¹ Riesman, David, with Denney, Reuel and Glazer, Nathan, The Lonely Crowd: A study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Whyte, William H. Jr, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956)Google Scholar.

² The fullest account to date is probably still Hartshorne, Charles L., The Distorted Image: Changing Conceptions of the American Character Since Turner (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1968)Google Scholar, which traces genres and phases up through the 1950s. In suggesting why different views of American character flourished at different periods, he sheds some light on why the subject as a whole has been attractive, but one cannot entirely account for a discipline by tracing its career from within; and his classification of genres needs updating so as to include developments since the 1960s. On the disciplines and schools of thought that have contributed to social character study as a whole (not just American character) and the problems of inference therein, see especially Potter, David M., People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), chs. 1, 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and De Vos, George, “ National Character,” International Encylopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Free Press, 1968), vol. II, pp. 14–19Google Scholar. See also DiRenzo, Gordon, “Theoretical and Methodological Perspectives on the Study of Social Character,” in DiRenzo, , ed., We, The People: American Character and Social Change (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

³ Wolfe, Tom, Mauve Gloves and Madmen, Clutter and Vine, and Other Stories, Sketches and Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1976)Google Scholar, esp. “The Perfect Crime” and “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening.” Bell, Daniel, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976Google Scholar; new foreword, 1978).

⁴ Lasch, Christopher, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979)Google Scholar. See also Malcolm, Henry, Generation of Narcissus (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971)Google Scholar. Malcolm concentrated more than Lasch on a television generation of youth and young adults. In his view they were influencing the whole culture but he was not sure how far their values would come to dominate it.

⁵ Riesman, David, “Egocentrism: Is the American Character Changing?” Encounter, 55 (08–09 1980), 19–28Google Scholar. Yankelovich, Daniel, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Random House, 1981)Google Scholar. Veroff, Joseph, Douvain, Elizabeth and Kulka, Richard, The Inner America: a Self-Portrait, 1965 to 1976 (New York: Basic Books, 1981)Google Scholar. See also Ferguson, Marilyn, The Aquarian Conspiray: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 1981)Google Scholar, which presents the positive potentials in American psychological journeying without being primarily a delineation of social character.

⁶ E.g. Thurow, Lester, The Zero-Sum Society: Distribution and the Possibilities for Economic Change (New York: Basic Books, 1980)Google Scholar.

⁷ See Epstein, Joseph, Ambition: the Secret Passion (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980)Google Scholar; also Hulbert, Ann, “Friends for Now,” Harper's Magazine, 264 (04 1982), 101–03Google Scholar, on the rewriting of Dale Carnegie; and a more muddled piece by Gaddis, William, “The Rush for Second Place,” Harper's Magazine, 262 (04 1981), 31–39Google Scholar. The social theorists reviewed in these pages have differed as to whether American ambitions – drives for success – have weakened in the long run or merely switched goals (e.g. from money to recognition). For somewhat contrary views on America and the drive for substantive excellence, see De Charms, Richard and Moeller, Gerald H., “Values Expressed in American Children's Readers: 1800–1950,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 64 (1962), 136–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yankelovich, Daniel, “The Protestant Ethic is Underemployed,” Psychology Today, 16 (05 1982), 5–8Google Scholar. On national prospects, Blumberg, Paul, Inequality in an Age of Decline (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), ch. 4Google Scholar, cited jeremiads by leaders and business writers, which he interpreted as loss of nerve. Survey research indicating the survival of American optimism and national pride is cited by Ladd, Everett Carll, “How Americans See Themselves,” Dialogue, 55 (1982), 6–8Google Scholar (first published in Public Opinion, 1981), and Hiyer, Marjorie, “Polls Find Americans Most Proud,” International Herald Tribune (20 05 1982)Google Scholar.

