alienation.” It expresses a unique facet of the crisis of our times: the widespread belief that there has been a revolutionary change in the psychological condition of man, reflected in the individual’s feeling of isolation, homelessness, insecurity, restlessness, anxiety.

It is not hard to find evidence of the agonized awareness that man’s presumed oneness with his fellows and with the world is no more: of a sense of the splitting asunder of what was once together, the breaking of the seamless mould in which values, behavior, expectations, were once cast into interlocking forms. Housman’s plaintive lines, “a stranger and afraid, in a world I never made,” appear in a hundred guises in titles, articles, books, and book reviews, a spontaneous mass projection of an underlying discomfort. The life and works of the most widely-discussed writers of our time (Joyce, Kafka, Proust) are interpreted by critics as paradigms of alienation. The re-establishment of the unity of medieval life becomes one of the most popular goals of modern intellectuals, together with, on the part of others, the establishment of a new unity through the replacing of modern complex forms of social organization (Paul Goodman, Dwight Macdonald). Perhaps half of the twelve contributors to this magazine’s series on “The Crisis of the Individual,” though they represent a variety of traditions and disciplines, have interpreted it as a crisis caused by alienation. And while theologians (Reinhold Niebuhr, for example) see alienation as a permanent condition of man, and not peculiarly a modern problem, the widespread appeal their theories have achieved just at this time might indicate the contrary.

In this problem, as in others, there is an interesting interplay between “science” and “art,” objectivity and intuition. In the case of alienation, we have one problem that was raised first by social science, and which the writers—or at least the critics—have been relatively late in discovering. In one form or another, Marx, Durkheim, Veblen, Weber, Tonnies, Simmel, Cooley, G. H. Mead, were aware of the existence of a psychological problem related in some way to the shift from a “simple” to a “complex” society (they labeled these two poles of social organization differently, but I think they had the same phenomena in mind). They framed terms and ideas for the better understanding of this psychological revolution —”anomie,“ “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity, “primary” and “secondary” group relations, “traditional” and “rational” society, “Gemeinschaft“ and “Gesellschaft.“ As a result, sociologists, too, take part in the growing chorus that discusses alienation—what it is, what has caused it, what can be done about it.

We propose to examine here a number of recent articles by sociologists bearing in one way or another on alienation. The specific contributions of psychoanalysts, theologians, literary critics, novelists, artists have been temporarily left aside—not to mention the fact that the most promising contributions of sociology itself, in the work of such men as C. Wright Mills on the white-collar worker and Robert K. Merton on a housing-project community, have not yet been published.

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Daniel Bell, of the College of the University of Chicago, begins his article “A Parable of Alienation” (Jewish Frontier, November 1946) by retelling an incident from Koestler’s book on Spain: awaiting capture by the Fascists on a hill outside Malaga, Koestler is suddenly aware only of his presence on that hill on a bright sunny day: everything else—the war, his imminent danger—seems remote and unreal. “Most living today,” Mr. Bell continues, “has that blank awareness that gripped Koestler. The men at war had a constant feeling of what am I doing here, where did all this come from? . . . that feeling is not a transient but a fundamental experience of our time. People move about, in the huge caverns that modern technology has constructed, with little sense of relationship to meaningful events. . . . This quality of being lost is the most pervasive symptom of the alienation of modern man.”

Behind this symptom, and explaining it in Mr. Bell’s view (he leans heavily on the work of Professor Benjamin Nelson of the University of Chicago, and Max Weber), is the breakdown of a simpler way of life. The earlier pattern was characterized by an intimate relation with others—a relation based on seeing them as kin, not as strangers; spontaneous acts of work and play which were their own reward; adherence to traditional moral values that gave meaning to life. But “emerging capitalism found that ‘brotherhood,’ or the traditional ways, hindered the rational pursuit of economic ends.” The attack on the traditional values, with their “irrational” distinction between the “brother” (the member of the kin-group—family, clan, tribe) and the “other” (the outsider), was carried on in alliance with another moral code: that of the Protestant ethic, which glorified rational economic activity regardless of whether it was directed against brother or other. In time, this religious justification of the ascetic devotion to work for the glory of God gave way to a “naturalistic” justification of unrestricted pursuit of economic gain for the greater comfort of man.

