大卫·理斯曼

大卫·理斯曼（David Riesman，1909年9月22日—2002年5月10日），美国社会学家、律师、教育家。他父亲是宾夕法尼亚医学院教授，早年入哈佛大学攻读生物化学，1931年毕业。之后进入法学院，1934年取得学位。其间，他常用业余时间去纽约精神病学院听课，并因此结识埃里希·弗罗姆。

之后，理斯曼成为《哈佛法律评论》的成员，自1935至1936年在美国最高法院法官路易斯·布兰迪斯手下办事。他也在布法罗大学法学院任教。

《孤独的人群》

理斯曼1950年与同事合著的书《孤独的人群》，是对现代行为的社会学研究，假定了“自我支配型”和“他人支配型”两种人格的存在。理斯曼认为二战后美国社会的特征是将人的个体推向“他人支配”，最明显的例子是现代郊区，个人都寻求他们邻居的赞同，害怕被社群抛弃。这种生活方式产生了一种强制的影响，迫使人们抛弃对各自生活的“自我支配”，迫使人们接收社群的喜与不喜、思维和目标。讽刺的是，这种现象造成了每一群人之间的紧密联系，但却不能真正满足个人对友谊的渴望。该书被认为是研究美国人性格的里程碑。理斯曼成为著名的公共知识分子和社会学家，是现在所谓“公共社会学” 的早期代表之一。

美国高等教育

除了出版其他领域的书，理斯曼也是美国高等教育问题的评论员。他与Christopher Jencks合著的《学术革命》就是关于此类问题。在这本书中，理斯曼总结了他的主张，声称“如果这本书表达了什么简单信息的话，那就是专业学者的职业日益决定了大学本科教学的质量”。在对20世纪美国高等教育中发生的那些重大改变的惨淡经营的、从历史角度表达的评论中，理斯曼一再强调“研究型大学的逻辑”的作用，主要聚焦于对严肃学术的研究。这种内部逻辑不但设置了研究型大学的目标，也生产出它未来的专家教授。理斯曼注意到这种逻辑孤立了任何试图挑战大学的首要目标——学术研究的所有阻碍的方式，赋予它们成功的机会。

David Riesman (September 22, 1909 – May 10, 2002) was an American sociologist, educator, and best-selling commentator on American society.

Career

Born to a wealthy German Jewish family, Riesman attended Harvard College, where he graduated in 1931 with a degree in biochemistry. He attended Harvard Law School, where he was a member of the Harvard Law Review. Riesman clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis between 1935 and 1936. He also taught at what is now the University at Buffalo Law School and at the University of Chicago.

He worked for Sperry Gyroscope company during the war. After a fellowship at Yale to write The Lonely Crowd, he returned to Chicago. In 1958, he became a university professor at Harvard. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1955) and the American Philosophical Society (1974). Intellectually he was influenced most by Erich Fromm, as well as Carl Friedrich, Hannah Arendt, Leo Löwenthal, Robert K. Merton, Paul Lazarsfeld, Paul Goodman, Martha Wolfenstein, and Nathan Leites. He widely referenced the works of Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, and Sigmund Freud.

The Lonely Crowd

Daniel Horowitz says The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, in 1950 quickly became the nation’s most influential and widely read mid-century work of social and cultural criticism. It catapulted its author to the cover of Time magazine in 1954, making Riesman the first social scientist so honored.... Riesman offered a nuanced and complicated portrait of the nation’s middle and upper-middle classes.... Riesman pictured a nation in the midst of a shift from a society based on production to one fundamentally shaped by the market orientation of a consumer culture. He explored how people used consumer goods to communicate with one another.

The book is largely a study of modern conformity, which postulates the existence of the "inner-directed" and "other-directed" personalities. Riesman argued that the character of post-World War II American society impels individuals to "other-directedness," the preeminent example being modern suburbia, where individuals seek their neighbors' approval and fear being outcast from their community. That lifestyle has a coercive effect, which compels people to abandon "inner-direction" of their lives, and it induces them to take on the goals, ideology, likes, and dislikes of their community.

This creates a tightly grouped crowd of people that is yet incapable of fulfilling each other's desires. The book is considered a landmark study of American character. Riesman was a major public intellectual as well as a sociologist and represented an early example of what sociologists now call "public sociology".

American higher education

In addition to his many other publications, Riesman was also a noted commentator on American higher education, publishing, with his seminal work, The Academic Revolution, which was co-written with Christopher Jencks. In it, Riesman sums up his position by stating, "If this book has any single message it is that the academic profession increasingly determines the character of undergraduate education in America."

Riesman highlights the effects of the "logic of the research university," which focuses upon strict disciplinary research. That both sets the goals of the research university and produces its future professors. Riesman noted that the logic isolated any patterns of resistance that might challenge the university's primary purpose as disciplinary research, dashing their chances of success.