⁸ As I write this, Margaret Thatcher's thinkers are renewing the attack on the welfare state for undermining self-reliance (and voluntary social action) which was made by Kipling, Baden-Powell and others at the turn of the century. The main tradition, however, among those who blame British economic failure on cultural attitudes is still largely derived from the critique of upper-class institutions, especially the public schools, for sharpening some class differences while co-opting the bourgeoisie and perpetuating a gentlemanly disdain of industry. Wiener, Martin, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, owes much to this tradition.

⁹ Britain's Geoffrey Gorer bridged both groups. See Gorer, , The American People: a Study in National Character (New York: W. W. Norton, 1948)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Mead, Margaret, And Keep Your Powder Dry: an Anthropologist Looks at America (New York: William Morrow, 1942)Google Scholar; Mead, , “Why We Americans Talk Big,” Listener, 30 (28 10 1943), 494Google Scholar.

¹¹ Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, and Sanford, R. Nevitt, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper and Row, 1950)Google Scholar.

¹² At intervals in the 1970s, however, Yankelovich and others published survey reports on attitudes and values: e.g. Yankelovich, , The New Morality: a Profile of American Youth in the 1970s (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974)Google Scholar; Watts, William and Free, Lloyd A., State of the Nation (New York: Universe Books, 1973), esp. ch. 13Google Scholar.

¹³ Potter, David M., “American Women and the American Character,” Stetson University Bulletin, 62 (1962), 1–22Google Scholar, reprinted in, e.g., Michael McGiffert, ed., The Character of Americans (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1964, revised edition 1970). Riesman, David, with Glazer, Nathan, Faces in the Crowd: Individual Studies in Character and Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) esp. pp. 345–46, 622Google Scholar in the 1965 abridged paperback edition. Riesman, , “Some Questions About the Study of American National Character,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 370 (03 1967), 36–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd, passim. A recent essay on women and aspects of individualism in early America is Kerber, Linda K., “Can a Woman Be an Individual? The Limits of Puritan Tradition in the Early Republic,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Within government, two classic though different statements of this were Mr X (pseud. for Kennan, George F.), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs, 25 (07 1947)Google Scholar, section iv, and Paul Nitze et al., NSC 68 (National Security Council paper, 1950), sections ii, iv, vi, vii, reprinted in Etzold, Thomas H. and Gaddis, John Lewis, eds., Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1949–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ The fear of vulnerability emerged in the crusade for more science and rigour in the schools. Some Cold War depictions of America's social structure and political system were indeed celebratory, implicitly or explicitly contrasting American opportunity and democracy with communist class conflict and oppression. See NSC 68, ibid.; also Polenberg, Richard, One Nation Divisible: Class, Race and Ethnicity in the U.S. Since 1938 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980), pp. 101–05Google Scholar. On historic tensions in American attitudes to consumer comforts, culminating around 1960, see Wilkinson, Rupert, American Tough: the Tough-Guy Tradition and American Character (Westport: Greenwood Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar, ch. 2. Ch. 3 deals more substantively with a number of the social character works cited here. Blumberg, Inequality in an Age of Decline, ch. 1, observes the reign in the 1950s of “class convergence” sociology, including notions of lower-class “embourgeoisement.”

¹⁶ On the writing and readership of such books in the context of the fifties, see Hartshorne, The Distorted Image, chs. 8, 9; and Larabee, Eric, “David Riesman and His Readers,” in Lipset, Seymour Martin and Lowenthal, Leo, eds., Culture and Social Character: the Work of David Riesman Reviewed (New York: Free Press, 1961)Google Scholar. Veblen, Thorsten, The Theory of the Leisure Class: an Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Macmillan, 1899)Google Scholar is the most obvious forerunner of The Lonely Crowd's psychological focus on consumption, but is more restricted to upper and upper-middle class groups.