Whatever the justification, the opening of the restricted, sacred area of inner family relations, in which tradition had hitherto ruled, to that aggressiveness, predatory and otherwise, which had previously been directed only outward, has had a devastating effect on man. The rational organization and transformation of society for the exploitation of nature and man (modern technology, the division of labor, vast enterprises, industrial cities, business and political bureaucracies) has banished brotherhood and brotherly relations from the functioning of modern society. But man yearns desperately for their restoration. “That yearning has been skillfully realized by the Nazis in their call for Gemeinschaft, by the Communists in their cry for Comradeship. However warped, these doctrines are an affirmation of the need for brotherhood which the world has denied.” In short, the destruction of the cosy nest, the kinship group, in which men once lived out their lives and in which spontaneous personal relations were possible, is at the root of the experience of alienation.

Within this larger framework Bell presents the specific drama of the alienation of the young Jewish intellectual of immigrant family. Here too, there is the contrast between the warm, intimate hearth and the outer world. But his psychological wounds are not caused so much by the invasion of the domain of brotherhood by the principle of otherhood: rather, they are caused by the need to find a place in a different world—the Gentile world. This leads him to question the assumptions and values incorporated in the ritual and accepted behavior of traditional Jewish family life (the rejection of the assumptions means the rejection of unconditional love). And the Jewish intellectual is also affected by the way in which the outer world reacts upon and transforms the world in which he grew up. Significantly, the same story is told in Irving Howe’s “The Lost Young Intellectual,” in the October 1946 COMMENTARY: even the same holiday, Passover, is evoked as a “manifestation of the concreteness of family love” spoken of by Mr. Bell.

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But is the alienation experienced by people in general under modern capitalism really the same thing as the alienation felt by the individual Jewish intellectual? The two processes of alienation, superficially quite similar, are, it seems to me, actually very different. First, note that the general process of alienation, as Mr. Bell describes it, stretches over a lengthy and indeterminate time-span: it certainly goes as far back as the Protestant revolution, and perhaps as far back as Neolithic society—for only there, after all, did the contrast between brother and other exhibit its pristine sharpness.

The specific process of Jewish alienation here under consideration is much more limited historically. It came into existence only when the Jewish family left the ghetto and was transplanted into Western culture. When we come to the children of the second generation of immigrants in America, Messrs. Bell’s and Howe’s analysis already does not hold. It is true, of course, that as long as they are considered an alien body in society, no matter how attenuated their cultural differences, Jews will, to some extent, be alienated and view society from the outside. Nevertheless, in the acculturated second-generation family, the chief key to the psychological processes involved is no longer the conflict between the culture of the immigrant family and that of the outside world.

It seems to me that the problem on which Messrs. Bell and Howe have focused is a passing phase of acculturation: a problem of transition, the intensity of which the passage of time must reduce.

It is when the larger problem of alienation begins to operate upon the perfectly acculturated (or “assimilated”) descendants of immigrants—even those who came over on the Mayflower—that they begin to feel the poignancy of being lost, of their inability to form lasting intimate relationships, to recapture brotherhood. For the fact is—and this point is not made as clearly as it might be in Mr. Bell’s presentation—that the larger problem of alienation which he discusses is not created by the transition as such from a simple to a complex society, but by the social structure itself, what we call contemporary capitalism. After all, the transition itself was completed in the chief centers of Western culture one or two centuries ago, yet we feel that the psychological problems of society are only now reaching a crescendo of intensity. Thus it may well be that the chief element in the alienation felt by the Jew is the homelessness felt by all men in our giant industrial system.

There are, then, two kinds of alienation in Mr. Bell’s discussion. One is the alienation of passage from one culture to another, or from one form of social life to another; this is the less severe form, and the completion of the cultural passage signifies its disappearance. The other is a systemic alienation involved in modern social organization as we know it: complex, largescale industrial society (not “capitalist” society as such, perhaps; the same problems may exist in Russia). We need to explain just how our society in its present mature form operates to burden its members, even though it is the only society they have known all their lives, with the most devastating psychological disabilities. If we approach alienation in this way, it becomes, paralleling the case of hysteria, less a description of a single specific symptom than an omnibus of psychological disturbances having a similar root cause—in this case, modern social organization.

