Chapter Title: Autonomy and Utopia

Book Title: The Lonely Crowd

Book Subtitle: A Study of the Changing American Character
Book Author(s): David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney
Published by: Yale University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvxkn7c9.21

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 XVI
Autonomy and Utopia

Time, events, or the unaided individual action of the mind will sometimes
undermine or destroy an opinion, without any outward sign of the change.
It has not been openly assailed, no conspiracy has been formed to make war
on it, but its followers one by one noiselessly secede; day by day a few of them
abandon it, until at last it is only professed by a minority. In this state it will
still continue to prevail. As its enemies remain mute or only interchange their
thoughts by stealth, they are themselves unaware for a long period that a great
revolution has actually been effected; and in this state of uncertainty they take
no steps; they observe one another and are silent. The majority have ceased
to believe what they believed before, but they still affect to believe, and this
empty phantom of public opinion is strong enough to chill innovators and to
keep them silent and at a respectful distance.
Tocqueville, Democracy in America

In these last chapters I have set forth some thoughts about the middle-
class world of work and play, in the hope of finding ways in which a
more autonomous type of social character might develop. I cannot
be satisfied that I have moved very far along these lines. It is difficult
enough to consider how we may remove the barriers of false person-
alization and enforced privatization. It is enormously more difficult to
descry, after these barriers are overcome, what in man may lead him
to autonomy, or to invent and create the means that will help him to
autonomy. In the end, our few suggestions are paltry ones, and we can
only conclude our discussion by saying that a vastly greater stream of
creative, utopian thinking is needed before we can see more clearly the
goal we dimly suggest by the word autonomy.
The reader who recalls our beginnings with the large, blind move-
ments of population growth and economic and technological change
may ask whether we seriously expect utopian thinking, no matter how

266

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 Autonomy and Utopia 267
inspired, to counter whatever fate for man these movements have in
store. Indeed, I believe that only certain ideas will be generated and catch
on, under any given socioeconomic conditions. And character, with all
its intractabilities and self-reproducing tendencies, will largely dictate
the way ideas are received. But despite the massed obstacles to change
inherent in social structure and character structure, I believe that ideas
can make a decisive historical contribution. Marx, who himself denied
that ideas are very important and dismissed the utopian speculations of
his predecessor socialists, himself supplied an irrefutable example of the
power of ideas in history. As we all know, he did not leave the working
class to be emancipated only by events. In his alternate role as propagan-
dist, he tried himself to shape the ideological and institutional environ-
ment in which workers would live.
I think we need to insist today on bringing to consciousness the kind
of environments that Marx dismissed as utopian, in contrast to the me-
chanical and passive approach to the possibilities of man’s environment
that he helped, in his most influential works, to foster. However, since
we live in a time of disenchantment, such thinking, where it is rational
in aim and method and not simply escapism, is not easy. It is easier to
concentrate on programs for choosing among lesser evils. We are well
aware of the “damned wantlessness of the poor”; the rich as well, as I
have tried to show in this book, have inhibited their claims for a decent
world. Both rich and poor avoid any goals, personal or social, that seem
out of step with peer-group aspirations. The politically operative inside-
dopester seldom commits himself to aims beyond those that common
sense proposes to him. Actually, however, in a dynamic political context,
it is the modest, common-sensical goals of the insiders and the “con-
structive” critics that are unattainable. It often seems that the retention
of a given status quo is a modest hope; many lawyers, political scientists,
and economists occupy themselves by suggesting the minimal changes
which are necessary to stand still; yet today this hope is almost invariably
disappointed; the status quo proves the most illusory of goals.
Is it conceivable that these economically privileged Americans will
some day wake up to the fact that they overconform? Wake up to the
discovery that a host of behavioral rituals are the result, not of an ines-
capable social imperative but of an image of society that, though false,
provides certain secondary gains for the people who believe in it? Since
character structure is, if anything, even more tenacious than social

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 268 Autonomy
structure, such an awakening is exceedingly unlikely—and we know
that many thinkers before us have seen the false dawns of freedom while
their compatriots stubbornly continued to close their eyes to the alterna-
tives that were, in principle, available. But to put the question may at
least raise doubts in the minds of some.
Occasionally city planners put such questions. They comprise per-
haps the most important professional group to become reasonably weary
of the cultural definitions that are systematically trotted out to ratio-
nalize the inadequacies of city life today, for the well-to-do as well as
for the poor. With their imagination and bounteous approach they have
become, to some extent, the guardians of our liberal and progressive po-
litical tradition, as this is increasingly displaced from state and national
politics. In their best work, we see expressed in physical form a view of
life which is not narrowly job-minded. It is a view of the city as a setting
for leisure and amenity as well as for work. But at present the power
of the local veto groups puts even the most imaginative of city planners
under great pressure to show that they are practical, hardheaded fel-
lows, barely to be distinguished from traffic engineers.
However, just as there is in my opinion a greater variety of attitudes
toward leisure in contemporary America than appears on the surface,
so also the sources of utopian political thinking may be hidden and con-
stantly changing, constantly disguising themselves. While political cu-
riosity and interest have been largely driven out of the accepted sphere
of the political in recent years by the focus of the press and of the more
responsible sectors of public life on crisis, people may, in what is left of
their private lives, be nurturing newly critical and creative standards. If
these people are not strait-jacketed before they get started—by the elab-
oration and forced feeding of a set of official doctrines—people may
some day learn to buy not only packages of groceries or books but the
larger package of a neighborhood, a society, and a way of life.
If the other-directed people should discover how much needless work
they do, discover that their own thoughts and their own lives are quite
as interesting as other people’s, that, indeed, they no more assuage their
loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drink-
ing sea water, then we might expect them to become more attentive to
their own feelings and aspirations.

This possibility may sound remote, and perhaps it is. But undeniably
many currents of change in America escape the notice of the reporters

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 Autonomy and Utopia 269
of this best-reported nation on earth. We have inadequate indexes for
the things we would like to find out, especially about such intangibles as
character, political styles, and the uses of leisure. America is not only big
and rich, it is mysterious; and its capacity for the humorous or ironical
concealment of its interests matches that of the legendary inscrutable
Chinese. By the same token, what my collaborators and I have to say
may be very wide of the mark. Inevitably, our own character, our own
geography, our own illusions, limit our view.
But while I have said many things in this book of which I am unsure,
of one thing I am sure: the enormous potentialities for diversity in na-
ture’s bounty and men’s capacity to differentiate their experience can
become valued by the individual himself, so that he will not be tempted
and coerced into adjustment or, failing adjustment, into anomie. The
idea that men are created free and equal is both true and misleading:
men are created different; they lose their social freedom and their indi-
vidual autonomy in seeking to become like each other.

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