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Famous Sociologists

Richard Sennett

[1943]

	Texts by Sennett Sennett Live Texts on Sennett Bi(bli)ographies
Famous Sociologists ‖ Sociologists in social media

Famous Sociologists ‖ Sociologists in social media

“Electronic communication is one means by which the very idea of public life has been put to an end.”
[The Fall of Public Man, 1977]

“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
[Authority, 1980]

“Treating people with respect, cannot occur simply by commanding it should happen. Mutual recognition has to be negotiated; this negotiation engages the complexities of personal character as much as social structure.”
[Respect in a World of Inequality, 2002]

“Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake.”
[The Craftsman, 2009]

Texts by Sennett

Homepage |
[1969] (eds.) Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays In The New Urban History (with Stephan Thernstrom)
New Haven: Yale University Press. March 11, 1969.
The —mostly American— cities studied range from small communities to giants. The studies focus on the dimensions of mobility and stability in the social structure of nineteenth-century cities. The authors relate sociological theory to the historical materials. The result is a complex interdisciplinary portrait of the origins of modern city life.
[1969] (ed.) Classic Essays On The Culture Of Cities
Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice Hall. June 1969.
A collection classic essay from the German School (Max Weber, Georg Simmel & Oswald Spengler) and the Chicago School (Robert Park, Louis Wirth, Robert Redfield & Milton Singer) introduced by Richard Sennet.
- An Introduction, pp. 3-22.
[1970] Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Sennett portrays the life styles of middle class families in a Chicago community during the decades following the Civil War, when major American cities were experiencing massive development. The study focuses on Union Park, a section of Chicago that had been wealthy and elegant in the early years but gradually became a solidly middle class neighborhood of native-born lawyers, clerks, bookkeepers, and office workers. Sennett explores how urban middle class families were structured, and how family structure, work, and the urban community influenced each other over two decades. He finds that the dominant mode of family life was of small nuclear units —a father, mother, and one or two children— that tended to withdraw from the city and make their homes places of refuge from the alien and fluctuating world outside. This was a refuge not dominated by the father, whose role was gradually weakening, but by the mother. This shift in family authority became a poignant source of strain between the generations: the sons looked to their fathers for guidance in dealing with the urban work world, but the fathers were as passive in the larger society as they were in the home. Sennett suggests how this situation could have formed the root of that feeling of “father absence” and “mother-centered homes” which psychologists remark in modern, urban, middle class families.
Reviews by:
- Roy Lubove - Journal of Social History, 5(3): 388-391. Spring 1972.
[1970] The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life
New York: Knopf.
Sennett shows how an excessively ordered community freezes adults into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. He proposes a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and deal with the challenges of life.
Reviews by:
- Peter H. Rossi - Business History Review, 44(4): 565-567. 1970
- Perry Duis - American Journal of Sociology, 76(5): 956-959. March 1971.
- Alan Stone & John Hardwig - World Futures, 13(3/4): 271-282. 1973.
- P.D. Smith - The Guardian, December 13, 2008.
[1972] The Hidden Injuries of Class (with Jonathan Cobb)
New York: Knopf,
The authors deal with class not as a matter of dollars or statistics but as a matter of emotions. They isolate the ‘hidden signals of class’ through which today’s blue-collar worker measures his own value against those lives and occupations to which our society attaches a special premium. They uncover and define the internal, emotionally hurtful forms of class difference in America that become visible with the advent of the ‘affluent’ society. In our society a human being is judged against an arbitrary scale of ‘achievement’, that recognizes not a diversity of talents but a pyramid of them, and accords the world’s best welder less respect than the most mediocre doctor. The authors concentrate on the injurious game of ‘achievement’ and self-justification that result. They are critical both of the claim that workers are melting into a homogenous society and of the attempt to save the worker for a revolutionary role along conventional socialist lines. The games of hierarchical respect will end in a fratricide in which no class can emerge the victor. True egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity to substitute for the rigidly uniform scale against which Americans are now forced to judge one another- and validate themselves. Examining personal feelings in terms of a totality of human relations, and looking beyond the struggle for economic survival, Hidden Injuries of Class takes an important step forward in the sociological critique of everyday life.
[1977] Breaking the Code
New York Review, June 9, 1977.
A reply to Sheldon S. Wolin, The Rise of Private Man (April 14, 1977).
[1977] The Fall of Public Man
New York: Knopf.