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It is this form of alienation that has been brilliantly handled by Arnold W. Green, of the University of Pennsylvania, in a series of articles which have recently appeared in psychological and sociological journals. (“The Middle-Class Male Child and Neurosis,” American Sociological Review, February 1946; “The Sociological Analysis of Fromm and Horney,” American journal of Sociology, May 1946; “Social Values and Psychotherapy,” Journal of Personality, March 1946. Earlier articles directly relevant to our main theme are: “The ‘Cult of Personality’ and Sexual Relations,” Psychiatry, August 1941, and “Duplicity,” Psychiatry, November 1943.)

Mr. Green is by no means unique in his approach: it is by now a commonplace to say that psychological disturbances must be related to factors in the social order; and the works of Karen Homey, who has popularized this approach, have become best-sellers. But the question remains of finding out just how modern life produces alienation or neurosis, of tracing its strains and stresses in their different impacts on different groups in society. As Mr. Green says in his criticism of the work of Erich Fromm—who, in that modern classic, Escape from Freedom, explained the psychological condition of modern man by the breakdown of medieval primary ties: “The Protestant ethic, with all it implies, was of unquestionable significance as a causal link in the development of the modern obsession with wealth and success. But in itself it is inadequate to explain that development, and it is certainly inadequate to explain, as a directly channeled historical development, any putative psychological condition of ‘modern man.’“

Mr. Green points out that the Protestant ethic has undergone many and varied vicissitudes in the four hundred years of its existence. In America, where it was coupled with the frontier tradition, it worked quite differently than in England and Germany. It is not enough, Mr. Green concludes, to relate the psychological state of people today to a general cultural background: “Since individuals interact within a small segment of a differentiated society, and are inoculated with the specialized values of their various segments as well as the general-cultural values,” it is the analysis of the typical experience of individuals in each of those segments that is necessary if we are to get to the specific causes of alienation or neurosis. (Mr. Green uses the term neurosis; we can equate it with alienation for our purposes, since he applies it, as we do alienation, to the whole body of psychological disabilities that can be understood through social structure.)

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In his article “The Middle Class Male Child and Neurosis,” Mr. Green carries through the analysis of one of these social segments— the white, native-born, urban, Protestant, college-educated middle class—with a precision remarkable for its isolation of specific causal factors. One of its chief merits is its astute detailed description of the mechanisms of child-rearing by which our society mass-produces the “alienated” personality of our era.

The father in a family of this social segment is characteristically a white-collar worker. “As a salesman, office worker, minor bureaucrat, or professional man, his job techniques revolve around manipulating the personality of others, instead of tools. . . . He tries to use his associates as means to further his career; in fact, he has himself been conditioned to view his associates, education, hobbies, intellectual interests, in terms of their possible value to his career. . . . He has, then, a well-developed tendency to view his relations with others in terms of what he, as a mobile, displaced [in the sense of having no fixed status] person can get out of them.

“Yet the modern middle-class father cannot use his child either in the new sense of manipulating others to his own advantage, nor, be it noted, in the ways available to him in the past.”

The child cannot be put to work on the farm, or sent into a factory to add to the family’s income. Nor can it any longer be considered as a form of insurance against old age. On the other hand, the demands of the child on the parents, and the liabilities it represents for them, have become enormous. It requires funds for an ever-lengthening period of education and preparation to fit it for the rigors of middle-class life, and these expenditures come at a time when all the father’s energy and funds should be going into his career. The child interferes with the pursuit of pleasure—seen by Mr. Green, as by Mr. Bell, as a prime value in modern life—because modern, commercialized recreation is designed for the individual or couple, not for the family. The child interferes with the roles of husbands and wives as companions, which now increasingly replace their older roles as patriarchal father and housewife-mother (such roles lose their meaning outside the framework of a family economy—the family farm, the family workshop, the family business). The spread of scientific child-care techniques brings with it further heavy duties and responsibilities toward the child, and further curbs the traditional rights of parents.

The modern middle-class mother is said to have gained “freedom” because she now has a variety of careers open to her, and because gadgets have reduced household drudgery. But the very fact that she has been taught to see a career as possible for her, and the fact that marriage and children generally mean giving it up, creates a new conflict and a new source of regret and frustration. And the training of middle-class women for careers, half-hearted though it is (how secondary to marriage this career business is in the minds of middle-class parents is wonderfully demonstrated in an article by Mirra Komarovsky, “Cultural Contradictions and Sex Roles,” American Journal of Sociology, November 1946), leaves them technically and psychologically unprepared for household tasks. The Victorian or peasant housewife found her work “part of a well-integrated system of household and community activities”; for the modern middle-class housewife, such tasks become increasingly unbearable because they are isolated from social activities and have no valued place in her ideals. By and large, the modern woman has no respect for herself in the role of a housewife.

