David Riesman – 1909-2002

Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) was a groundbreaking, provocative, and highly influential study of the urban middle class of postwar America. Riesman analyzed and defined the sense of individual alienation among the dominant class in America, which (as he saw it) emphasized conformity at the expense of self-fulfillment and the development of deep interpersonal relationships.