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Book Review: Keith B. Kerr, B. Garrick Harden, and Marcus Aldredge (ed.), David Riesman's Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy. Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2015. ISBN: 978-1-472-42848-6 (Paperback). 293 Pages. $97.60.
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With a little effort, one could imagine the Institute for Social Research at the Goethe University Frankfurt establishing a school in the US, at some point in the early 1950s, at which David Riesman would have played a significant role. This imaginary school, perhaps a sibling of The New School for Social Research, would include some teachers and researchers who were not as clearly connected to Hegelian and Marxist philosophy as those from the German school. During the intense decades of the Cold War, members like Riesman would tread gently around such controversies as the grand stand-off between socialism and capitalism, at least as much as they could, and would-perhaps for that reason-never be distinguished as one of the school's most serious theorists. Michael Maccoby was right to point out in the collection here under review that "Riesman characteristically exchanged theory for thick description" (186).
Nonetheless, Riesman's work is a major contribution in the trajectories coming out of post-World War II critical theory, and his most famous and influential book, The Lonely Crowd (1950), should always accompany Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) as the more US-centric social-psychological study of American society and culture. With the German critical theorists, Riesman shared a deep interdisciplinary interest in sociology, psychoanalysis, political-economy, and philosophy, although his research ultimately owes more to Freud and Fromm than to Hegel and Marx.
David Riesman (1909 - 2002) was a sociologist, Harvard University professor, and influential writer. Before that, he attended Harvard Law School, and worked with the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, Riesman went on to work at universities in New York, Chicago, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. But what properly established Riesman as a major figure in American social science was the publication and reception of his single-most influential work, The Lonely Crowd. This book offered Riesman's study of the variations of pervasive conformity in people with "inner-directed"...