May 19, 2002 The Last Sociologist By ORLANDO PATTERSON
AMBRIDGE, Mass. — "The Lonely Crowd," the book for which David Riesman is best known, was published more than half a century ago. It remains not only the best-selling book by a professional sociologist in American history, but arguably one that has had the widest influence on the nation at large. The work of Mr. Riesman, who died May 10, inevitably raises questions about the claims and limitations of academic sociology today.
In "The Lonely Crowd" and other works, Mr. Riesman provided middle-class Americans with a sharply focused view of their major cultural preoccupations. Then as now, Americans were concerned about the threat to personal freedom posed by the conformism and homogeneity inherent in mass-consumption society. They longed for connection in their pursuit of suburban affluence. They struggled with the contradictory tendency of capitalist individualism to undermine other forms of individualism through a ruthless "ethic of callousness" and celebration of greed. And they tried to reconcile their autonomy with genuine compassion.
He also gave the nation a vocabulary for the discussion of what his graceful prose had seduced them to gaze at. In "The Lonely Crowd," he analyzed the anxieties of American life, identifying the ways in which individuals and groups responded to the fast-changing postwar culture.
And yet David Riesman died discarded and forgotten by his discipline. Even Harvard's department of sociology, which he had served for over 30 years, recently discontinued a lecture series named for him after only two years. I gave the last David Riesman lecture in October 2000. It was, I think, the last public event David attended, and he was very happy about it. As he was my mentor, so was I.
The dishonoring of David Riesman, and the tradition of sociology for which he stood, is not a reflection of their insignificance. It is merely a sign of the rise in professional sociology of a style of scholarship that mimics the methodology and language of the natural sciences — in spite of their inappropriateness for the understanding of most areas of the social world.
Anxious to achieve the status of economics and the other "soft sciences," the gatekeepers of sociology have insisted on a style of research and thinking that focuses on the testing of hypotheses based on data generated by measurements presumed to be valid. This approach works reasonably well for the study of certain subjects like demographics in which there is stability in the variables studied. Business schools, for example, have increasingly turned to organizational sociologists for a more realistic interpretation of the behavior of firms than that provided by economists.
Unfortunately, for most areas of social life — especially those areas in which the general public is interested — the methods of natural science are not only inappropriate but distorting. (It is important to note here that the issue is not the use of statistics. Mr. Riesman encouraged their use where appropriate.)
Americans tend to be highly skeptical of generalizations of social interaction. Yet they are deeply interested in knowing what is distinctive about their patterns of behavior, beliefs and values. They welcome attempts to understand what forces in society influence them to act the way they do. Another great sociologist and a contemporary of Mr. Riesman, Erving Goffman, gave them just that in books like "The Sociology of Everyday Life."
These two scholars — and others like C. Wright Mills, William F. Whyte, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer and Peter Berger — practiced a sociology different in both style and substance from that of today. It was driven first by the significance of the subject and second by an epistemological emphasis on understanding the nature and meaning of social behavior. This is an understanding that can only emerge from the interplay of the author's own views with those of the people being studied.
These writers, following an earlier tradition, pursued big issues like the cultural contradictions of capitalism, the role of religion in economic life, the problems of America's melting-pot ideology, the nature of civil society and the virtues and dangers of patriotism. But they also painted on small canvases, offering us insights into American rituals of interaction in public and private places. They wrote about the ways we avoid each other, the ravages of stigma, the search for honor behind the behavior of young men in gangs on street corners. Their ideas became pervasive, entering the language with terms like "inner-directed," "power elite" and "masking techniques."
Mr. Riesman, in particular, was a pioneer in the study of popular culture, writing brilliantly on the role of the car and of comics. A landmark essay he wrote 50 years ago on youth and pop music was recently reissued in a definitive collection of essential readings on the rock 'n' roll revolution. Even in the world of music criticism, Mr. Riesman was considered relevant.
Today, when mainstream sociologists write about culture they disdain as reactionary any attempt to demonstrate how culture explains behavior. And their need to test hypotheses, build models and formulate laws forces them into an emphasis on the organizational aspects of culture, which can be reduced to data suitable for "scientific" analysis.
Thus in much of modern sociology one learns little or nothing about literature or art or music or religion, even in sociologies that purport to study these subjects. Mainstream sociology eschews any exploration of human values, meanings and beliefs because ambiguities and judgment are rarely welcomed in the discipline now.
Americans are as eager today for analysis of how they live as they were when Mr. Riesman wrote "The Lonely Crowd." Now as then, they want to be informed (in a language they can understand) about their beliefs and cultural practices.
Since mainstream sociology has abandoned this important mission, the intellectual vacuum has been filled by legions of scholars, mainly from the humanities, and commentators in the press. Most have little insight into social, political or cultural issues. In the academy, they have made a frightening intellectual mess of so-called cultural studies. In the popular culture, Americans who want informed sociological essays and thoughtful reflections turn to literary commentators or, less helpfully, to writers of self-help books or hosts of television talk shows.
Sociology is hardly alone in this pseudo-scientific narrowing of purpose and methods on the nation's campuses. Many political science departments, for example, have been hijacked by "rational choice" theorists who disdain the study of political beliefs and culture. There are occasional hopeful signs pointing in other directions, often in small journals or quarterlies published by academic departments or individuals committed to independent thought.
It is that independence, that confidence in ideas, that is most lacking in the academy now. About this, too, Mr. Riesman had something to say. To participate in public life, as anyone who does so knows, requires something he called "the nerve of failure" and defined as "the courage to face aloneness and the possibility of defeat in one's personal life or one's work without being morally destroyed."
David Riesman had that nerve. Would that more in the academy did.
Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and author of ``Rituals of Blood,'' the second volume of a trilogy on race relations http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/opinion/19PATT.html?ei=1&en=&ex=1022852188&pagewanted=print&position=top