ABSTRACT
Even before the publication of The Lonely Crowd, the name of David Riesman had become synonymous with creative and imaginative social science. Formerly on the faculty of the University of Chicago, Mr. Riesman was now a member of the Department of Social Relations at Harvard University. Freud was fundamentally an Enlightenment rationalist. He thought that to trust it might sometimes be to trust an illusion. But at least it was capable of disproof as an illusion, according to the canons of reason itself; and therefore it was superior to the illusion of religion, which did not offer itself to proof or disproof. Today the situation appears very nearly to be reversed. The massed social pieties which were invested in the established economic order in the pre-Roosevelt era now seem massed behind religion and nation. Indeed, Freud himself is in part to be thanked; by studying religion, he in a sense domesticated it for science.