¹⁷ An exception was Grier, William H. and Cobbs, Price M., Black Rage (New York: Basic Books, 1968)Google Scholar. An unusually systematic study of ghetto attitudes and behaviour, and the relationship between black subcultures and “mainstream” society, was the work by the Swedish anthropologist, Hannerz, Ulf: Soulside: Enquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. In noting parallels between ghetto male behaviour and “ slightly subterranean ” values in the larger society, Hannerz drew on revisionist writing about deviance that came to a head in the early 1960s, especially Matza, David and Sykes, Gresham, “Juvenile Delinquency and Subterranean Values,” American Sociological Review, 26 (1961), 712–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But far more systematic writing about black character tendencies was essayed in the fifties, from the work of Abram Kardiner to Stanley Elkins, whose book on slavery and personality, like the subsequent Moynihan Report, stirred up a warning controversy. See Kardiner, Abram and Ovesey, Lionel, The Mark of Oppression: a Psychosocial Study of the American Negro (New York: W. W. Norton, 1951)Google Scholar; Elkins, Stanley, Slavery: a Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Rainwater, Lee and Yancey, William L., The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1967)Google Scholar, which includes the full text of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's report on “The Negro Family.” A more recent, and timid, study is Yinger, J. Milton, “Characterological Change Among Black Americans,” in DiRenzo, , ed., We, The People (1977)Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Potter, David M., “American Individualism in the Twentieth Century,” Texas Quarterly, (Summer 1963)Google Scholar, revised and reprinted in Gordon Mills, ed., Innocence and Power: Individualism in Twentieth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965).

¹⁹ See Segal, Ronald, The Americans: a Conflict of Creed and Reality (New York; Viking Press, 1965)Google Scholar; Slater, Philip, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Reich, Charles, The Greening of America (New York: Random House, 1970)Google Scholar. Continuity from the late fifties to the seventies was supplied by the popular sociology books of Vance Packard, several of which focused on aspects of social character as well as on manipulators and controllers.

²⁰ Among diverse studies with a keen sense of place, see Morris, Willie, North Toward Home (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967)Google Scholar; Kramer, Jane, The Last Cowboy (New York: Harper and Row, 1977)Google Scholar; and, between those dates, a wave of books on Alaska.

²¹ Kammen, Michael, People of Paradox: an Enquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), esp. p. 3Google Scholar in the Vintage paperback, and ch. 4.

²² Ibid., p. 3. Yankelovich, , New Rules, pp. xviii, 13–14Google Scholar.

²³ Bell, , The Cultural Contradictions (1976)Google Scholar.

²⁴ See Wilkinson, Rupert, “On the Toughness of the Tough-Guy,” Encounter, 46 (02 1976), 35–42Google Scholar; Wilkinson, American Tough; Ong, Walter J., Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Kammen, Michael, The Contrapuntal Civilization: Essays Toward a New Understanding of the American Experience (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1971)Google Scholar. See also Bell, Daniel, “The Disjunctions of Culture and Social Structure,” Daedalus (Winter 1965)Google Scholar and other articles listed in the “acknowledgments” of The Cultural Contradictions.

²⁶ Higham, John, “The Cult of the American Consensus,” Commentary, 59 (02 1959), 93–100Google Scholar.

²⁷ In the fifties and early sixties, Cora DuBois, Seymour Martin Lipset and Francis L. K. Hsu – in contrast with Kammen and Bell in the seventies – were concerned with the way American culture resolved or masked apparent contradictions. For DuBois indeed the contradictions were “spurious.” DuBois, , “The Dominant Value Profile of American Culture,” American Anthropologist, 57 (1955), 132–39Google Scholar; Hsu, , “American Core Value and National Character,” in Hsu, , ed., Psychological Anthropology (Homewood: Dorsey Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Lipset, , The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963), ch. 2Google Scholar. More recent writing on American social character has not been much influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss's dialectical conception of myth, the view that it bridges as well as articulates dualities – nor by those scholars of American myth who in other ways have explored the bridging functions of myths and symbols.

²⁸ Novak, Michael, “Pluralism: a Humanistic Perspective,” in Thernstrom, Stephan, ed., Harvard Encyclopaedia of American Ethnic Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 776–78Google Scholar (section on “The Pluralistic Personality”). Through this theory Novak also tried to acknowledge both the force of cultural conditioning and a wide optionality in modern America.

