Papers of David Riesman

David Riesman (1909-2002), lawyer, sociologist, educator, was the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University. Riesman's research focused on the study of American higher education, including educational strategies and reform, student development and welfare, and the relationship between the university and the larger society. He was also known as a commentator on American society publishing in 1950 a social and cultural analysis of American character, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character.

Riesman received his AB (1931) and LLB (1934) from Harvard University. After receiving his law degree, Riesman held a research fellowship at the Harvard Law School, where he studied government, economics, and American constitutional history. In 1935, Riesman worked as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and in 1936 began practicing law in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1937, Riesman became Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo Law School, where he taught courses in criminal law, property, legislation, and constitutional law until 1941. In 1941, as a Visiting Research Fellow at Columbia Law School, Riesman continued his research on public opinion problems, civil liberties, and the politics of defamation. In 1942, Riesman became Assistant Deputy District Attorney in New York. He studied with sociologist Erich Fromm at the Washington School of Psychiatry in New York from 1940 to 1945. From 1943 to 1946, Riesman worked as Assistant to the Treasurer and later War Contract Termination Director for Sperry Gyroscope Company, an electronics manufacturer. In 1946, Riesman came to the University of Chicago first as a Visiting Assistant Professor of the Social Sciences; he was named Professor of Social Sciences in 1949, and taught at the University until 1958. While on the faculty at the University of Chicago, Riesman served as a Visiting Professor of Sociology at John Hopkins University in the spring of 1954 and as Visiting Professor in Harvard University's Department of Social Relations in the summer of 1954. He was Chairman of the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Leisure, established in 1955. Riesman left the University of Chicago in 1958 for the newly-created Henry Ford II Professorship of Social Sciences at Harvard University, where he remained until he retired in 1980. In 1976 Riesman became a member of the faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Riesman was involved in other interests, including the peace movement, opposition to nuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam, the Peace Corps, and supporting the expansion of the student vote. In the fall of 1961, Riesman spent four months in Japan as a visiting researcher studying Japanese culture and society. Riesman was a Visiting Professor at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England, in 1965, focusing on British higher education. Riesman attended Stanford University's Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1968 where he was able to observe the university culture on the West Coast. Additionally, Riesman studied experimental colleges and made intensive visits to various institutions while a member of the Social Science Program at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1971.