The Lonely Crowd : a Study of the Changing American Character

1952 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-132
Author(s):  
F. C. Bartlett
Keyword(s):  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Character

The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character.

1951 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Read Bain ◽  
David Riesman ◽  
Ruel Denney ◽  
Nathan Glazer
Keyword(s):  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Character

The Predicament of National Character

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Blaustein
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
The United States ◽  
Second World War ◽  
National Character ◽  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Military ◽  
American Character ◽  
History Of ◽  
Henry Luce ◽  
Second World

“National character” has a curious history in the twentieth century. Margaret Mead wrote the first anthropological account of the United States in 1942, but the history of national character as a concept runs through social psychology and anthropology between the wars, the cultivation of “morale” during the Second World War, and the deployment of social science in postwar American military occupations. That history is the subject of this chapter: what “American character” revealed and obscured, both nationally and internationally. Mead was the Henry Luce of anthropology: her life and writings offer a miniature of the science of characterology in the American Century. The chapter begins as an institutional and intellectual history, but concludes with new readings of three postwar texts. Characterology was indeed a science, of a kind, but it was also an art. Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a remote ethnography of Japan, is a parable of American power and its limits. Mead’s New Lives for Old, recounting her return to New Guinea in 1953, becomes a sermon about a Polynesian city upon a hill. David Riesman’s classic of sociology, The Lonely Crowd, closes one frontier of national character but opens another. To consider national character as narrative and ideology illuminates American character’s imprint on the world.

The Lonely Crowd in Minnesota: A Psychometric Approach to the Study of the Modern American Character

Prospects ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 365-390
Author(s):  
Michael Barton
Keyword(s):  
Personality Type ◽  
Personality Types ◽  
National Character ◽  
Psychological Characteristics ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Character ◽  
Realistic Approach ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Problems

The Historical study of the American character has been hobbled for several reasons, many of which are summarized by David Stannard in “American Historians and the Idea of National Character: Some Problems and Prospects.” Stannard emphasizes that America has always been too complex a sociocultural system to have produced a uniform national character or a typical personality. He notes that cultural anthropologists have not found psychological uniformity even in small, preliterate communities. If scholars would study the variety of the nation's psychological characteristics instead—if they would search for the modal personality (most frequently occurring type) and the distribution of other personality types rather than only the basic personality type—then, at least in Stannard's opinion, they would avoid oversimplification, the most serious conceptual error. But even this more realistic approach retains methodological problems that are so serious that he suggests historians concentrate on understanding “deeds and events” and leave the study of national character and characteristics to the social and behavioral scientists. (Philosophers of history might deny that the study of deeds and events is less troublesome than the study of national character, but that is another matter.)

The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character

1951 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolph E. Morris ◽  
David Riesman ◽  
Reuel Denny ◽  
Nathan Glazer
Keyword(s):  
Lonely Crowd ◽  
American Character
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