American Character Revisited
One of the intellectual industries that has flourished as the economic barometer has fallen is the study of American social character: the enterprise of generalizing about American culture in a way that focuses on psychological tendencies: on character, attitude, and personal values. Ten years ago, most readers, I believe, would have accepted this topic as a distinctive part of American intellectual history, but as something which more or less went out after the concerns of the 1950s that made such a market for David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd and William Whyte's The Organization Man. We now know that it did not go out; it merely receded in the centrifugal sixties and resumed in the seventies. Yet despite the industry's resurgence and its long antecedents, it has never been fully analysed and explained.