Public life once meant that vital part one’s life outside the circle of family and close friends. Sennett shows how our lives today are bereft of the pleasures and reinforcements of the lost interchange with fellow citizens. He shows how, today, the stranger is a threatening figure; how silence and observation have become the only ways to experience public life, especially street life, without feeling overwhelmed; how each person believes in the right, in public, to be left alone. Private life becomes distorted as we of necessity focus more and more on ourselves, on increasingly narcissistic forms of intimacy and self-absorption. Because of this, our personalities cannot fully develop: we lack much of the ease, the spirit of play, the kind of discretion that would allow us real and pleasurable relationships with those whom we may never know intimately.
Reviews by:
- J.P. Roos - Acta Sociologica, 22: 97-99. January 1979.
- JoAnn Chirico - Sociological Analysis, 41(4): 394-396. Winter 1980.
- Craig Crowder - Crooked Letter, January 24, 2012.
[1980] Authority
New York: Knopf.
Sennett analyzes the nature, the role, and the faces of authority: authority in personal life, in the public realm, authority as an idea. Why have we become so afraid of authority? What real needs for authority do we have: for guidance, stability, images of strength? What happens when our fear of and our need for authority come into conflict? Sennett examines traditional forms of authority (the father’s in the family, the lord’s in society) and the dominant contemporary styles of authority. He shows how our needs for no less than our resistance to authority have been shaped by history and culture, as well as by psychological disposition. He also explores the bonds that rebellion against authority paradoxically establishes: how in the very act of rebelling we become more and more tied to those we struggle against. Sennett imagines how we might begin to achieve the detachment and empathy needed to reinvigorate the role of authority according to good and rational ideals of nurturance, guidance, and strength.
Reviews by:
- Geoffrey Hawthorn - London Review of Books, 2(21): 15-16. November 6, 1980.
- Charles E. Ellison - American Political Science Review, 75(2): 482-483 June 1981.
- John H. Schaar - American Journal of Sociology, 88(1): 195-196. July, 1982.
- Zygmunt Bauman - Theory, Culture & Society, 1(2): 128-130. September 1982.
- Richard White - Culture + Youth Studies.
[1990] The Conscience of the Eye: The design and social life of cities
New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Sennett gives an account of the search for shelter and the fear of exposure to strangers and new experience in Western culture — and how these two concerns have shaped the physical fabric of the city. He moves between past and present from the assembly hall of Athens to the Palladium Club; from Augustine’s City of God to the Turkish baths of the Lower East Side; from eighteenth-century English gardens to the housing projects of East Harlem; from Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy to subway graffiti.
Reviews by:
- Karal Ann Marling - New York Times Books, March 3, 1991.
- Daphne Spain - American Journal of Sociology, 97(4)4: 1186-1188. January 1992.
[1994] Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
New York: W.W. Norton.
A history of the city in Western civilization that tells the story of urban life through bodily experience. It recounts how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed their noses, where they ate, how they dressed, the mores of bathing and of making love — all in the architecture of stone and space from ancient Athens to modern New York.
Reviews by:
- Alex Raksin - Los Angeles Times, October 13, 1994.
- Marina Warner - London Review of Books, 16(23): 14-15. December 8, 1994.
- Ian Morris - American Journal of Sociology, 101(3). November 1995.
- David Nicholas - History: Reviews of New Books, 24(1): 28. 1995.
- Richard Brilliant - Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 55(2): 187-189. June, 1996.
- Caroline Lavoie - Journal of Planning Education and Research, 16(1): 67-68. September 1996.
[1998] The Corrosion of Character. The Personal Consequences Of Work In the New Capitalism
New York: W.W. Norton.
- Chapter 1: Drift
- Chapter 5: Risk, pp. 76-97.
Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism. He reveals the vivid and illuminating contrast between two worlds of work: the vanished world of rigid, hierarchical organizations, where what mattered was a sense of personal character, and the brave new world of corporate re-engineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime. The new capitalism stimulates a dynamic economy. But it is also destructive, eroding the sense of sustained purpose, integrity of self, and trust in others that an earlier generation understood as essential to personal character. Sennett suggests how we need to re-imagine both community and individual character in order to confront an economy based on the principle of ‘no long term’.
Reviews by:
- Deborah Stead - New York Times Books, November 6, 1998.
- Alan Ehrenhalt - New York Times Books, December 20, 1998.
- Serge Nataranjan - March 2003.
- Joep Dohmen - Sennett’s quest for morality. July 2013.
- Venkataraman Nilakant - Spirit@Work, New Zealand.
[1998] The Spaces of Democracy
Raoul Wallenberg Lecture.
University of Michigan.
[2002] Respect in a World of Inequality
London: Penguin.
In the uncertain world of flexible social relationships, all are troubled by issues of respect. Sennett explores the factors that undermine mutual respect: unequal ability, adult dependency, and degrading forms of compassion. From the world of music Sennett investigates how self-worth can be nurtured in an unequal society (e.g. through dedication to craft), how self-esteem must be balanced with feeling for others, and how mutual respect can forge bonds across the divide of inequality. Sennet proposes a welfare system based on respect for those in need. He concludes: “Treating people with respect, cannot occur simply by commanding it should happen. Mutual recognition has to be negotiated; this negotiation engages the complexities of personal character as much as social structure.” The only moral Sennett offers involves “accepting in others what one does not understand.” By allowing of someone that you do not understand them, you grant them their dignity; by granting them their dignity, you thereby strengthen your own. This is an ethical win-win.
