Part of the message of the Kinsey reports, and of Betty Friedan’s investigation, was that Western society was changing in the wake of war, and in some fairly fundamental ways. America was in the forefront here, but the changes applied in other countries as well, if less strongly. Before the war, anthropology had been the social science that, thanks to Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, most caught the imagination, certainly so far as the general public was concerned. Now, however, the changes within Western society came under the spotlight from the other social sciences, in particular sociology, psychology, and economics.
The first of these investigations to make an impact was The Lonely Crowd, published in 1950 by the Harvard sociologist David Riesman (who later moved to Stanford). Riesman began by stressing what sociology had to offer over and above anthropology. Compared with sociology, he said, anthropology was ‘poor.’ That is to say, it was not a big discipline, and many of its field studies were little more than one-man (or one-woman) expeditions, because funds were unavailable for more ambitious projects. As a result, fieldwork in anthropology was amateurish and, more important, ‘inclined to holistic over-generalisation from a general paucity of data.’ By contrast, public opinion surveys – the bread-and-butter material of sociologists, which had become more plentiful since the inception of Gallup in the mid-1930s and their widespread use during World War II to gauge public feeling, aided by advances in statistics for the manipulation of data – were rich both in quantitative terms, in the level of detail they amassed, and in the representativeness of their samples. In addition to survey data, Riesman also added the study of such things as advertisements, dreams, children’s games, and child-rearing practices, all of which, he claimed, had now become ‘the stuff of history.’ He and his colleagues therefore felt able to deliver verdicts on the national character of Americans with a certainty that anthropologists could not match. (He was later to regret his overconfident tone, especially when he was forced to retract some of his generalisations.)1
Riesman was a pupil of Erich Fromm, and therefore indirectly in the tradition of the Frankfurt School. Like them, his ideas owed a lot to Freud, and to Max Weber, insofar as The Lonely Crowd was an attempt to relate individual psychology, and that of the family, to whole societies. His argument was twofold. In the first place, he claimed that as societies develop, they go through three phases relating to changes in population. In older societies, where there is a stable population at fairly low levels, people are ‘tradition-directed.’ In the second phase, populations show a rapid increase in size, and individuals become ‘inner-directed.’ In the third phase, populations level off at a much higher level, where the people are ‘other-directed.’ The second part of his argument described how the factors that shape character change as these other developments take place. In particular, he saw a decline in the influence and authority of parents and home life, and a rise in the influence of the mass media and the peer group, especially as it concerned the lives of young people.2
By the middle of the twentieth century, Riesman said, countries such as India, Egypt, and China remained tradition-directed. These locations are in many areas sparsely populated, death rates are high, and very often the people are nonliterate. Here life is governed by patterns and an etiquette of relationships that have existed for generations. Youth is regarded as an obvious period of apprenticeship, and admission to adult society is marked by initiation ceremonies that are formal and which everyone must go through. These ceremonies bring on added privilege but also added responsibility. The ‘Three Rs’ of this world are ritual, routine, and religion, with ‘Little energy … directed towards finding new solutions to age-old problems.’3 Riesman did not devote any space to how tradition-oriented societies develop or evolve, but he saw the next phase as clearly marked and predicated upon a rapid increase in population, which creates a change in the relatively stable ratio of births to deaths, which in turn becomes both the cause and consequence of other social changes. It is this imbalance that puts pressure on society’s customary ways of coping. The new society is characterised by increased personal mobility, by the rapid accumulation of capital, and by an almost constant expansion. Such a society (for example, the Renaissance or the Reformation), Riesman says, breeds character types ‘who can manage to live socially without strict and self-evident tradition-direction.’ The concept of ‘inner-direction’ covers a wide range of individuals, but all share the experience that the values that govern their lives and behaviour are implanted early in life by their elders, leading to a distinct individualism marked by a consistency within the individual from one situation to another. Inner-directed people are aware of tradition, or rather traditions, but each individual may come from a different tradition to which he or she owes allegiance. It is as if, says Riesman, each person has his own ‘internal gyroscope.’ The classic inner-directed society is Victorian Britain.4
As the birth rate begins to follow the death rate down, populations start to stabilise again, but at higher levels than before. Fewer people work on the land, more are in the cities, there is more abundance and leisure, societies are centralised and bureaucratised, and increasingly, ‘other people are the problem, not the material environment.’5 People mix more widely and become more sensitive to each other. This society creates the other-directed person. Riesman thought that the other-directed type was most common and most at home in twentieth-century America, which lacked a feudal past, and especially in American cities, where people were literate, educated, and well provided for in the necessities of life.6 Amid the new abundance, he thought that parental discipline suffered, because in the new, smaller, more biologically stable families it was needed less, and this had two consequences. First, the peer group becomes as important as, if not more important than, the family as a socialising influence – the peer group meaning other children the same age as the child in question. Second, the children in society become a marketing category; they are targeted by both the manufacturers of children’s products and the media that help sell these products. It is this need for direction from, and the approval of, others that creates a modern form of conformity in which the chief area of sensitivity is wanting to be liked by other people – i.e., to be popular.7 This new other-directed group, he said, is more interested in its own psychological development than in work for personal gain, or the greater good of all; it does not want to be esteemed but loved; and its most important aim is to ‘relate’ to others.
Riesman went on to qualify and expand this picture, devoting chapters to the changing role of parents, teachers, the print media, the electronic media, the role of economics, and the changing character of work. He thought that the changes he had observed and described had implications for privacy and for politics, and that whatever character type an individual was, there were three fates available – adjustment, anomie, and autonomy.8 Later he recanted some of his claims, conceding he had overstated the change that had come over America. But in one thing he was surely right: his observation that Americans were concerned above all with ‘relationships’ foreshadowed the obsession later in the century with all manner of psychologies specifically designed to help in this area of life.
