In 1950 David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published The Lonely Crowd. It described a new American character that they called other-directed. “The other-directed person wants to be loved rather than esteemed.” One of the book’s headings reads “From the Invisible Hand to the Glad Hand.”
Nearly fifty years later the writer Wilfred McClay looked back at the book. In the world it described, “popularity and ‘social skills’ were more important than the pursuit of excellence or fidelity to inner standards of behavior.” The book has sold “many hundreds of thousands of copies.”