“And so it is inevitable that the child shall be viewed with some degree of ambivalence by both father and mother, for he represents a direct interference with most of the dominant values and compulsions of the modern middle class: career, social and economic success, hedonistic enjoyment.”

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In Such a situation, Green argues, the child undergoes a process of “personality absorption”: “physical and emotional blanketing of the child, bringing about a slavish dependence on the parents.” For “the mother has little to do, in or out of the home; she is her single child’s constant companion. Modern ‘scientific child care’ enforces a constant supervision and diffused worrying over the child’s health . . . [and] ego development.” (Even the play group is at first, in an urban setting, dominated by the mothers.) When we realize that the child can only form his conception of himself on the basis of others’ images of him, and his absorption of those images, and that the only significant image that he possesses is that gained from his mother and father, we begin to see what the modern middle-class family has done to change personality. By preventing the child from acquiring a variety of images of himself from varied sources, it prevents the growth of an independent self. In such a context, says Mr. Green, the demand for the restoration of “spontaneity” may be meaningless—there is nothing spontaneous to be restored.

The other significant factor in personality absorption is what Green calls the “love-complex of our time.” Love is now considered—for various reasons—almost the only valid relationship between men and women, parents and children. Parents no longer receive any economic benefit from their children, or any feeling of fulfilling cosmic law or supernatural commands; love then becomes their sole reason for having children. This heightened “love,” and their awareness of how much they have given up for their children, makes them feel justified in demanding in compensation their children’s love. Current writers on child problems assume that love is a biological necessity. Green denies this: “The child’s need for love is experienced precisely because he has been conditioned to need it” (and to feel that no other attitude towards his parents will compensate them for their sacrifices).

What more effective discipline of the child, in this situation, than the threat of withdrawing love? “To the extent that a child’s personality has been absorbed, he will be thrown into a panic by this sort of treatment, and develop guilt-feelings to prevent further trouble.” (And “trouble” in the urban-apartment environment is so defined as to include the child’s normal motor and exploratory activity.)

Personality absorption in itself is not neurosis-producing: it becomes important when the child is being prepared for the same kind of struggle up the status-ladder that his father is engaged in. Even before he is aware of it, his mother begins to rate his achievements in talking, walking, etc. against those of the neighbor’s children. His father uses a modified form of the love-withdrawal threat—the attack on self-esteem—to force the child into at least the attempt to compete. “But effective competition demands a certain degree of independence, firmness of purpose, perhaps aggressiveness. . . . The child is not able to establish an integrated self-image. Propitiation has meant obedience and ‘love’ for the parents, leading to a compulsive repression of self-will. But he soon discovers that propitiation, in the sense of meeting new parental expectations, means exhibiting independence, self-assertiveness, aggressiveness, outside the home.” (Just so—but the other way around!—for the middle-class girl. Mirra Komarovsky reports in her study of college girls that signs of superior scholarship and “masculine” aggressiveness are approved by parents—up to a point. Then they advise slowing down, restraining the drive for achievement, or otherwise prospective husbands will be scared away.)

The core of the problem is not so much the need to play the contradictory roles of submissiveness and aggression, or to shift from one to the other. It is that the child-rearing conditioning for the role of loving submission never succeeds in developing the kind of personality able to play the aggressive role without anxiety and guilt-feelings. Nor, on the other hand, can the middle-class child remain submissive, in the face of parental and social pressures to be aggressive, without anxiety and guilt-feelings. “This is a key to much of his contradictory and self-blocking behavior: his desire to be the last man in the last regiment and his desire to conquer the world; his demand that everyone love him, and his settled conviction that no one could love a person as base as he; his inability to erect a hierarchy of values; his endless debate over the value of his own goals. . . . He is embraced by a psychological Iron Maiden: any lunge forward or backward only impales him more securely on the spikes.”