The Lonely Crowd was released in the same year that Senator Joseph McCarthy announced to the Women’s Republican Club in Wheeling, West Virginia, that ‘I hold in my hand’ a list of Communist agents in the State Department. Until that point, McCarthy had been an undistinguished Midwestern politician with a drinking problem.9 But his specific allegations now sparked a ‘moral panic’ in America, as it was described, in which 151 actors, writers, musicians, and radio and TV entertainers were accused of Communist affiliations, and the U.S. attorney general issued a list of 179 ‘Totalitarian, Fascist, Communist, subversive and other organisations.’* While McCarthy and the U.S. attorney general were worrying about Communists and ‘subversives,’ others were just as distressed about the whole moral panic itself and what that said about America. In fact, many people – especially refugee scholars from Europe – were by now worried that America itself had the potential to become fascist. It was thinking of this kind that underlay a particular psychological investigation that overlapped with The Lonely Crowd and appeared at more or less the same time.
The Authoritarian Personality had been conceived as early as 1939 as part of a joint project, with the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and the American Jewish Committee, to investigate anti-Semitism.10 The idea was for a questionnaire survey to explore whether a psychological profile of the ‘potential fascist character’ could be identified. It was the first time that the critical school of Frankfurt had used a quantitative approach, and the results of their ‘F’ (for fascist) scale ‘seemed to warrant alarm.’11 ‘Anti-Semitism turned out to be … the visible edge of a dysfunctional personality revealed in the many “ethnocentric” and “conventional” attitudes of the general American population, as well as of a disquietingly submissive attitude towards authority of all kinds.’12 This is where the link to Riesman came in: these potential fascists were ‘other-directed,’ normal, conventional Americans. The Authoritarian Personality therefore concluded with a warning that fascism rather than communism was the chief threat facing America in the postwar world, that fascism was finding ‘a new home’ on the western side of the Atlantic, and that bourgeois America and its great cities were now ‘the dark heart of modern civilisation.13 The book’s other conclusion was that the Holocaust was not simply the result of Nazi thinking, and its specific theories about degeneration, but that the rationality of Western capitalist civilisation itself was responsible. Theodor Adorno, the exile from Frankfurt and the main author of the report, found that whereas left-wing types were emotionally more stable, usually happier than their conservative counterparts, capitalism tended to throw up dysfunctional personalities, highly authoritarian anti-Semites who linked reason to power. For them, the pogrom was the ultimate expression of this power.14 If The Lonely Crowd may be seen as an early effort to combine public opinion survey material with social psychology and sociology to understand whole nations, a rational – if not entirely successful – project to assimilate new forms of knowledge, The Authoritarian Personality is best understood as a late throw of the Germanic tradition of Freud and Spengler, yet another overarching attempt to denigrate the Western/Atlantic alliance of rationalism, science, and democracy. It was an arresting thesis, especially when read against the backdrop of the McCarthy shenanigans. But in fact it was immediately attacked by fellow social scientists, who systematically and ruthlessly disassembled its findings. By then, however, the unsubstantiated phrase ‘the authoritarian personality’ had caught on.
A better picture of totalitarianism, both as to its origins and its possible expression in the postwar world (especially America), was given by Hannah Arendt. She had been in New York since 1941, after she escaped from France. In Manhattan she had lived in poverty for a time, learned English, and begun to write, moving among the intellectuals of the Partisan Review milieu. At various times she was a professor at Princeton, Chicago, and the University of California as well as being a regular contributor to the New Yorker. She finally settled at the New School for Social Research in New York, where she taught until she died in 1975.15 As home to the University in Exile, for emigré European intellectuals fleeing fascism in the 1930s, one aim of the New School was to develop an amalgam of European and American thought. Arendt made a name for herself with three influential – and highly controversial – books: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).16 She began The Origins of Totalitarianism after the war ended, and it took several years.17 Her main aim was to explain why so ‘unimportant’ a matter in world politics as ‘the Jewish question,’ or anti-Semitism, could become the ‘catalytic agent for, first, the Nazi movement, then a world war, and finally the establishment of the death factories.18 Her answer was that mass society led to isolation and loneliness – the lonely crowd of Riesman’s title. In such a condition, she realised, normal political life deteriorated, fascism and communism drew their remarkable strength, offering a form of politics that provided people with a public life: uniforms, denoting belonging; specific ranks, recognised and respected by others; massed rallies, the experience of participation.19 That was the positive side. At the same time, ‘loneliness’ she identified as ‘the common ground for terror, the essence of totalitarian government.’20 And this is where the controversy started, for although she equated Stalinism with Nazism and left many thinking that there was therefore no alternative to the emerging American way of life, she still implied that the ‘massification’ of society was ‘a step towards totalitarianism’, towards ‘radical evil,’ a key phrase, and that ‘the new mass society in the West was in danger of converging with the totalitarian East.’21
In The Human Condition Arendt tried to offer some solutions for the problems she had identified in her earlier book.22 The essential difficulty with modern society, she felt, was that modern man felt alienated politically (as opposed to psychologically). The ordinary individual did not have access to the inside information that the political elite had, there was bureaucracy everywhere, one man, one vote didn’t mean that much, and such predicaments were all much more important now because, with the growth of huge corporations, individuals had less control over their work; there was less craftwork to offer satisfaction, and less control over income. Man was left alone but knew he couldn’t act, live, alone.23 Her solution, as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, her biographer, has said, was ahead of its time; Arendt thought that society would evolve what she called the personalisation of politics – what we now call single-issue politics (the environment, feminism, genetically modified foods).24 In this way, she said, people could become as informed as the experts, they could attempt to control their own lives, and they could have an effect. Arendt was right about the personalisation of politics: later in the century it would become an important element in collective life.
