Success Quote by David Riesman

Riesman is needling the warm glow of democratic slogans with a sociologist's cold flashlight. "Free and equal" is the kind of phrase that does essential political work: it flattens hierarchy, sets a moral baseline, makes citizenship imaginable. But Riesman calls it "true and misleading" because the slogan doubles as a social anesthetic. It tells us to feel egalitarian while quietly ignoring the messier reality that people begin with radically different temperaments, capacities, backgrounds, and appetites for risk. Equality, in practice, often means standardization.

The real bite comes in the second clause: autonomy is something we trade away, not something we simply lack. "Seeking to become like each other" points to the mid-century pressures Riesman diagnosed in The Lonely Crowd: the shift from inner-directed selves (guided by internalized values) toward other-directed selves (guided by peer approval, status cues, and consumer signals). Conformity isn't enforced only by the state; it's outsourced to the group, to taste, to the anxious choreography of fitting in.

Subtext: liberal democracies can produce their own soft coercions. The marketplace offers endless "choices" that paradoxically narrow the self, training people to curate acceptability rather than cultivate conviction. The pursuit of sameness is sold as social harmony, even as it erodes the very individuality that makes freedom more than a legal condition.

Context matters: writing in an America booming with mass media, suburbanization, corporate life, and standardized aspiration, Riesman is warning that equality can become a cultural demand to be legible, normal, and likable. The danger isn't tyranny; it's the crowd, smiling.