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To Be fair to Mr. Green, we should again point out that he does not offer this as the experience of “modern man” in general, but as an admittedly extreme—though typical— case in a certain segment of the population, the white-collar middle class. Neither is it a treatment of alienation or psychological malaise in general; rather, it claims only to indicate the background of certain neurotic trends. Other such personality portraits taken from other strata of the population, and the extension of these to include later behavior and experience in adult life (to complete the circle that began with the father as a white-collar worker), as well as empirical research, are necessary before we can say how significant or universal the history he describes is.

Nevertheless, one must note that the major social and economic trends of our day increase the number of people who are middle-class (at least in consciousness), native-born, urban— and therefore increasingly subject to the kind of conditioning Arnold Green describes, granting his analysis is correct. Such trends include urbanization and the impact of urban values and urban forms of living on the rural hinterland, the increase in the number of white-collar and service jobs, and the decline in the number of tool-using jobs, the acculturation of immigrant groups and the shutting-off of the immigation that automatically replenished the working class (which means, in this country, that the latter become increasingly middle-class in culture), the increasing difficulties in raising status in an economy that has stopped expanding (war, though, opens up a tremendous new avenue for status and success), and the heightened awareness that the economy is in decline.

It is this big-city, middle-class experience, not that of the Jewish immigrant family, unfortunately, that seems to me to be the model for our time. The East-European Jewish immigrant family was, at least for one generation, largely a working-class family. The rapid rise of the Jew in the class order may have been due less to a middle-class psychology, as some writers have assumed, or to a cultural tradition, than to the fact that they were concentrated in an industry that was relatively quickly and strongly organized, and, as semi-skilled workers, entered into American society somewhat higher up on the scale than the other Southern and Eastern European ethnic groups. As common as the middle-class attitude of “my son shouldn’t work in the shop” was the somewhat different feeling that parents should not slave to send their children to college and medical school.

In the Jewish immigrant family, the social position and expectations and the values held by both mother and father gave little basis for the devastating kind of social conditioning Green describes. Green says—and I think this applies to the Jewish immigrant family, too—“Respect, not love, is the tie that binds the peasant family.” The other side of respect was good-humored awareness of limitations, it might even have been contempt; but the other side of love —when the object of love is parent and sole model for one’s self—may be the sort of crippling neurosis that is one face of alienation.

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Some rather interesting factual support of Arnold Green’s analysis of middle-class child-rearing has recently appeared. Evelyn Mills Duvall, in “Conceptions of Parenthood” (American Journal of Sociology, November, 1946), reports on an experiment in which she asked 433 mothers to list ten attributes of a “good” child and of a “good” mother. The most typical response of the middle-class mothers is: a good child is one who loves and confides in his parents. The most typical response of the lower-class mothers is: a good child is one who keeps clean and neat, and who obeys and respects his parents. And the middle-class idea of a good mother is one who, for example, sees to the emotional well-being of her child, helps him develop security, provides for his mental growth, gives love and affection. Not so the ideal lower-class mother in this study: she just keeps house and takes care of the child physically.

Another study, by Allison Davis and Robert J. Havighurst (“Social Class and Color Differences in Child-Rearing,” American Sociological Review, December 1946), tries to get at the actual child-rearing practices of 200 mothers. They report: “Middle-class families are more rigorous than lower-class families in their training of children for feeding and cleanliness [toilet] habits. They generally begin training earlier. Furthermore, middle-class families place more emphasis on the early assumption of responsibility for the self and on individual achievement. Finally, middle-class families are less permissive in their regimen. They require their children to take naps at a later age, to be in the house at night earlier. . . .” The middle-class child is subjected to “influences that make a child an orderly, conscientious, responsible, and tame person.” But also a frustrated person: three times as many white middle-class children and twice as many Negro middle-class children suck their thumbs as compared with their lower-class counterparts. (But this, perhaps, is directly related to the fact that fewer middle-class children are breast fed.) There is exactly the same statistical disproportion between middle class and lower class in the numbers who masturbate—but the authors are not too sure the lower-class mothers understood this question.

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The problem of “what can be done” has been approached by sociologists on a number of levels; a few words on what they propose will enable us to tie up our discussion.

