Ebook: David Riesman’s Unpublished Writings and Continuing Legacy

It has been over 60 years since David Riesman’s most famous work The Lonely Crowd brought him international acclaim. While this remains a best-selling sociology book, Riesman’s expertise and publications spanned far beyond the treatment of the American social character type offered there. This volume recasts and reintroduces Riesman by presenting newly discovered and unpublished manuscripts of his work, including excerpts from a previously unpublished critical biography of Freud that Riesman began with this assistant at the time, Philip Rieff, an interview in which Riesman describes in detail his early biography and his route into the social sciences, and other research notes and memoranda. With additional chapters analyzing the unpublished works, as well as discussions of Riesman as a public intellectual, his multi-disciplinary method of understanding society and his connections with figures such as Goffman and Fromm, this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and the history of American social science.

Review
David Riesman was American sociology's great public intellectual of the 20th century. Riesman theorized about society and social character, cared about undergraduate teaching and higher education and intervened in the world effectively on questions of the nuclear arms race and the Berlin crisis in the early 1960s. These unpublished Riesman manuscripts and original essays on his ideas and life are an indispensable resource for understanding the pre-history of public sociology. --Neil McLaughlin, McMaster University, Canada

David Riesman was a major public intellectual of the second half of the last century, his views regularly solicited by major media and institutions. This volume collects some of his unpublished papers - lectures, letters, speeches, uncompleted articles - on a range of subjects, which illustrate his amazing fertility of mind, his talent as a writer and phrase-maker, and his unique ability to discern, from simple engagement with individuals and aspects of popular culture, significant trends in American society that now give him the aura of a prophet. --Nathan Glazer, Harvard University, USA

About the Author
Keith Kerr is Associate Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University, USA and author of Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st Century Sociology. B. Garrick Harden is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lamar University, USA and co-editor of Co-opting Culture: Culture and Power in Sociology and Cultural Studies. Marcus Aldredge is Assistant Professor of Sociology at at Iona College, USA and author of Singer-Songwriters and Musical Open Mics.