Like Hannah Arendt, Erich Fromm was German and Jewish. A member of the Frankfurt School, he had emigrated with the other members of the school in 1934 and sailed for America, continuing as an affiliate of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, attached to Columbia University. Fromm’s family had been very religious; he himself had helped found an academy of Jewish thought (with Martin Buber), and this had translated, in Frankfurt, into a project to study the formation of class-consciousness, an exploration – one of the first of its kind – into the links between psychology and politics. On the basis of more than one thousand replies to a questionnaire he sent out, Fromm found that people could not be grouped, as he had expected, into ‘revolutionary’ workers and ‘nonrevolutionary’ bourgeois. Not only were some workers conservative, and some bourgeois revolutionary, but very left-wing workers often confessed to ‘strikingly non-revolutionary, authoritarian attitudes’ in many areas normally regarded as nonpolitical, such as child-rearing and women’s fashion.25 It was this, as much as anything, that convinced Fromm and the others of the Frankfurt School that Marxism needed to be modified in the light of Freud.
Fromm’s 1920s work was not translated into English until the 1980s, so it never had the impact that perhaps it deserved. But it shows that he had the same sort of interests as Riesman, Adorno, and Arendt. He went considerably further, in fact, with his 1955 book, The Sane Society.26 Instead of just looking at the shortcomings of mass society, he examined the much more extreme idea as to whether an entire society can be considered unhealthy. To many, Fromm’s central notion was so presumptuous as to be meaningless. But he tackled it head-on. He admitted to begin with that his book was an amalgam of Tawney’s The Acquisitive Society (which, he reminded readers, had originally been called The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society) and Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents. Fromm started with the by-now familiar statistics, that America and other Protestant countries, like Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, had higher rates of suicide, murder, violence, and drug and alcohol abuse than other areas of the world.27 So he thought that on any measure these societies were sicker than most. The rest of his argument was a mixture of psychoanalysis, economics, sociology, and politics. The central reality, he said, was that ‘whereas in the nineteenth century God was dead, in the twentieth century man is dead.’28 The problem with capitalism, for all its strengths, and itself the result of so many freedoms, was that it had terrible consequences for mankind. In a neat phrase he said that ‘work can be defined as the performance of acts which cannot yet be performed by machines.’ He was putting in modern garb a familiar argument that twentieth-century work, for most people, was dehumanising, boring, and meaningless, and provoked in them a wide array of problems. Words like anomie and alienation were resurrected, but the significance of Fromm’s critique lay in his claim that the constricting experience of modern work was directly related to mental health. Mass society, he wrote, turned man into a commodity; ‘his value as a person lies in his saleability, not his human qualities of love, reason, or his artistic capacities.’29 Near the end of his book Fromm stressed the role of love, which he regarded as an ‘art form,’ because, he said, one of the casualties of super-capitalism, as he called it, was ‘man’s relationship to his fellow men.’ Alienating work had consequences for friendship, fairness, and trust. Riesman had said that the young were more concerned about relationships and popularity, but Fromm worried that people were becoming indifferent to others; and if everyone was a commodity, they were no different from things.30 He made it clear that he had scoured the literature, collecting accounts of how people’s lives were drying up, losing interest in the arts, say, as work became all-engrossing. For Fromm, the aim was the recovery not so much of man’s sanity as his dignity, the theme of Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, to which he made pointed reference.31 Fromm, for all his psychoanalytic approach and his diagnosis of the postwar world as an insane society, offered no psychological remedies. Instead, he faced frankly the fact that the character of work had to change, that the social arrangements of the factory, or office, and participation in management decision making, needed to be revamped if the harsh psychological damage that he saw all around him was to be removed.
One of the main entities responsible for the condition Fromm was describing was the vast corporation, or ‘organisation,’ and this was a matter taken up specifically in W. H. Whyte’s Organisation Man, published the following year. This was a much sharper, more provocative book than Fromm’s, though the overlap in subject matter was considerable.32 Whyte’s book was better written (he was a journalist on Fortune) and more pointed, and what he provided was a telling and not overly sympathetic account of the life and culture of ‘other-directed’ people in postwar America. Whyte considered that vast organisations both attracted and bred a certain type of individual, that there was a certain kind of psychology most suited to corporate or organisational life. First and foremost, he saw in the organisation a decline of the Protestant ethic, in the sense that there was a marked drop in individualism and adventurousness.33 People knew that the way to get on in an organisation was to be part of a group, to be popular, to avoid ‘rocking the boat.’ Organisation man, Whyte says, is a conservative (with a small ‘c’), and above all works for somebody else, not himself.34 Whyte saw this as a significant crossover point in American history. The main motives inside corporations, he said, were ‘belongingness’ and ‘togetherness.’ Whyte’s subsidiary points were no less revealing. There had recently been an historic change in the U.S. educational system, and he produced a chart of education courses that described those changes clearly. Between 1939–46 and 1954–5, whereas enrolments in fundamental courses (the humanities, the physical sciences) had declined, subscriptions to practical courses (engineering, education, agriculture) had increased.35 He thought this was regrettable because it represented a narrowing factor in life; people not only knew less, they would only mix with fellow students with the same interests, and therefore go on knowing less, leading a narrower life.36 Whyte went on to attack the personnel industry and the concept of ‘personality’ and personality testing, which, he felt, further promoted the conforming and conservative types. What he most objected to were the psychoanalytic interpretations of personality tests, which he thought were little better than astrology. He saved his final attack for an assault on suburbia, which he saw as ‘the branch office’ of the organisation and a complete extension of its group psychology. With little maps of suburban developments, he showed how social life was extremely constricted, being neighborhood-based (a rash of bridge parties, fish picnics, Valentine costume parties), and underlined his central argument that Organisation Man led his life in a regime he characterised as a ‘benign tyranny.’37 Under this tyranny, people must be ‘outgoing,’ by far the most important quality. They sacrifice their privacy and their idiosyncrasies and replace them with an enjoyable but unreflective lifestyle that moves from group activity to group activity and goes nowhere because one in three of such families will in any case move within a year, most likely to a similar community hundreds of miles away. Whyte recognised that, as Riesman had said of other-directed people, Organisation Man was tolerant, without avarice, and not entirely unaware that there are other forms of existence. His cage was gilded, but it was still a cage.
