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 This volume recasts and reintroduces Riesman by presenting newly discovered and unpublished manuscripts of his work, including excerpts from a previously unpublished critical biography of Freud that Riesman began with this assistant at the time, Philip Rieff, an interview in which Riesman describes in detail his early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 With additional chapters analyzing the unpublished works, as well as discussions of Riesman as a public intellectual, his multi-disciplinary method of understanding society and his connections with figures such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.

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 This volume recasts and reintroduces Riesman by presenting newly discovered and unpublished manuscripts of his work, including excerpts from a previously unpublished critical biography of Freud that Riesman began with this assistant at the time, Philip Rieff, an interview in which Riesman describes in detail his early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 With additional chapters analyzing the unpublished works, as well as discussions of Riesman as a public intellectual, his multi-disciplinary method of understanding society and his connections with figures such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.

More than 50 years ago, C. Wright Mills heralded a new age for sociology for the 1960s and beyond. Yet his forward-looking vision also foretold some of the social conditions we associate, more recently, with postmodern society. This intellectual biography of Mills emphasizes early life experiences that shaped Mills's expansive vision of the future, just as Kerr develops, from Mills, tools for confronting current and looming problems. Drawing upon little-known documents, Kerr expands our knowledge about this leading 20th-century sociologist, and shows how forward-looking Millsian scholarship can enhance the endeavors of sociology today.

This book explores what contemporary sociology can learn from Mills. Mills, exploring foundations for social solidarity during his times, turned backward just as we now turn backward toward Mills. Mills, however, was not content to allow the dead to speak for the living, recognizing that midcentury America, while sharing historical links to past times, also possessed people and structures that moved beyond what sociology of old was prepared to engage. At the start of the twenty-first century, we too must understand it is time to take from Mills what we can, but like Mills, we must learn to move forward and confront the problems of our own age. It is not argued that Mills should be forgotten; only that if Mills is to be relevant to contemporary sociology, a forward-looking vision must be drawn from his work rather than the nostalgic glance backward characteristic of much of Millsian scholarship.Exploring the impetus for Mills's statements on American culture, these pages are partly a biographical exploration into Mills's first 20 years and how these formative years shaped the scope and concern of Mills's later formulation of the emerging "postmodern" world. In exploring Mills's early experiences and how these later reappear in his academic work, the book examines previously unpublished-and in some cases previously unknown-primary documents, and shows what contributions a forward-looking Millsian scholarship could provide to an ailing contemporary sociology.