Since most sociologists have seen the psychological problem as a product of the transition from the simple traditionalist society,¹ the obvious, though naive “solution” is to propose the restoration of the formative institutions of the earlier society. Margaret Park Redfield (“The American Family: Consensus and Freedom,” American Journal of Sociology, November 1946), for example, suggests restoring the traditional functions of the family by such measures as rebuilding cities to create smaller and more intimate communities, establishment of community festivals and ceremonials, “the relaxation of the pressure from commercial interests to throw away the old and buy the new,” learning to enjoy family life, saving family pictures and records, etc. The full implications of such a program might also involve moving back to the caves and worshiping natural objects, which no one—not even Dr. Redfield, I think—is willing to advocate. Worse than naive is the proposal of Professor Carle C. Zimmerman of Harvard that we save the family by a billboard campaign. This only leads one to wonder why Harvard, in particular, should harbor three headline-making calamity-howlers (the other two are Pitirim Sorokin and Earnest Hooton).

On a much more sophisticated level are the approaches implied, and to some extent made explicit, by Messrs. Bell and Green. Mr. Bell approaches the problem of alienation in terms of an objective social situation. Primary groups have been so pulverized and life so atomized or compartmented by modern industrial society that it has now become impossible to relate one part of life to another; in some way, experience must be made whole, direct, meaningful again. Work, leisure, family life must in some way be joined together. Mr. Green approaches the same problem of psychological disorientation in terms of the kind of people the larger social trends tend to produce. Both the environing social situation and the inner emotional experience of middle-class child-rearing lead to the feeling of inadequacy. However, the social structure, to both writers, is so involved, so uncontrollable, that it alone would seem to make the experience of alienation inevitable for anyone in modern society, whether or not his personality incorporated the neurotic trends of the middle class.

Mr. Bell’s article looks forward to a change in social structure. Man, he says, has already cracked under the strain of alienation: to accept as an aim adjustment to an inhuman society seems inconceivable to him (this is also his position in his article “Adjusting Men to Machines,” in the January 1947 COMMENTARY). Man still has resources of spontaneity, still yearns for brotherhood: we can meet his problem only by the release of these potentialities through a radical reform in the social structure, he indicates.

Mr. Green, on the other hand, seems to deny that these resources exist any more in the middle class, and to feel that they are rapidly being depleted elsewhere. And in his article criticizing Dr. Fromm (“Sociological Analysis of Horney and Fromm”) he denies the possibility of releasing spontaneity in the modern world, since its control is a prerequisite of the simplest kind of economic and psychological security. (The spontaneous person is either mad or a bohemian.) Dr. Fromm, well aware of this, had coupled his suggested therapy of spontaneity and freedom with the demand for social reform: a planned economy combined with democratic control from below. Mr. Green answers that a planned economy cannot be combined with democratic control from below, and would mean an even more severe restriction on spontaneity and freedom than exists today. Finally, Mr. Green, in his article on “Social Values and Psychotherapy,” advises just that differentiated adjustment of man to industrial society which so horrifies Mr. Bell—and, I think, all those who are still imbued with democratic and humanistic values. “Any wholistic sense of responsibility, as well as wholistic emotional involvement with others, is out of gear with modern social structure. . . . There was some sense in expecting neighbors in a rural-familistic village to accept responsibility in curbing the personal aggression of family against family; it makes little sense to foster a sense of personal responsibility for the use of the atomic bomb.” If adjustment is proposed, it is not as a “solution”; it is but temporary therapy to ease psychological burdens: “Tragically enough, much of modern neurosis is wedged in a frame of person versus society which no immediately available social reform or therapeutic policy can reach.”

The crucial issue, for the problem of alienation as for so many others, revolves around the question of what kind of society is possible. Perhaps the most important job social science can tackle today is the theoretical construction of models of possible social organization. Can we create a society which holds on to human gains in technology and rationalism and at the same time enables the expression of such values as freedom and individualism? Such a model is not, in itself, any solution. But, for the lack of it, progressive politics today is largely negative, fighting off the worst to defend the bad. A successful model of a “good” society might give us one of the preconditions for positive politics today.

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¹ The well-nigh universal assumption, both in popular folklore and in the learned world, that simple societies necessarily produce integrated personalities, may of course be questioned There is some warrant for believing that the happy savage and the “whole” medieval man are alike myths. Melvin Seeman, in “An Evaluation of Current Approaches to Personality Differences in Folk and Urban Societies” (Social forces, December 1946), collates some evidence (Army-rejection rates, scores on a test of personality adjustment, admissions to mental hospitals) and concludes that the rural population in America may be worse off psychologically than the urban, and that the question at least deserves further investigation. Of course, it should be pointed out that rural America is no longer the simple society most sociologists have in mind.

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