Whyte didn’t like the changes he saw happening, but he was candid about them rather than angry. The same could not be said for C. Wright Mills. Mills liked to describe himself as ‘an academic outlaw.’38 As a native Texan, he fitted this image easily, aided by the huge motorcycle that he rode, but Mills wasn’t joking, or not much. Trained as a sociologist, who had taught in Washington during the war and been exposed to the new social survey techniques that had come into being in the late 1930s and matured in wartime, Mills had recognised from these surveys that American society (and, to an extent, that of other Western countries) was changing – and he hated that fact. Unlike David Riesman or Whyte, however, he was not content merely to describe sociological change; he saw himself as a combatant in a new fight, where it was his job to point out the dangers overtaking America. This forced him up against many of his academic colleagues, who thought he had overstepped the mark. It was in this sense that he was an outlaw.
Born in 1916, Wright had taught at the University of Maryland in wartime, and it was while he was in Washington that he had been drawn into the work carried out by Paul Lazersfeld at Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, which did a lot of surveys for the government. Lazersfeld’s essentially statistical approach to evidence had grown rapidly as war-related interest in practical social research was reflected in government spending.39 This wartime experience had two consequences for Mills. It gave him greater awareness of the changes overtaking American society, and he had acquired a long-lasting belief that sociology should be practical, that it should strive not just to understand the way societies worked but to provide the common man with the basis for informed decisions. This was essentially the same idea that Karl Mannheim was having in London at much the same time. After the war Mills moved to New York, where he mixed with a group of other intellectuals who included Philip Rahv, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving Howe, who were connected to the Partisan Review, and Daniel Bell, editor of the New Leader.40 At Columbia he got to know Robert Lynd, famous for his study Middletown, though Lynd’s star was then on the wane. Between 1948 and 1959 Mills wrote a clutch of books that hung together with a rare intellectual consistency. The late 1940s and early 1950s, thanks to the GI bill, saw a flood of students into higher education. This raised standards in general and in turn produced a new kind of society with more jobs, more interesting kinds of job, and more specialities being professionalised. Mills saw it as his role to describe these new situations and to offer a critique.
Mills’s books were published in the following order: The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956), and The Sociological Imagination (1959). All reflected his view that, in essence, labor had ceased to be the great question in society: ‘The end of the labor question in domestic politics was accompanied by the transformation of Russia from ally to enemy and the rise of the Communist threat. The end of utopia was also the end of ideology as the labor movement shifted from social movement to interest group. The defining political issue became totalitarianism versus freedom, rather than capitalism versus socialism.’ He felt that the automobile had made suburban living possible, with the housewife as the centerpiece, ‘a specialist in consumption and in nurturing a spirit of togetherness in the family.’41 The home, and the private sphere, rather than the workplace and the union hall, had become the center of attention. He believed the 1930s, with so much government intervention because of the depression, was the crossover point. He was also the first to consider ‘celebrities’ as a group.42 The result of all this, he said, was that the formerly ‘ruggedly individualist’ American citizens had become ‘the masses,’ ‘conformist creatures of habit rather than free-thinking activists.’43 Whereas in Organisation Man Whyte had found his interest in the middle orders of corporations, in The New Men of Power Mills concentrated on the leaders, arguing that there had appeared a new type of labor leader – he was now the head of a large bureaucratic organisation, part of a new power elite, part of the mainstream. In White Collar, his theme was the transformation of the American middle class, which he characterised as ‘rootless and amorphous, a group whose status and power did not rest on anything tangible … truly a class in the middle, uncertain of itself,’ essentially anomic and prone to take the tranquillisers then coming into existence.44 ‘The white collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making.’45 ‘The idea born in the nineteenth century and nurtured throughout the 1930s, that the working class would be the bearers of a new, more progressive society,’ was laid to rest, Mills concluded. In a section on mentalities, he introduced the subversive idea that the white-collar classes were in fact not so much the new middle classes as the new working classes.46
This reconceptualisation of American society culminated in 1956 in The Power Elite, a phrase and a thesis that many of the student revolutionaries of the 1960s would find congenial. Here Mills built on Max Weber’s ideas (he had helped translate Weber into English), seeing ‘the cohesiveness of modern society as a new form of domination, a social system in which power was more diffuse and less visible than in early forms of social order. Rather than the direct power exerted by the factory owner over his employees and the autocratic ruler over his subjects, modern power had become bureaucratised and thus less easy to locate and recognise…. The new face of power in mass society was a corporate one, an interlocking hierarchical system.’47 In traditional America, Mills wrote, ‘the family, the school and the church were the main institutions around which social order congealed. In modern America, these had been replaced by the corporation, the state, and the army, each embedded in a technology, a system of interlocking processes.’48
The Sociological Imagination, Mills’s last book, took as its tide another clever phrase designed to encapsulate a new way of looking at the world, and at experiences, to help the modern individual ‘understand his own experience and gauge his own fate … by locating himself within his own period, [so] that he can know his own chances in life … by becoming aware of all those individuals in his circumstances’ (again, reminiscent of Mannheim).49 Like Hannah Arendt, Mills realised that as the old categories had broken down, so the nature of politics had changed; individual identities, as members of groups, had also collapsed and no longer applied; it was therefore, to him at least, part of the task of sociology to create a new pragmatism, to convert ‘personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals.’50 Mills’s vision was invigorating, based as it was not on his prejudices, or not only on his prejudices, but on survey material. His analysis complemented others’, and his enthusiasm for using knowledge for practical purposes prefigured the more direct involvement of many academics – especially sociologists – in politics in the decades to follow. Mills was a kind of Sartrean homme revolté in the academy, a role he relished and which others, without the same success, tried to emulate.51
A different version of the change coming over American society, and by implication other Western societies, was provided by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith, a six-foot-five academic from Harvard and Princeton who had been in charge of wartime price control and director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, detected a major shift in economic sensibility in the wake of World War II and the advent of mass society. In the views he propounded, he was following – unwittingly perhaps – Karl Popper’s idea that truth is only ever temporary, in the scientific sense: that is, until it is modified by later experience.
