Volume 2, Number 7 · May 14, 1964
Riesman in the Sixties
By Midge Decter
Abundance for What?
by David Riesman
Doubleday, 603 pp., $6.50
Reading through this new collection of David Riesman's essays is a peculiarly unpleasant experience. The pieces collected here were originally published or delivered as lectures during the past nine years, and though they fall naturally into four sections divided by subject—'The Impact of the Cold War,' 'Abundance for What?' 'Abundance for Whom?' and 'Social Science Research'—all together they comprise a single continuing enterprise: to define the new temper of American life brought about by the conditions of 'abundance' or 'affluence' or whatever term one chooses to characterize the postwar period. Now this subject is one that no one living in America can long escape from or fail to feel himself implicated in. It is, moreover, preeminently David Riesman's subject; indeed, one might almost say that in The Lonely Crowd he invented it. And yet far from providing illumination or even entertainment, Abundance for What? only wearies the spirit.
Review, 1788 words
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