²⁹ E.g. Girgus, Sam B., ed., The American Self: Myth, Ideology, and Popular Culture (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), espGoogle Scholar. introduction and chs. by Sacvan Bercovitch, Peter A. Lupsha, Lillian Schlissel, and Shelley Armitage. Lupsha on gangsters and Schlissel on frontier women are in fact studies of social character. For related problems in American Studies, see Sklar, Robert, “The Problem of an American Studies ‘Philosophy’: a Bibliography of New Directions,” American Quarterly, 27 (1975), 245–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ A striking example of this is Clyde Griffen's elaborate course at Vassar, “Individualism in America” (American Culture 250). Developed in the late seventies under a grant from the National Humanities Institute, its creation was, ironically, a highly cooperative and systematic operation.

³¹ See esp. Whyte, The Organization Man; Hsu, “American Core Value”; Lipset, The First New Nation, ch. 2.

³² Slater, Philip, Wealth Addiction (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980)Google Scholar. Equinox Films/PBS television, “Paradox on 72nd Street,” with Philip Slater and Lewis Thomas (5 January 1981).

³³ Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), p. 5Google Scholar. A note is in order about The Lonely Crowd thesis, since this stood at the heart of reappraisals of social character theories that took place in the early sixties. Contrary to the view of many commentators, the thesis did not hold that Americans had become more conformist; what had changed were their social psychological modes of conformity. These, too, were more complex than usually realized. The predominant nineteenth-century mode operated on two levels – an “inner-direction” (level 1) derived from social norms internalized from elders at an early age, and (level 2) superficial conformities based largely on the esteem of others. This gave way in the twentieth century to a more deeply “other-directed” mode, a flexible radar-tuning to peer-group tastes and media-transmitted fashions, based largely on the wish to be liked and find resonance with others. These were “ideal types”: Riesman stressed that no one was purely inner- or other-directed.

³⁴ This of course was not confined to America. A recent British study-cum-polemic is Seabrook, Jeremy, Working Class Childhood: an Oral History (London: Victor Gollancz, 1982)Google Scholar.

³⁵ See Henretta, James A., The Evolution of American Society, 1700–1815: an Interdisciplinary Analysis (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1973), pp. 99–100Google Scholar; Henretta, , “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 35 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; debated in William and Mary Quarterly, 37 (1980), 686 ffGoogle Scholar. Also Brown, Richard D., Modernization: the Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), pp. 15–16, 47–48, 55–56, 94 ffGoogle Scholar.; Zuckerman, Michael, “The Fabrication of American Identity,” William and Mary Quarterly, 34 (1977), 184–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Royster, Charles, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979)Google Scholar. Robert A. Gross gives an illuminating historiography in “The Long Slow Death of the 18th Century,” unpublished paper, University of Sussex, 1982. By contrast, Macfarlane, Alan, The Origins of English Individualism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978)Google Scholar says much less about characterological issues though his interests are similar to the above and he refers to Riesman's categories.

³⁶ The word “continuity” is used here as a shorthand for “non-change”. Although American historians often use it in this sense, it should, properly speaking, include steady change (continuous change) as opposed to sudden change. I deal with these two categories as “long-term” and “short-term” change.

³⁷ Potter, People of Plenty; Potter, “American Individualism.”

³⁸ Keller, Morton, The Historical Sources of Urban Personality: Boston, New York, Philadelphia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

³⁹ Hofstadter, Richard, “Commentary: Have There Been Discernable Shifts in American Values During the Past Generation?” in Morison, Elting, ed., The American Style: Essays in Value and Performance (New York: Harper and Row, 1958)Google Scholar. Peter Parish, “Bigger or Better? A Pendulum Theory of American History,” reviews such theories and gives his own. See Kroes, Rob, ed., The American Identity: Fusion and Fragmentation (Amsterdam: Amerika Instituut, 1980) ch. 6Google Scholar. A “tidal” image can combine short-term and long-term change: I use it in explaining recent Anglo-American interests in language: Wilkinson, Rupert, “Word-Choosing: the Sources of a Modern Obsession,” Encounter, 58 (05 1982), 80–86Google Scholar. For other ways of combining continuity and change in American history see Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; and Bender, Thomas, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978)Google Scholar. See also Rudolph, Lloyd I. and Hoeber Rudolph, Suzanne, The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967)Google Scholar esp. introduction.