For Galbraith, the discipline of economics, the so-called ‘dismal science,’ had been born in poverty. For the vast span of history, he said, man has been bound by massive privation for the majority, and great inequality, with a few immensely rich individuals. Moreover, there could be no change in this picture, for the basic economic fact of life was that an increase in one man’s wages inevitably meant a decrease in another man’s profits: ‘Such was the legacy of ideas in the great central tradition of economic thought. Behind the façade of hope and optimism, there remained the haunting fear of poverty, inequality and insecurity.’52 This central vision of gloom was further refined by two glosses, one from the right, the other from the left. The social Darwinists said that competition and in some cases failure was quite normal – that was evolution working itself out. The Marxists argued that privation, insecurity, and inequality would increase to the point of revolution that would bring everything tumbling down. For Galbraith, productivity, inequality, and insecurity were the ‘ancient preoccupations’ of economics.53 But, he argued, we were now living in an Affluent Society (the title of his book), and in such a world the ancient preoccupations had changed in two important respects. In the wake of World War II and the ‘great Keynesian prosperity’ it had brought about, especially in the United States, inequality had shown no tendency to get violently worse.54 Therefore the Marxist prediction of a downward spiral to revolution did not appear to be on the cards. Second, the reason for this change, and something that, he said, had been insufficiently appreciated, was the extent to which modern business firms had inured themselves to economic insecurity. This had been achieved by various means, not all of them entirely ethical in the short run, such as cartels, tariffs, quotas, or price-fixing by law, all of which ameliorated the rawer effects of capitalist competition. But the long-term effect had been profound, Galbraith maintained. It had, for the first time in history (and admittedly only for the Western democracies), removed economic insecurity from the heart of human concerns. No one, any more, lived dangerously. ‘The riskiness of modern corporate life is, in fact, the harmless conceit of the modern corporate executive, and that is why it is vigorously proclaimed.’55
This profound change in human psychology, Galbraith said, helped explain much modern behaviour – and here there were echoes of Riesman, though Galbraith never mentioned him by name. With the overwhelming sense of economic insecurity gone from people’s lives, and with the truce on inequality, ‘we are left with a concern only for the production of goods.’ Only by higher levels of production, and productivity, can levels of income be maintained and improved. There is no paradox that the goods being produced are no longer essential to survival (in that sense they are peripheral), for in an ‘other-directed’ society, when keeping up with the Joneses comes to be an important social goal, it does not matter that goods are not essential to life – ‘the desire to get superior goods takes on a life of its own.’56
For Galbraith there are four significant consequences of this. One is that advertising takes on a new importance. With goods inessential to life, the want has to be created: ‘the production of goods creates the wants that the goods are presumed to satisfy,’ so that advertising comes to be an integral aspect of the production process.57 Advertising is thus a child to, and a father of, mass culture. Second, the increased production – and consumption – of goods can only be achieved by the deliberate creation of more debt (in a telling coincidence, credit cards were introduced in the same year that Galbraith’s book was published). Second, in such a system there will always be a tendency to inflation, even in peace (in the past inflation had generally been associated with wars). For Galbraith, this is systemic, arising from the very fact that the producers of goods must also create the wants for those same goods, if they are to be bought. In an expanding economy, firms will always be operating at or near their capacity, and therefore always building new plants, which require capital investment. In a competitive system, successful firms will need to pay the highest wages – which must be paid before the returns on capital investment are brought in. There is, therefore, always an upward pressure on inflation in the consumer society. Third, and as a result of this, public services – paid for by the government because no market can exist in these areas – will always lag behind private, market-driven goods.58 Galbraith both observes and predicts that public services will always be the poor relation in the affluent society, and that public service workers will be among the least well off. His last point is that with the arrival of the product-driven society there also arrives the age of the businessman - ‘more precisely, perhaps, the important business executive.’ So long as inequality was a matter of serious concern, says Galbraith, the tycoon had at best an ambiguous position: ‘He performed a function of obvious urgency. But he was also regularly accused of taking too much for his services. As concern for inequality has declined, this reaction has disappeared.’
