An upcoming lecture will provide listeners with an opportunity to survey American sociological thought from its beginnings to the present. What is even more notable is that some of the discipline’s leading practitioners will be present.

Nathan Glazer, whose career as a social critic and public intellectual spans half a century, will present a talk, "Tocqueville and Riesman: Two Passages to Sociology," at 4 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 20, at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences at 136 Irving St., Cambridge. The talk is free and open to the public.

This will be the first David Riesman Lecture on American Society, named for the renowned sociologist whose book, The Lonely Crowd (1950), has been called one of the most influential and popular sociological studies of the 20th century.

Riesman, who turned 90 on Sept. 22, is the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus. Riesman is expected to attend the lecture.

Glazer, professor of education and social structure emeritus, coauthored The Lonely Crowd along with Reuel Denney and was also co-author of the book’s sequel Faces in the Crowd (1952). Glazer gives Riesman credit for being "the real author" of both books, however.

Glazer said that the purpose of his talk will be to "partly assess and partly celebrate Riesman’s role in American sociology." Pairing Riesman with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) seemed a natural comparison since the French writer’s book Democracy in America (1835) was the most influential book on American society in the 19th century, while The Lonely Crowd, with sales of more than a million, is considered by many to be the most influential of the 20th.

"Some of Riesman’s thought developed as a conversation across the ages with Tocqueville," Glazer said, adding that the French liberal politician and political theorist can be thought of as one of the first sociologists, although he lived before the discipline was established.

"Democracy and equality have been considered the key characteristics of American society by foreign visitors, most significantly by Tocqueville," Glazer said.

"In The Lonely Crowd, Riesman took that same theme and asked, what are the implications of this kind of society? What sort of problems are likely to arise? His answer was the concept of ‘other directedness,’ which is a peculiarly 20th-century response to equality, in which one is always adapting oneself to the other person."

Glazer said that one of the most interesting things about Riesman is that he came to sociology late and in an atypical manner. Born in Philadelphia in 1909, the son of a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Riesman attended Harvard College, graduating in 1931.

He earned a degree from Harvard Law School in 1934 and embarked on a law career, which included clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and teaching at the University of Buffalo Law School.

As a research fellow at Columbia Law School, Riesman had the opportunity to discuss comparative social issues with anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, philosopher Hannah Arendt, and literary critic Lionel Trilling. Later he studied psychoanalysis with Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan.

Riesman became a member of the Harvard faculty in 1958. For almost 20 years he taught a popular undergraduate course American Character and Social Structure, and, through his voluminous correspondence, continued to exert an influence on many of his students long after they had left Harvard.

"He is one of the great correspondents of our day," Glazer said. "There are many alumni who treasure the letters Riesman wrote in response to their final paper or their senior thesis. It might take him through the summer, but eventually each student would get a long, single-spaced letter that often would be the start of a long correspondence, although one could never respond at the same length."

Glazer, the author of such works as American Judaism (1957), Beyond the Melting Pot (with Daniel P. Moynihan, 1970), Affirmative Discrimination: Ethnic Inequality and Public Policy (1975),We Are All Multiculturalists Now (1997), and many others, met Riesman in 1947-48 when Glazer was one of the editors of the journal Commentary. In addition to collaborating with Riesman on writing projects, Glazer co-taught a course with him at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the 1970s.

A member of the group of writers and critics who came to be known as the "New York Intellectuals," Glazer earned his B.A. in 1944 from City College of New York and his Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University in 1962. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1969 after teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, Bennington College, and Smith College.

Serving as respondents to Glazer’s lecture will be two more of America's distinguished sociologists, Daniel Bell and Christopher Jencks. Bell, the author of The End of Ideology (1960) and Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), is the Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus. Jencks, the author of The Academic Revolution (1968, with David Riesman), Rethinking Social Policy (1993), and The Homeless (1994), is the Malcolm Wiener Professor of Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government.