"At Home Everywhere and Nowhere"

"From the 1930s, other sociologists had written about the social effects of mass media and mass consumption, and The Lonely Crowd's other-directed type bore some resemblance to Erich Fromm's 'marketing personality' (Fromm had been Riesman's analyst). But The Lonely Crowd made more of the way in which an older industrial culture of production and saving had given way to one of services, sales, and consumption—what Daniel Bell, a decade later, would call a 'postindustrial' society."

In The Chronicle Review, Rupert Wilkinson revisits David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, upon the book's sixtieth anniversary.