Having set out his description of modern mass society, Galbraith went on to make his famous distinction between private affluence and public squalor, showing how it is the obsession with private goods that helps create the poor public services, with overcrowded schools, under-strength police forces, dirty streets, inadequate transport. ‘These deficiencies are not in new or novel services but in old and established ones,’ he says, because only in private goods can advertising – that is, the creation of wants – work. It makes no sense to advertise roads, or schools, or police forces. He concludes, therefore, that the truce on inequality should be replaced with a concern for the balance between private affluence and public squalor. Inflation only makes that imbalance worse, and things are at their very worst in local, as opposed to central, government areas (the local police are always underfunded compared to the FBI, for instance).59
Galbraith’s solutions to the problems of the affluent society were twofold. One was taken up widely. This was the local sales tax.60 If consumer goods are the prime success story of modern society, and at the same time a cause of the problem, as Galbraith maintained, there is a certain justice in making them part of the solution too. His second solution was more radical, more unusual psychologically, and cannot be said to have been acted upon in any serious way as yet, though it may come. Galbraith noted that many people in the affluent society took large salaries not because they needed them but because it was a way of keeping score, a reflection of prestige. Such people actually enjoyed working; it was no longer a way to avoid economic insecurity but intellectually satisfying in itself. He thought what was needed was a new leisure class. In fact, he thought it was growing naturally, but he wanted it to be a matter of policy to encourage further growth. His point was that the New Class, as he called it, with initial capitals, would have a different system of morality. Better educated, with a greater concern for the arts and literature, having made enough money in the earlier parts of their careers, members of this New Class would retreat from work, changing the value attached to production and helping redress the social balance between private affluence and public squalor, maybe even devoting the latter part of their careers to public service.61
The Affluent Society may have sparked other books, but many were in preparation at the end of the 1950s, born of similar observations. For example, in The Stages of Economic Growth, completed in March 1959 and published a year later W. W. Rostow produced a book that in some ways showed affinities with both Galbraith and Riesman. Rostow, an economist at MIT who had spent a great deal of time in Britain, mainly but not only at Cambridge, agreed with Riesman that the modern world had developed through stages, from traditional societies to the age of high mass consumption. He echoed Galbraith in regarding economic growth as the engine not just of material change but of political, social, and intellectual change as well. He even thought that the stages of economic growth had a hand – but only a hand – in wars.62
For Rostow, societies fell into five stages. In the beginning, the pre-Newtonian world, there is the traditional society. This included the dynasties in China, the civilisations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the world of mediaeval Europe. What they shared was a ceiling on their productivity. They were capable of change, but slowly. At some point, he said, traditional societies broke out of their situation, mainly because the early days of modern science came along, with new techniques enabling individuals ‘to enjoy the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest.’63 In this stage, the precondition for takeoff, several things happened, the most important being the emergence of an effective, centralised nation state, the lateral expansion of trade across the world, and the appearance of banks for mobilising capital. Sometimes this change was promoted by the intrusion of a more advanced society. What Rostow called ‘The Take-Off’ he regarded as the ‘great watershed of modern life in modern society.’64 This required two things; a surge in technology, but also a group of individuals, organised politically, ‘prepared to regard the modernisation of the economy as serious, high-order political business.’ During the takeoff the rate of effective investment and savings more than doubles, say from 5 percent to 10 percent and above. The classic example of this stage is the great railway booms. Some sixty years after the takeoff begins, Rostow says, the fourth stage, maturity, is reached.65 Here there is a shift from, say, the coal, iron, and heavy engineering industries of the railway phase to machine tools, chemicals, and electrical equipment. Rostow produced a number of tables that illustrate his approach. Here, two of the more interesting have been amalgamated:66
| Country | Takeoff | Maturity |
| United Kingdom | 1783–1802 | 1850 |
| United States | 1843–60 | 1900 |
| Germany | 1850–73 | 1910 |
| France | 1830–60 | 1910 |
| Sweden | 1868–90 | 1930 |
| Japan | 1878–1900 | 1940 |
| Russia | 1890–1914 | 1950 |
| Canada | 1896–1914 | 1950 |
Speculating on the sixty-year gap between takeoff and maturity, Rostow puts this down to the time needed for the arithmetic of compound interest to take effect and/or for three generations of individuals to live under a regime where growth is the normal condition. In the fifth stage, the age of high mass consumption, there is a shift to durable consumer goods – cars, refrigerators, other electrically powered household gadgets.67 There is also the emergence of a welfare state.68 But The Stages was a book of its time in other senses than that it followed Galbraith. This was the height of the Cold War (the Berlin Wall would go up in the following year, with the Cuban missile crisis a year after that), and the arms race was at its height, the space race beginning in earnest. Rostow clearly saw his stages as an alternative, and better, analysis of social and economic change than Marxism, and he considered the stages of growth to be partly related to war. Rostow observed three kinds of war: colonial wars, regional wars, and the mass wars of the twentieth century.69 Wars tended to occur, he said, when societies, or countries, were changing from one stage of growth to another – war both satisfied and encouraged the energies being unleashed at these times. Conversely, countries that were stagnating, as France and Britain were after World War II, became targets of aggression for expanding powers. His most important point, certainly in the context of the times when his book appeared, but still of great interest, was that the shift into high mass consumption was the best hope for peace70 – not only because it created very satisfied societies who would not want to make war, but also because they had more to lose in an era of weapons of mass destruction. He noted that the USSR spent far too much on defence to allow its citizens to profit properly from consumer goods, and he hoped its citizens would one day realise how these two facts were related and prevail on their governments to change.71 Rostow’s analysis and predictions were borne out – but not until more than a quarter of a century had elapsed.