Reviews by:
- Jenny Turner - The Guardian, January 3, 2003.
[2006] The Culture of the New Capitalism
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sennett surveys the major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life: how the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how «the specter of uselessness» haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving. The new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience.
Reviews by:
- Norbert Ebert - Journal of Sociology, 43(4): 440-442. December 2007
[2006] The Open City | idem (LSE)
Sennett talks about the contrast between the closed and open city. “Closed means over-determined, balanced, integrated, linear. Open means incomplete, errant, conflictual, non-linear. The closed city is full of boundaries and walls; the open city possesses more borders and membranes. The closed city can be designed and operated top-down; it is a city which belongs to the masters. The open city is a bottomup place; it belongs to the people.”
LSE Cities, November 2006.
[2007] Practicing Culture (with Graig Calhoun)
Routledge. September 20, 2007.
The authors seek to revitalize the field of cultural sociology with an emphasis not on abstract theoretical debates but on showing how to put theoretical sources to work in empirical research. Culture is a set of practices rather than just products and static representations. It is made and remade in countless small ways and occasional bursts of innovation. It is something people do - and do in rich variety and distinctive contexts.
[2008] Labours of love
In: The Guardian, February 2, 2008.
[2009] The Craftsman
New Haven: Yale University Press. February 5, 2009.
- Richard Sennett on The Craftsman [52:01] - The Diane Rehm Show, March 11, 2008.
Craftsmanship is the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake. Good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Sennett shows that pure competition will never produce good work.
Reviews by:
- Fiona MacCarthy - The Guardian. February 9, 2008.
- Stephanie Merritt - The Guardian. February 17, 2008.
- Lewis Hyde - New York Times Books. April 6, 2008.
- Pat Kane - The Play Ethic. May, 2008.
- James Livingston - History News Network (HNN). June 14, 2008.
- Jeffrey C. Goldfarb - American Journal of Sociology, 115(1): 265-267. July 2009.
- Stephan Lorenz - Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 11(2). May 2010.
- Tom Chivers - The Telegraph, March 6, 2012.
[2011] The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile
Notting Hill Editions. April 28, 2011.
Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. Sennett visits two of the world’s greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical and psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom (including prostitutes as well as Jews) was translated into a rich community identity; and mid-nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city’s culture at large.
- Sennett on The Foreigner [58:32] - London Review Booshop Podcasts. May 3, 2011.
[2012] The Virtue of Informality
In: Boston Review. May/June 2012.
[2012] This is not the kids’ problem
In: The Guardian, July 4, 2012.
Too many people are chasing too few jobs. It’s an especially depressing prospect for young graduates, who face doing work, if they can find it at all, which does not make use of their talents. There are solutions (emigration, flex work, startup, job sharing) but none of them is pretty.
2013] No one likes a city that’s too smart
In: Wilfing Architettua, January 10, 2013.
Thanks to the digital revolution, at last life in cities can be brought under control. We are evolving towards «smart cities» in all part of urban life are fitted together by computer programmes. But is this a good thing? “You don’t have to be a romantic to doubt it”, says Sennett. Technology is a great tool, when it‘s used responsively. But a city is not a machine and if it is approached as such cities can deaden and stupefy the people who live in its all-efficient embrace. “We want cities that work well enough, but are open to the shifts, uncertainties, and mess which are real life.”
[2013] Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation
New Haven: Yale University Press. March 26, 2013.
Living with people who differ —racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically— is the most urgent challenge facing civil society today. We tend socially to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves, and modern politics encourages the politics of the tribe rather than of the city. Sennett discusses why this has happened and what might be done about it. He contends that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen well and discuss rather than debate. He explores how people can cooperate online, on street corners, in schools, at work, and in local politics. He traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to today, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, and workers on Wall Street. Sennett addresses the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened. He warns that we must learn the craft of cooperation if we are to make our complex society prosper, yet he reassures us that we can do this, for the capacity for cooperation is embedded in human nature.
Reviews by:
- David Runciman - The Guardian, February 3, 2012.
- Jenny Turner - London Review of Book, 34(6): 29-31. March 22, 2012.

