David Riesman Jr., 92; Sociologist Coauthored ‘The Lonely Crowd’

David Riesman Jr., attorney and sociologist who rocketed to fame with the publication of his first book, “The Lonely Crowd,” which remains a classic study of ever-changing American society, has died. He was 92.

Riesman died Friday in a nursing home in Binghamton, N.Y., of natural causes.

Coauthored by Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney, Riesman’s 1950 “The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character” has sold more than 1.4 million copies. The book popularized and dignified the field of sociology and helped set the stage for developing “pop psychology.”

Along with such cautionary tomes as “The Greening of America,” “One-Dimensional Man” and “The Status Seekers,” the book also signaled a long period of intense self-scrutiny by Americans.

Even people who never read Riesman’s masterwork came to identify friends and neighbors as “inner-directed,” “other-directed” or perhaps “tradition-directed”--three terms Riesman coined for household as well as classroom consumption.

In the book, Riesman defined three types of social character as determined by population trends. In periods with fairly stable population growth such as the Middle Ages, he said, people become “tradition-directed,” planning their lives according to the rules of their cultural history.

As populations grow, he said, people become “inner-directed,” ambitiously setting and pursuing individualistic goals such as fame or scientific discovery.

But as populations stabilize anew following growth spurts, individuals become “other-directed,” seeking peer approval by conforming to group aspirations.

The third type was how Riesman viewed the mid-20th-century Americans he was writing about.

As a companion piece, Riesman and Glazer wrote a second book, published in 1952, titled “Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics,” to illustrate the various types of character.

Many saw the books as preaching nonconformity, and flower children and other individualists sought to use them as a basis to justify free-form lifestyles.

A reference to “The Lonely Crowd” even pops up in Bob Dylan’s song “I Shall Be Released,” which includes the lyric “Standing next to me in this lonely crowd is a man who swears he’s not to blame.”

But Riesman emphasized that personalities are too complex for a single label and insisted he merely wanted to show how conformity could occur and be enforced in society.

Critics also felt Riesman meant to discredit careers in business, as corporations began to rely on group decisions rather than individual action. He disputed that, writing in a 1969 edition that he regretted how “The Lonely Crowd” might have encouraged snobbish deprecation of business careers. He pointed out that he had repeatedly encouraged “interested students to take their MBAs.”

Adamantly opposed to nuclear weapons and to war, and specifically the Vietnam War, Riesman nevertheless famously opposed student protesters of the 1960s. He referred to their activities at UC Berkeley and other campuses as “uncivil disobedience,” and told Berkeley student leaders their conduct was provoking a right-wing backlash that would “one day elect [then-Gov.] Ronald Reagan president.”

In later years, Riesman staunchly continued to oppose subsequent and milder student protests over South African apartheid and other issues. College, he insisted, should be a time “for students to do things badly, to be awkward, to think about utopian subjects, to read Baudelaire.... Politics can come later.”

Riesman devoted much of his study and writing to higher education--contributing half a dozen books on such issues as rising student power, declining faculty autonomy, politics in choosing administrators and treatment of minorities on campus.

Among the books he wrote or co-wrote were “The Academic Revolution” in 1968, “The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College” in 1978, “On Higher Education: The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism” in 1980 and “Choosing a College President: Opportunities and Constraints” in 1990.

Riesman, who through the years enjoyed matching wits with journalists as much as students, academics and government officials, was often sought out for commentary on evolving America.

During the high inflation, oil shortages and economic curtailment of the 1970s, he once defined inflation for a Times columnist as “social dynamite,” and warned of “the enormous resistance of people to the lowering of standards of living....”

Born in Philadelphia, the son of a physician and professor of medicine, Riesman earned a bachelor’s degree in biomedical science and a law degree from Harvard, serving as editor of the Harvard Crimson and an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He was a clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, practiced law in Boston and taught it at the University of Buffalo. He then worked as a deputy assistant district attorney in Manhattan. During World War II, he was an executive at Sperry Gyroscope Co.

But ultimately Riesman decided to concentrate on an academic career in lecturing, research and writing. He taught social sciences at the University of Chicago from 1949 to 1958 and then at Harvard until semiretirement in 1980.

Widowed in 1998 after 62 years of marriage to Evelyn Hastings Thompson, Riesman is survived by two daughters, Lucy Lowenstein and Jennie Riesman; one son, Michael; and two grandchildren.