Yelp and the Wisdom of 'The Lonely Crowd' : The New Yorker - 1 views
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David Riesman spent the first half of his career writing one of the most important books of the twentieth century. He spent the second half correcting its pervasive misprision. “The Lonely Crowd,” an analysis of the varieties of social character that examined the new American middle class
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the “profound misinterpretation” of the book as a simplistic critique of epidemic American postwar conformity via its description of the contours of the “other-directed character,” whose identity and behavior is shaped by its relationships.
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he never meant to suggest that Americans now were any more conformist than they ever had been, or that there’s even such a thing as social structure without conformist consensus.
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