Sennett Live: video & audio

[2002] Apathy and Antipathy, Part 1 | Part 2
BBC: The Westminster Hour, August 15, 2002.
[2006] Views on respect
BBC News, January 9, 2006.
[2008] Night Waves [45:00]
BBC: Radio 3. January 29, 2008.
Isabel Hilton talks to Sennett about the relationship between the work of the hand and the work of the brain, a combination that is crucial to creating more balanced, fulfilling lives in the modern consumer society.
[2008] Craftwork and Skill
BBC: Radio 4, Thinking Aloweed. February 6, 2008.
Laurie Taylor is joined by sociologist Richard Sennett and Grayson Perry Turner (artist and craftsman-potter). They discuss the meaning of true skill, of craftsmanship — of the lifelong engagement with a particular skill or craft. Is there still a need for the craftsman’s ethic in our computer-driven, factory-made society where strings to our bows count for so much more than a way with wood?
[2008] Imagination and the City [28:05]
BBC Radio 4: Thinking Allowed, September 1, 2008.
A series that explores how imagination and reality combine to create the environments in which we live. Laurie Taylor discusses our experience of the modern city and is joined by the novelist Will Self, the sociologist Richard Sennett and the geographer Doreen Massey in the Radio Theatre at Broadcasting House. Made in association with The Open University.
[2009] The Forum: Part 1 [22:59] Part 2 [26:29]
BBC Worldservice, August, 17, 2009.
Pulitzer prize winning German biologist Bert Hölldobler explores the ability of ant colonies to work together as a single unit, a Superorganism. Ants co-operate and communicate collectively, dividing labour to benefit the whole group with no need for an overseer. What are the evolutionary lessons for humanity? The role of collaboration in human society fascinates sociologist Richard Sennett. From his research he detects that the current financial crisis will produce a change in work/life practices as ex-Wall Street workers hanker for more co-operation and less cut-throat competition. When it comes to business, will it continue to be down to the survival of the fittest?
[2009] Craftmanship [57:51]
Sennett speaks about the artificial boundaries between art and craft at the HMW Auditorium (Getty Center). December 3, 2009.
[2010] The Sociology Of Public Life - Part 1 [1:31:59] | Part 2 [1:13:24]
Speakers: Craig Calhoun, Bruno Latour, Alan Rusbridger, Judy Wajcman, David Adjaye, Geoff Mulgan, Richard Rogers, Polly Toynbee. The event was recorded on 14 May 2010 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building. Two panels on ‘Public Life and Public Policy’ and ‘Cities and the Public Realm’, discuss these themes in the context of the work of Sennett.
[2011] The Decline of the Skills Society [1:09:17]
Sennett presented his lecture as part of the Townsend Center for the Humanities’ Forum on the Humanities and the Public World.
[2012] The Architecture of Cooperation [1:26:15]
On 28 February 2012 Richard Sennett delivered the lecture, The Architecture of Cooperation which addresses the question: how can we design spaces in the city which encourage strangers to cooperate? To explore this question he draws on research in the social sciences about cooperation and relates this research to current issues in urban design.
[2012] Together: The Rituals Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation [58:27]
Sennett addresses the phenomenon of why people tend to avoid engaging with others who are different, leading to a modern politics of the tribe rather than the city. Sennett offers ideas on what might be done to encourage people to live with others who are racially, ethnically, religiously or economically unlike themselves.
[2013] On Cooperation [1:11:29]
Sennett wonders how we can repair the social divides that separates us. Sennett says, goodwill isn’t enough: we need special skills to get on and cooperate, and we’re losing them.
[2013] The Open City [1:22:33]
A speach at the Center for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities of the Universisty of Cambridge. Sennett focusses on the relation of social life to physical design. He explores what shape cities should have to admit the complexities and conflicts of the people who live together, in a particular way. He talks about edge conditions within the city, distinguishing between borders and boundaries, exploring the design of porosity and mixture of people who differ from one another.
[2013] We have lost the balance between cooperation and competition - by Georgios Chatzoudis
In: LISA, July 11, 2013.
[2015] Free Thinking: Sociology in the 21st Century [45:19]
BBC Radio 3, March 18.2015.
For the last few decades of the 20th century, sociology had cultural currency and political power, but has it now fallen by the wayside, identifiable only as an academic discipline rather than one that has lived relevance or impact? Has it become too abstract and esoteric while the wider study of how we behave as a society has been co-opted by journalists and historians? Who are the new generation developing ideas that bear upon contemporary cultural and political life? To examine where we are at with sociology, Philip Dodd is joined by three leading practitioners, the LSE’s Richard Sennett, Frank Furedi from the University of Kent, and Monika Krause at Goldsmiths, as well as the journalist and author, Peter Oborne.
[2015] The Edge: borders and boundaries [53:37]
[2015] Uncomfortable Spaces [11:48]
[2015] Richard Sennett: Citizen Sociologist [54:45]
Recorded on October 24, 2015 as part of the 26th annual Chicago Humanities Festival.
[2015] Narratives of Inclusion: Can cities help us live together? [23:10]
How can we live better together in the 21st century city, these 10…20…60 million people living side-by-side, and on top of each other? Recorded at Thursday 3 December 2015.
[2016] Interiors and Interiority [1:00:32]
Sennett traces how intimate physical spaces emerged, historically. He explores the relationship between the concepts inside and subjective and whether interior spaces and interiority are disappearing today, under the influence of social media.
[2016] What is Meaningful Work? [1:32:08]
Is it possible to reconcile your values with the demanding profit-driven structures of modern professional life? Are some sectors more meaningful than others or does every career have the potential for meaningful work? How can our values and/or beliefs best inform our work and make a positive difference in the world? A podium discussion between Richard Sennett, Ruth Kosmin and Tim Frost, organised by St Paul’s Institute in partnership with the LSE Faith Centre, LSE Life and LSE Careers at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Texts on Sennett