Rostow’s view was therefore fundamentally optimistic, more optimistic certainly than Galbraith’s. Other critics’ were much less so. One of Galbraith’s main points in the analytic section of his book was the relatively new importance of advertising, in creating the wants that the private consumer goods were intended to satisfy. Almost simultaneously with his book, an American journalist-turned-social-critic published three volumes that took a huge swipe at the advertising industry, expanding and amplifying Galbraith’s argument, examining the ‘intersection of power, money and writing.’ Vance Packard called his trilogy The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), and The Waste Makers (1960). All of them reached the number-one slot in the New York Times best-seller list, in the process transforming Packard’s own fortunes. He had lost his job just before Christmas 1956 when the magazine he wrote for, Collier’s, folded.72 In early 1957 he had taken his first unemployment cheque but already had a manuscript with the publishers. This manuscript had an odd life. In the autumn of 1954 Reader’s Digest magazine had given Packard an assignment, which he later said ‘they apparently had lying around,’ on the new psychological techniques then being used in advertising. Packard researched the article, wrote it, but then learned that the Digest had ‘recently broken its long-standing tradition and decided to begin carrying advertisements. Subsequently, he was paid for his article, but it never appeared, and he was outraged when he learned there was a connection between the decision not to publish his piece and the magazine’s acceptance of advertising, the subject of his attack.’73 He thus turned the article into a book.
The main target of Packard’s attack was the relatively new technique of motivational research (MR), which relied on intensive interviewing, psychoanalytic theory, and qualitative analysis, and in which sex often figured prominently. As Galbraith had emphasised, many people did not question advertising – they thought it important in helping fuel the demand on which mass society’s prosperity was based. In 1956 the prominent MR advocate Ernest Dichter had announced, ‘Horatio Alger is dead. We do not any longer really believe that hard work and savings are the only desirable things in life; yet they remain subconscious criteria of our feeling of morality.’ For Dichter, consumption had to be linked to pleasure, consumers had to be shown that it was ‘moral’ to enjoy life. This should be reflected in advertising.74
Packard’s main aim in The Hidden Persuaders was to show – via a catalogue of case histories – that American consumers were little more than ‘mindless zombies’ manipulated by the new psychological techniques. In one revealing case, for example, he quoted a marketing study by Dichter himself.75 Headed ‘Mistress versus Wife,’ this was carried out for the Chrysler Corporation and explored why men bought sedans even though they preferred sporty models. The report argued that men were drawn into automobile showrooms by the flashy, sporty types in the window, but actually bought less flashy cars, ‘just as he once married a plain girl.’ ‘Dichter urged the auto maker to develop a hardtop, a car that combined the practical aspects men sought in a wife with the sense of adventure they imagined they would find in a mistress.’76 Packard believed that MR techniques were antidemocratic, appealing to the irrational, mind-moulding on a grand scale. Such techniques applied to politics could take us nearer to the world of 1984 and Animal Farm and, Packard thought, following Riesman, that the ‘other-directed’ types of mass society were most at risk. Advertising not only helped along the consumer society, it stopped people achieving autonomy.
Packard’s second book, The Status Seekers, was less original, attacking the way advertising used status and people’s fears over loss of status to sell goods.77 His more substantial point was that, just then in America, there was much debate over whether the country was really less class-ridden than Europe, or had its own system, based more on material acquisitions rather than heredity. (This also was an issue that Galbraith had raised.) Packard advanced the view that business was essentially hypocritical in its stance. On the one hand, it claimed that the wider availability of the consumer products it was selling made America less divided; on the other, one of its major methods of selling used exactly these differences in status – and anxiety over those differences – as a device for promoting the sales of goods. His third book, The Waste Makers, used as its starting point a 1957 paper by a Princeton undergraduate, William Zabel, on planned obsolescence, in other words the deliberate manipulation of taste so that goods would seem out of date – and therefore be replaced – long before they were physically exhausted.78 This last book was probably Packard’s most overstated case; even so, analysis of his correspondence showed that many people were already disenchanted by the underlying nature of mass consumer society but felt so atomised they didn’t know what to do about it. As he himself was to put it later, the people who wrote to him were members of ‘The Lonely Crowd.’79
Naturally, the business community didn’t relish these attacks; as an editorial in Life put it, ‘Some of our recent books have been scaring the pizazz out of us with the notion of the Lonely Crowd … bossed by a Power Elite … flim-flammed by hidden persuaders and emasculated into a neuter drone called the Organisational Man.’80
One general notion underpinned and linked these various ideas. It was that, as a result of changes in the workplace and the creation of mass society, and as a direct consequence of World War II and the events leading up to it, a new socio-politico-psychology, a new human condition, was abroad. The traditional sources from which people took their identity had changed, bringing new possibilities but also new problems. Riesman, Mills, Galbraith, and the others had each chipped away, sculpting part of the picture, but it was left to another man to sum it all up, to describe this change of epoch in the language it deserved.
Daniel Bell was born in the Lower East Side of New York City in 1919 and grew up in the garment district in a family that had migrated from Bialystok, between Poland and Russia (the family name was Bolotsky). Bell was raised in such poverty, he says, that there was ‘never any doubt’ that he would become a sociologist, in order to explain what he saw to himself. At the City College of New York he joined a reading group that included Melvin J. Lasky, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Irving Howe, all well-known sociologists and social critics. Some were Trotskyists, though most later changed their beliefs and formed the backbone of the neoconservative movement. Bell also worked as a journalist, editing the New Leader, then at Fortune with Whyte, but he also had a stint at the end of the war as a sociologist at the University of Chicago, with David Riesman, and moonlighted as a sociology lecturer at Columbia from 1952–1956. He later joined Columbia full time before moving on to Harvard, in 1965 founding The Public Interest with Irving Kristol as a place to rehearse the great public debates.81 It was while he was moonlighting at Columbia that he produced the work for which he first became known to the world outside sociology. This was The End of Ideology.
