The Perils of “Freedom from Want”
Individualism Reconsidered, and Other Essays.
by David Riesman.
The Free Press (Glencoe, Illinois). 529 pp. $6.00.

This big volume contains no less than thirty substantial essays, all published within the short period from 1947 to 1954. It is a formidable collection both as to range and depth. Whether he discusses ethnic minorities or Utopian city-planning schemes, college football or popular music, modern novels or law reviews, totalitarianism or psychoanalysis, Professor Riesman has many illuminating and original things to say. And unlike some other writers with wide-ranging interests, he is anything but a dilettante or armchair theorist His writing invariably grows out of the direct experience of the phenomena he is discussing. If he is by no means an easy author to read, the reason is the restless darting about of his mind, which now puts some familiar fact in a wider context illuminating it in an unexpected way, and now illustrates some general point by a striking example. Also, the reader used to tamer stuff is apt to be disconcerted because Professor Riesman refuses to fit into the familiar categories of “right” and “left.” He is both a dedicated libertarian and a cautious conservative. He rather likes Utopian community reformers, but definitely dislikes “progressive” cliché-mongers. He is belligerent and gentle, opinionated and self-critical.

The thinking of so mercurial and complex an author cannot, of course, be reduced to any simple formula. But it is possible at least to indicate a central theme to which nearly all of Professor Riesman’s investigations are more or less directly related. In whatever topic he takes up, the author seems to be primarily concerned with one thing—the secular transformation of Western and in particular of American society. This transformation consists—to put it in a nutshell—in a gradual but decisive transition from a “seller’s market” to a “buyer’s market.” Up to now, man’s destiny in the West, as everywhere else, had been governed by scarcity. Both nature and society presented the individual with a hostile challenge, forcing him to make a supreme effort in order to survive. In our time, however, Western culture (and particularly its trail-blazer in this respect, the U.S.A.) is developing a productive apparatus that tends to make the satisfaction of basic needs unproblematic. And now, Professor Riesman asks, what does this change in the environment mean for the individual and his freedom?

One might expect that with the external world becoming more benign (save for the possibility of catastrophic wars), the individual would flourish and at last achieve his age-old dream of freedom. But our author shows that things are by no means so simple. The harsh and exacting world of yesterday, indeed, stimulated a certain type of individualism. Precisely because he had to pit himself against destiny, the individual could experience his existence and situation as meaningful. He could also stake out areas of freedom successfully protected from social dictation and coercion. But with the advent of the “buyer’s market,” the individual paradoxically finds himself in a situation of complete dependence on the group, on society. With scarcity gone, the marginal value of the individual as producer sinks to zero. He cannot gain social recognition for what he creates or contributes. In order to relate himself to society and gain acceptance, he must sell “himself.” He must become “other-directed.” He can no longer rely, as the sturdy “inner-directed” type of the era of scarcity could, on internalized norms of conduct, but must conform to standards to which he has no real inner relation.

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This remarkable insight, already put forth in Mr. Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), written in collaboration with Reuel Denney and Nathan Glazer, is developed here in a number of variations. Discussing two major intellectual figures of the recent past, Veblen and Freud, the author shows that their thinking was rooted in the heroic and pessimistic outlook of the “scarcity” period. To them, man stood under the inexorable law of the hostility of nature and society. But their world, thanks to the secular process away from “scarcity,” is no longer ours, even if few among us realize the direction and extent of the change. At this point the intellectual community of today presents, according to the author, a curious example of cultural lag. Most intellectuals still think of American society as a battlefield where ruthless individualism and fierce competitiveness reign supreme, whereas in fact, our author says, Americans are busy ingratiating themselves with one another. And this seeking to ingratiate oneself is more subtly dangerous to the individual’s freedom than the competitiveness and arrant individualism of yesterday.

Freedom, Riesman thinks, must be protected from the smothering embrace of benevolent “groupism” no less than from the cold dictation of authority. This calls for a new type of individualism. The old, inner-directed individualism, with its ascetic, Puritanical, work-oriented character, though it has by no means disappeared from our society, no longer can set the style for our culture as a whole. But the individual who feels ill at ease in the group-oriented culture may reconquer his selfhood and his freedom by becoming “autonomous.” The autonomous person is not success-oriented as are, each in his way, the “inner-directed” and the “other-directed” type. What he wants is not success but satisfaction; he considers nothing desirable or valuable unless it means something to him as a self, an authentic person. To be autonomous is to be alive.

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Ideals similar to this have been proclaimed by others; we may recall in this connection two very dissimilar prophets, Erich Fromm and D. H. Lawrence. All thinkers of this type are impatient with modern man’s docility, his readiness to forgo genuine satisfactions for the sake of surrogates palmed off on him by society. They call on us to be free, to be ourselves, to live “authentically.”

Both Fromm and Riesman have pointed out how difficult such freedom is to achieve, even in a permissive social environment. To be “free” in this sense of “autonomy” cannot simply consist in everyone’s following his own bent to the extent that a permissive society would permit him to do so. When we think we are just following our own bent, Riesman says, more often than not we are obeying the dictates of some alien authority. The choices we make in a supposedly autonomous fashion may, for example, merely echo the injunctions implanted in us by parents and educators in early life; this is the “freedom” of the inner-directed individualist. Or alternatively, our supposedly self-chosen goals may merely reflect our need to be accepted by a group of our “peers”; this is the way of the other-directed person. The truly autonomous person, however, is “directed” neither by internalized nor external authority. He is undirected—neither pushed by previous commitments nor drawn by present exigencies. When he makes a choice, then, it is an absolute beginning. If this is a correct rendering of the gist of Professor Riesman’s concept of autonomy (I may have misunderstood him), then the concept emerges as rather close in spirit to Sartre’s existentialism.

Now the question is whether human freedom in any valid sense can consist in making choices that are absolute beginnings. I am profoundly convinced that it cannot. The human individual, as a biological organism, is born of parent organisms; as a cultural, social, and spiritual being, he is likewise fashioned from molds. He cannot start from scratch, even though it is true that each individual is unique and that none recapitulates his biological and cultural antecedents in a mechanically identical fashion. Human freedom consists in adding something unique to the heritage of the past. I would say, in this sense, that freedom is growth. But no growth is possible without some roots.

Even when we think that we are making a completely new beginning, we continue our past; and we necessarily make new departures when we think that we only repeat what has been handed down to us. No fruitful discussion of the individual’s freedom is possible without realizing this “dialectical” feature of the problem. And in spite of occasional leanings towards an undialectical existentialist conception of the individual’s autonomy that I think I detect in Professor Riesman’s analyses, his whole frame of mind seems to me essentially dialectical. This is why I find his exploration of the problem of individualism so rewarding.

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