⁴⁰ For other, related views of continuity and change in American culture, see the symposium on Bell, 's work in American Quarterly, 34 (1982), 49–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar: articles by Bell, Laurence Veyzey, Richard Wightman Fox, and Richard Gillam.

⁴¹ Kluckholn, Clyde, “Have There Been Discernable Shifts in American Values During the Past Generation?” in Morison, , ed., The American StyleGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Lapham, Lewis, “Intimations of Mortality: Notes on the Restoration of Harper's Magazine,” Harper's Magazine, 261 (09 1980), 8–9Google Scholar.

⁴³ See Rodgers, Daniel T., The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974)Google Scholar. In The Lonely Crowd (1950), Riesman et al. implied that inner-direction started to give way to other-direction from the 1890s, but they also said that other-direction seemed to be emerging “in very recent years,” especially in metropolitan areas.

⁴⁴ See McKendrick, Neil, Brewer, John and Plumb, J. H., The Birth of a Consumer Society: the Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England (London: Europa Publications, 1982), espGoogle Scholar. McKendrick's introduction which discusses the meaning of a “consumer revolution,” with an amusing historiography thrown in. On defining aspects of a modern American consumer society see Riesman, , The Lonely Crowd, pp. 18–19Google Scholar in the 1961 Yale University Press paperback; Riesman, , Faces in the Crowd, pp. 6–7Google Scholar in the abridged Yale University Press paperback; Bell, , The Cultural Contradictions, pp. 64–66Google Scholar in the 1979 Heinemann paperback; Lasch, , The Culture of Narcissism, pp. 136–40Google Scholar in the 1979 Warner paperback. Also Yankelovich, Daniel, “New Rules in American Life,” Psychology Today, 15 (04 1981), 50Google Scholar, on the consumption analogy between psychological “needs” to be filled and the “Sections of an ice-cube tray.”

⁴⁵ George W. Pierson's arguments about geographical mobility and American character implicitly take more of a halfway position between the stress on geography and demography and stress on cultural momentum. See Pierson, , “The M-Factor in American History,” American Quarterly, 14 (1962), 275–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “A Restless Temper,” American Historical Review, 69 (1964), 969–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁶ Yankelovich made more of cultural autonomy in his preview article, “New Rules,” than in his book. Like Bell, Lasch and Riesman, he exaggerated, I believe, the force of self-denial as an ethic (rather than mean necessity) since colonial times. See Carl N. Degler on different models of nineteenth-century businessman: Degler, , “The Sociologist as Historian: Riesman's The Lonely Crowd,” American Quarterly, 15 (1963), 484CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁷ Lipset, The First New Nation, ch. 2; Farber, Maurice L., “English and Americans: Values in the Socialization Process,” Journal of Psychology, 36 (1953), 243–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McClelland, David C., The Achieving Society (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Among major studies of American social character in our period, the most unequivocally non-exceptionalist arc Riesman, The Lonely Crowd and Bell, The Cultural Contradictions. Riesman gives virtually no specific comparisons from abroad. Bell gives a multitude of foreign and comparative references, but few of these occur in the sections which describe popular attitudes and social behaviour.

