Word: riesmans
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...GLANCE at the different points of departure from which Riesman is attacked reveals that the critics agree no more among themselves than with Riesman: he is not so heretic as another dissident. But the search for agreement on the meaning of words is still important--the theory of special relativity, for example, grew from a sophisticated examination of the word simultaneous. Still, it is disheartening for the layman to watch sociologists chasing each other, like so many out Little Black Sambo's tree, pur-definition of social character...
...obstacle to curt dismissal of such hair- splitting is that these matters of definition are more important than that: Sheldon Messinger and Burton Clark argue presuasively that Riesman has used social character to talk about personality when he should have centered his attention on schools, work, and nations in which people behave as if other-directed. Talcott Parsons and Winston White analyze the word values, and continuities in the evolution of American behavior which Riesman does not mention. These preoccupations with careful anlysis can be most frustrating (Robert Gutman and Dennis Wrong talk about property space and chop words with...
...conceptual frames these men establish with such pain really do serve a function in explaining their thought. Parsons and White, for example, make far more sense of the restricted role of the modern family than Riesman's vague awareness that the family is abdicating all responsibility for raising children. Because they proceed from a coherent theory of society, their closely reasoned (and extremely dense) essay leads them to put Riesman's observations in a very different and more coherent perspective. In examining the evidence Riesman puts out, they are led to believe that individual freedom has increased rather than ebbed...
...effects of this book of essays is a sense that, aggravating and obscure as methodology may be, it has a place in modern sociology that is not only inescapable but vital for those who want to talk about what happens in society. One bit of evidence for this is Riesman's almost casual assumption that the American character has altered radically, and several authors take violent issue with the subtitle of The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character. As Ralf Dahrendorf explains, "Comte Alexis de Tocqueville and Mr. David Riesman share a number of their questions...
...Riesman, as Norman Birnbaum observes, is difficult to write about. "Himself a master of ambiguity, he cannot be surprised that his colleagues are ambivalent about his thought." Riesman captures insights so true that his weaving them into a fabric of vague theory seems inescapably right--yet he expounds a point of view rather than an encompassing hypothesis, and his theories have a habit of melting like a sweet, decorated ice cream...