Faces in the Crowd [antikvár]

Preface to the Paperbound Edition This book is primarily the record of an experiment in the interpretation of relatively brief interviews. These are the twenty-one portraits which make up the bulk of the volume.^ Mr. Glazer and I had started work at Yale in January 1948 without a clear agenda. He had had some experience as a coder and analyst at the Bureau of Applied Social Research, but I had never constructed an interview guide or done any interviews. Our point of departure was an interest in the way people expressed political attitudes or their absence. For we had noticed, going over files of interviews in the Eastern Office of the National Opinion Research Center and also studying interviews done for C. Wright Mills (later made use of in his book, White Collar), that the great majority of Americans seemed opinion-prone in politics, with only a relatively small minority (often no more than 10 per cent) falling into the "don't know" column. Since we were proceeding in an exploratory fashion to conduct our own interviews, when opportunities occurred to interview adolescents in high school, we jumped in, putting together a grab bag of questions (some of them taken from the work that later became The Authoritarian Personality and some from work at the Bureau, or NORC) ; we also recruited interviewers as unprofessional as ourselves. Originally we mulled over these interviews in terms of political orientation.^ But we also began to notice characterological differences and to be struck by the way small clues might hint at these. In fact, the concepts of social character set forth in The Lonely Crowd were developed almost accidentally in working with these vignettes of a few individuals. Margaret Mead once commented in a review that Faces in the Crowd and The Lonely Crowd should have been published as a unit, since each sheds light upon the other. But as we make clear in both books, the portraits of Faces in the Crowd furnish no probative support for the generalizations of the com- I. Four portraits have been eliminated from this paperbound edition, principally for reasons of space: those of Mrs. Elizabeth Sinclair, Harrington A. Wittke, Robert Blau, and Henry Songer. Otherwise, the reprint that follows has been made from the plates of the hardcover edition. Awkward wording has been changed in a few places, but substantive changes have not been made, and criticisms of the original book would hold also for this one. Cross-references to The Lonely Crowd now refer, not to the original hardcover, but to the several paperbound editions. 2- In addition to what is said in Part I of this book, see the discussion in Riesman and Glazcr, Criterion for Political Apathy, Alvin W. Gouldner, ed., Studies in Leadership (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1950).