⁴⁹ Snowman, Daniel, Kissing Cousins: an Interpretation of British and American Culture, 1945 to 1975 (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1977)Google Scholar; American title: Britain and America: an Interpretation of Their Cultures, 1945–1975 (New York: New York University Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Whyte, , The Organization Man, pp. 4–5Google Scholar in the 1972 Simon and Schuster Clarion paperback. (Whyte also recognized the interplay between ideas and economic organization, and he was relatively precise in dating the key shifts he postulated as taking place from the 1880s on. Ibid., pp. 16, 20.) Riesman's essay, “Egocentrism,” did combine exceptionalist and non-exceptionalist explanations, but the outcome, for Americans, was implicitly exceptionalist. Lasch, in The Culture of Narcissism, was more ambiguous: his determinants appeared to be generally Western rather than uniquely American, but his focus and material were intensely American. Morgenthau, Hans J. and Person, Ethel, “The Roots of Narcissism,” Partisan Review, 45 (1978), 337–47Google Scholar, argued that the narcissism decried by Lasch had general roots in Western individualism and secularism, but they gave no real example of behaviour from particular societies. Robert Jay Lifton's concept of “Protean Man” did use specific, if mercurial, comparisons between three societies: China, Japan, and the U.S. He argued that world developments – historical dislocation, a “flooding of imagery,” and nuclear threat – had gained ascendancy over national culture and biological forces in shaping personality. Lifton, , Boundaries: Psychological Man in Revolt (New York: Random House, 1967)Google Scholar, ch. 4 (“Self”).

⁵¹ Bell, , The Cultural Contradictions, 1978 foreword, p. xxvGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Cunliffe, Marcus, “American Watersheds,” American Quarterly, 13 (1961), 489–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daniel Bell has contended, prematurely, that Americans are now only exceptionalist about their past and their Constitutional rights and liberties. Bell, , “The End of American Exceptionalism,” Public Interest, 41 (1975), 193–224Google Scholar.

⁵³ Eldridge, Herbert G., “The Paper War Between England and America: the Inchiquin Episode, 1810–1815,” Journal of American Studies, 16 (1982), 49–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The use of disease imagery is well documented by Eldridge; the explicit reference to projection and the significance of “Gallic” is mine. Another recent work which amplifies some of the European background is Billington, Ray Allen, Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: the European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁵⁴ Gorer, Geoffrey, “English Character in the Twentieth Century,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 370 (03 1967), 77 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. This special issue on “National Character in the Perspective of the Social Sciences,” contained articles on fourteen countries plus general and methodological articles.

⁵⁵ Barzini, Luigi, “The Americans,” Harper's Magazine, 263 (12 1981), 29–36Google Scholar.

⁵⁶ “America in Perspective: Major Trends in the United States Through the 1980s,” a report for corporate clients by Oxford Analytica Ltd, 1982. See Mackay-Smith, Anne, “The British Explain America to American Express,” Wall Street Journal (13 05 1982)Google Scholar.

⁵⁷ I am grateful to Robert A. Gross for the essential lines of this historical framework, and for many other comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

⁵⁸ Potter, David M., “The Quest for the National Character,” in Higham, John, ed., The Reconstruction of American History (New York: Harper and Row, 1962)Google Scholar. Immigrant nations dominated by one nationality group (Australia till recently) or consisting of many groups in relatively balanced numbers (modern America) are more conducive to generalizations about national character – a norm of assimilation – than those divided between two or three large blocs (Malaya or South Africa). Canada falls into the latter category but has supported cross-group generalizations due to parallels between French Canadian and Scots puritan conservatism, and ideas about the psychology of “hanging on” in a hostile environment – applicable to French Canadians but also to Canada as a whole. See Atwood, Margaret, Survival: a Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1972)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Fifteen years ago, when I studied American college students' attitudes to careers and the recruitment of graduates into government and other occupations, I was struck by the quickness of many faculty and administrators to generalize about campus “moods,” occupational values, attitudes to community, localism versus Federal orientation, and other wide-ranging aspects of the subject. The subject encouraged such responses but it was the readiness to generalize and the zest to identify rapid shifts in attitude that were notable – I did not find the same enthusiasms at British universities.

⁶⁰ Marie Jahoda has developed this point in connection with psychoanalysis, but it applies to other branches of psychology and on popular levels too. Jahoda, , “The Migration of Psychoanalysis: Its Impact on American Psychology,” Perspectives in American History, 2 (1968), 420–45Google Scholar.