Riesman As Social Critic

People who write good social criticism these days are essentially gadgeteers. Like Freud, contemporary social critics enjoy tinkering around with their own perceptions, ordering them with analytical categories taken from the academe as well as with a journalist's feel for day-to-day events. However, in using this approach, modern critics have not ignored the austere tradition of prophet and moralist, one "crying in the wilderness." Of course, our better critics, the ones we can take seriously, are more sophisticated than a Jonah or Isaiah. Yet, as the old prophets did, men like Riesman worry a lot about what meaning human events might carry; they ask general questions about what life might mean to the individual and to the society in which he lives.

Problems Plague Prophets

Prophets have always been vulnerable to easy satire, especially today. Questions about meaning are necessarily associated with holistic, loose-jointed ideas; and such ideas usually find the methodological rigors of the old empirical trail pretty rough.

Quite aware of these difficulties, David Riesman has published a collection of thirty essays, written over the past nine years to follow up observations made in The Lonely Crowd. Riesman calls his essays in Abundance For What? "speculative and tentative forays" whose perspective is "seasoned subjectivity." He apologizes to his more academic colleagues. "The very refinement of American social science and its academic freedom have led to a growing divorce between what individuals as citizens are most concerned with and what individuals as researchers feel can be investigated with reliable methods."

Criticizes Middle-Class

Certainly David Riesman is America's best critic and, of course, an American critic must be a critic of our middle class. Upper-middle brows like to swat the middle-class with back issues of the New Republic, and Paul Goodman castigates the masses with vindictive paternalism. Riesman is less sure of himself, less polemical. In turn, he takes himself less seriously.

Yet Riesman still has a big gripe with American life. He deplores the vapid joylessness and the comfy-cozy ways of suburbia, the white collar man, and the mass media. Unlike existentialists, however, Riesman refuses to believe that mass production per se brings on the magnified man; instead, like Marx, he thinks mass production has freed man for better things.

The tragedy in America, as Riesman sees it, is her inability to provide or even think about better things. She is still concerned with more things.

Riesman argues that the emphasis in a "post-industrial, over-developed society" has shifted from production (work) to consumption (leisure). Because such a shift has occurred, utopian ideas and long range social goals must be reconsidered. Preoccupation with winning the cold war or beating the Russians to the moon provides no answer; nor can purpose be found in building more superhighways--these threaten to cut us to pieces. The threat of chaos necessitates conscious planning for the kind of society we want.

Includes Utopian Ideas

Abundance for What? puts forth some utopian ideas for reorganizing work and leisure patterns in America. The book encourages more though about a utopia. Riesman thinks that work for most of the world is clear cut: industrialization. For Americans, the notion of work is more complicated. Now that we've got the factories, what next?

The answers, according to this sociologist, is to make leisure more meaningful for the increasing number of people with time on their hands. To do this we "need changes in the whole society: in its work, its political forms and its cultural styles." Such talk is no less revolutionary than what Goodman wants--utopian reforms. Here Riesman's thinking encounters difficulties. Any scheme for utopia requires a comprehensive view of man; otherwise large-scale social reform has no coherence or legitimacy. But, unlike the 18th century ideologues, Riesman has no driving metaphysic; his approach is "one of seeing rather than doing." To a pragmatist, interested in the implementation of ideas, Riesman's detachment would be annoying.

Nevertheless, it's silly to escalate all of the author's thoughts to philosophical ultimates. His specific observations snap with insight. The essay about the place of the car in American life is the best one on the subject: When he discusses the marginal place of sociology with its concern for "underprivileged data," Riesman detects and delineates the subtlest of conflicts and snobberies in the scholarly world.

The chief criticism of Abundance for What? is its size. The thirty essays add up to 604 pages, making the book appear long-winded when it's only bulky. But Riesman's recent thoughts should be examined closely; he has a sense of where we are and where we are going.