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  • The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Freelancer
  • Wilfred M. McClay (bio)
Daniel Horowitz. Vance Packard and American Social Criticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. xviii 375 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95.

Vance Packard’s amazingly productive and successful career as journalist cum -social-critic has spanned over five decades. During that time he has published twelve substantial and visible books, each of which treated some controversial and current topic of the day. Now in his eighties, Packard has not allowed advancing age or poor health to end his literary productivity; his most recent book, The Ultra Rich, appeared in 1991, and he is apparently now at work on a book of memoirs. So compulsive a worker is he that there is every reason to accept his prediction, in a 1992 interview for this book, that he will be “in the middle of a book when I pop off” (p. 282).

Yet, despite an impressively sustained run in the literary marketplace, Packard has somehow remained an obscure figure in American intellectual life, destined to be forever wedded, particularly in the minds of historians, to the milieu of the 1950s. His reputation rests on three best-selling works of social criticism penned during those years, books that made him famous and wealthy, and left an unmistakable impress on the minds and parlance of Americans: The Hidden Persuaders (1957), The Status Seekers (1959), and The Waste Makers (1960). Such works would seem to put him in the vanguard of those social critics, today so plentiful, who examine the attitudes and cultural practices that accompany a consumption-driven economy. The manipulative power of advertising, the ceaseless competition for social distinction in the middle classes, the role of commodities as class markers, the immense wastefulness of an economy based upon planned obsolescence — these issues and more were raised in irresistibly readable form by Packard’s “trilogy.” But his name now seems destined to survive chiefly as an item in the familiar laundry list of postwar social critics — a list that includes C. W right Mills, David Riesman, William Whyte, John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Goodman, Daniel Bell, and John Keats, among others.

To achieve bibliographical immortality in this way is a mixed blessing, for [End Page 123] it secures preservation at the price of conflation. Packard’s name lives on, but it lives in the shadow of other names, especially those of more respectable academic pedigree. Everyone who studies the fifties knows Packard’s name. But few know much about him beyond the obvious, and fewer still are likely to have given his works the attention that they would afford, say, The Lonely Crowd (1950), The Organization Man (1956), or The Affluent Society (1958). Nor are they likely to remember that Packard produced many other books: on animal intelligence, the decline of privacy, changing sexual mores, the perilous lot of children, and the rootlessness of American life. The thought that there might have been anything distinctive about Packard’s voice as an American social critic is simply not entertained.

The present book makes a good cause for changing that state of affairs, and for taking Packard’s name off the laundry list for more individualized attention. But it does not do so by boosting Packard or glossing over his shortcomings. Although Daniel Horowitz benefited from the direct personal assistance of his subject in researching this book, it is a tribute to both men that Vance Packard and American Social Criticism is far from being an uncritical celebration of Packard’s importance. On the contrary: one comes away with an acute sense of Packard’s complexity, of his intellectual and personal limitations, and of the remarkable and enduring ambivalences with which he has lived. In the end, Horowitz accepts the conventional assessment of Packard as a synthesizer and retailer of other people’s ideas, rather than an original thinker; and he readily concedes that Packard’s books were often flawed by his penchant for crowd-pleasing, superficiality, haste in composition, and even punch-pulling.

But, he would add, these judgments hardly begin to exhaust what needs to be said about Packard, both as an individual and as a culturally indicative figure...

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