National Affairs: AN AUTONOMOUS MAN

Author David Riesman tries to be an autonomous man, and many of his friends think that he achieves a high degree of success. He was born 45 years ago this week into a well-to-do Philadelphia home. At Harvard he majored in chemistry, then switched to law. Later he became a law clerk to Justice Brandeis, practiced in Boston, taught law at the University of Buffalo. He did not become a full-fledged social scientist until 1946, when he joined the Chicago faculty. He wrote The Lonely Crowd during two years at Yale.

His books cut across the social sciences, picking a method of treatment out of anthropology and using it to handle a political exposition. He can mingle ideas from psychoanalysis and economics and enrich the result with literary references from Tolstoy, Samuel Butler, Virginia Woolf, Castiglione, Jules Verne, Franz Kafka, St. Augustine, Nietzsche, Kathleen Winsor, E. M. Forster, Lionel Trilling, Cervantes, Jack London and James Joyce. His books are relatively free of academic jargon, because there is no special lingo that the economists, sociologists and anthropologists have in common; anybody who wants to talk to all of them has to use English.

He has an immense respect for his colleagues in all branches of the social sciences; the “credit lines” in his books reflect the warmth of a man who is really grateful for information. He will send copies of his work to scores of people before publication, noting all reactions but not necessarily following suggestions. He refuses to join the high-level theorists in their contempt for interviewers and other spade-workers. Nor will he join in the contempt of the fact-workers for the lofty insights of the theorists. He believes in both, and works at a level between them, using both.

With his wife and four children, he lives an active family and social life in a large Chicago house (two servants), and summers on his Brattleboro, Vt. dairy farm. He plays vigorous, competent, year-round tennis, is interested in his clothes and his food, keeps a good wine cellar, drinks orange juice mixed with soda, likes movies (but not “message” movies, because the movies’ proper message is the “enrichment of fantasy”).

Trying his first law case, Riesman put the judge to sleep. Since, he has tried hard not to bore anybody—or to be bored.