The American sociologist, writer, and social critic David Riesman (born 1909) was a leading authority on higher education and on developments in American society.

David Riesman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1909. His father, also named David Riesman, was a well-known physician and professor of clinical medicine and later of the history of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. Young Riesman attended William Penn Charter School, Harvard College, where he was one of the editors of The Crimson, and Harvard Law School, where he was one of the editors of the Harvard Law Review. In the following year he was a research fellow and worked with Professor Carl Friedrich of the Harvard Government Department, and the next year he served as a law clerk to Justice Brandeis of the U.S. Supreme Court.

After a year of law practice in Boston he spent four years at the...