After the Industrial Revolution in America had succeeded in developing a middle-class state, institutions that had flourished within the tradition-directed and the inner-directed social framework became more secondary to daily life.

[4] Other-direction defined the middle class that no longer had the material need to cling to past life standards to form a cohesive society.

The Lonely Crowd also argues that society dominated by the other-directed faces profound deficiencies in leadership, individual self-knowledge, and human potential.

The analyses of the parent-child relationship,[5] of dependence on the peer group,[6] of the ambiguous influence of the mass media,[7] of the work-leisure dialectic, the subtle criticism of human relations, and many other aspects, are all points where the things written by Riesman show a disconcerting topicality.

In Riesman there is no nostalgia for the individual as a heroic figure that winds its way through the writings of Frankfurt School theorists such as Marcuse or Horkheimer, just as there is no stinging criticism of conformism that hovers among the detractors of mass society.