In 1955 Bell attended the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Milan, where several notable liberal and conservative intellectuals addressed a theme set by Raymond Aron, ‘The End of the Ideological Age?’ Among those present, according to Malcolm Waters, in his assessment of Bell, were Edward Shils, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Anthony Crosland, Richard Crossman, Hugh Gaitskell, Max Beloff, J. K. Galbraith, José Ortega y Gassett, Sidney Hook, and Seymour Martin Lipset. Bell’s contribution was a lecture on America as a mass society. The ‘End of Ideology’ debate – which would recur in several forms during the rest of the century – was seen originally by Aron as a good thing because he thought that ideologies prevent the building of a progressive state. In particular, Aron identified nationalism, liberalism, and Marxist socialism as the three dominant ideologies that, he said, were crumbling: nationalism because states were weakening as they became interdependent, liberalism because it could offer no ‘sense of community or focus for commitment,’ and Marxism because it was false.82 Bell’s contribution was to argue that this whole process had gone further, faster, in the United States. For him, ideology was not only a set of governing ideas but ideas that were ‘infused with passion,’ and sought ‘to transform the whole way of life.’ Ideologies therefore take on some of the characteristics of a secular religion but can never replace real religion because they do not address the great existential questions, particularly death. For Bell, ideologies had worked throughout the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth because they helped offer moral guidance and represented real differences between the various interest groups and classes in society. But those differences had been eroded over the years, thanks to the emergence of the welfare state, the violent oppression carried out by socialist regimes against their populations, and the emergence of new stoic and existential philosophies that replaced the romantic ideas of the perfectibility of human nature.83 Mass society, for Bell and for the United States at least, was a society of abundance and optimism where traditional differences were minimised and a consensus of views had emerged. The blood, sweat, and tears had gone out of politics.84
Bell wasn’t seeking a prescription, merely attempting to describe what he saw as an epochal change in society, where its members were no longer governed by dominant ideas. Like Fromm or Mills he was identifying a new form of life coming into being. We are now apt to take that society for granted, especially if we are too young to have known anything else.
Few if any of these writers were associated intimately with any political party, but the majority were, for a time at least, of the left rather than of the right. The equality of effort demanded from all sections of society in wartime had a powerful significance that was much more than symbolic. This was reflected not only in the creation and provisions of the welfare state but in all the analyses of mass society, which accepted implicitly that all individuals had an equal right to the rewards that life had to offer. This equality was also part of the new human condition.
But was that justified? Michael Young, a British educationalist, an arch innovator, and a friend and colleague of Daniel Bell, produced a satire in 1958 that poked fun at some of these cherished assumptions.85 The Rise of the Meritocracy was ostensibly set in 2034 and was cast as an ‘official’ report written in response to certain ‘disturbances’ that, to begin with, are not specified.86 The essence of the satire is that the hereditary principle in life has been abolished, to be replaced by one of merit (IQ+Effort=Merit), with the ‘aristocracy’ replaced by a ‘meritocracy.’ Interestingly, Young found it very difficult to publish the book – it was turned down by eleven publishers.87 One suggested that it would only be worth publishing if it were rewritten as a satire like Animal Farm (as if that had been easy to publish). Young did rewrite the book as a satire, but even so the publisher still declined to take it on. Young was also criticised for coining a term, meritocracy, that had both a Greek and a Latin root. In the end the book was published by a friend at Thames & Hudson, but only as an act of friendship – whereupon The Rise promptly sold several hundred thousand copies.88
The book is divided into two sections. ‘The Rise of the Elite’ is essentially an optimistic gloss on the way high-IQ people have been let loose in the corridors of power; the second section, ‘The Decline of the Lower Classes,’ is a gleeful picture of the way such social engineering is almost bound to backfire. Young doesn’t take sides; he merely fires both barrels of the argument as to what would happen if we really did espouse wholeheartedly the mantra ‘equality of opportunity.’ His chief point is that such an approach would be bound to lead to eugenic nonsenses and monstrosities, that the new lower classes – by definition stupid – would have no leadership worth the name, and that the new IQ-rich upper classes would soon devise ways to keep themselves in power. Here he ‘reveals’ that society in 2034 has discovered ways of predicting the IQ of an infant at three months; the result is predictable – a black market in babies in which the stupid children of high IQ parents are swapped, along with large ‘dowries,’ for high-IQ children of stupid parents.89 It is this practice that, when exposed in the newspapers, gives rise to the ‘disturbances,’ an incoherent rising by a leaderless, stupid mob, which has no chance of success.
Young’s argument overlaps with Bell’s, and others, insofar as he is saying that the new human condition risks being a passionless, cold, boring block of bureaucracy in which tyranny takes not the form of fascism or communism or socialism but benevolent bureaucratisation.90 Scientism is a factor here, too, he says. You can measure IQ, maybe, but you can never measure good parenting or put a numerical value on being an artist, say, or a corporate CEO. And maybe any attempt to try only creates more problems than it solves.
Young had pushed Bell’s and Riesman’s and Mills’s reasoning to its limits, its logical conclusion. Man’s identity was no longer politically determined; and he was no longer an existential being. His identity was psychological, biological, predetermined at birth. If we weren’t careful, the end of ideology meant the end of our humanity.