Univers magazine interviewed me about my favorite sociological book. Below you can find the interview (in Dutch sorry) in which I talk about The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman and colleagues: A rare venture into time diagnosis, and an even more rare case of a sociological best-seller. Even though the book is written many decades ago, it only seems to gain relevance in the twenty-first century.
One of my favorite quotes in the book: ‘If the other-directed people should discover how much needless work they do, discover that their own thought and their own lives are quite as interesting as other people’s, that, indeed, they no more assuage their loneliness in a crowd of peers than one can assuage one’s thirst by drinking seawater, then we might expect them to become more attentive to their own feelings and aspirations’…(Riesman e.a., 1962: pp.307)…