Heathcote, Edwin
[2012] A breath of fresh air for public spaces
In: Financial Times, October 26 2012.
Kimball, Roger
[1991] Academic psychobabble, or Richard Sennett goes to town
In: The New Criterion, May 1991.
Leeuwen, Bart van
[2014] Urban civility or urban community? A false opposition in Richard Sennett’s conception of public ethos
In: European Journal of Social Theory, 17(1): 3-23. February 2014.
Sennett has a critical vision on the ethnic communities in urban areas: ethnic enclaves are a proof of urban disintegration and failing citizenship. Van Leeuwen takes issue with Sennett’s assumption that there is an inherent tension between in-group solidarity and the ability to deal with members of perceived out-groups. Instead of simply cutting citizens off from the wider public sphere and leaving them politically ineffective (as Sennett argues), urban communities can be instrumental in a struggle for emancipation and equal rights. A sense of belonging is a basic aspect of human well-being. Urban villages or ethnic clusters are able to provide this. As long as a local identity is not exclusive or the effect of involuntary segregation, ethno-cultural concentrations in the city are acceptable from the moral-political point of view.
Thomas, Casper
[2010] De tirannie van intimiteit
In: De Groene, December 15, 2010.
Tweedie, Dale - Macquarie University, Australia
[2013] Making sense of insecurity: a defence of Richard Sennett’s sociology of work
In: Work Employment & Society January 7, 2013.
Tweedie defends Sennett’s sociology of work under new capitalism against claims that his analysis lacks empirical foundation and methodological rigour. Sennett’s sociology is not committed to predictions of an ‘end of work’ or ‘age of insecurity’. His research provides a targeted critique of specific management practices and of those social transformations that share the same ethos.
Wolin, Sheldon S.
[1977] The Rise of Private Man
In: New York Review, April 14, 1977.

Bi(bli)ographies

Brief Biography | Curriculum Vitea
Braun, Melissa
[2001] Inner-city scholar
In: The Guardian, February 3, 2001.
Wikipedia: Richard Sennett

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Editor	dr. Albert Benschop Social & Behavioral Studies University of Amsterdam
Created	June, 1996
Last modified	03rd April, 2017