Richard Sennett: biography of this American sociologist

Richard Sennett he is an american sociologist known for his research on social relations in urban environments, for his studies on the effects of life in cities on individuals of today's modern society or by their various scholarly works on the nature of work and the sociology of different cultures over time and history.

In this article we explain who Richard Sennett is, and we review his main published works.

Who is Richard Sennett?

Richard Sennett is an American sociologist whose thought can be framed within the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. He was born in Chicago in 1943 and grew up in Cabrini-Green housing in this American city. As a child he was trained in music and learned to play the cello, although due to an injury to his hand he had to put an end to his musical career.

Sennett briefly attended the University of Chicago and then entered Harvard, where he studied history with Oscar Handlin, sociology with David Riesman, and philosophy with John Rawls. He earned his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization in 1969, and has since published various works on sociology.

Over the course of the last five decades, Sennett has written about social life in cities, changes in the forms of work and phenomena related to the activity of companies human. Among his books it is worth highlighting "The corrosion of character", which won the European Prize for Sociology.

In addition, he has had a prolific public career, first as founder of the New York Institute for the Humanities and later as President of the American Council for Labor. For thirty years he has served as a consultant to various agencies within the United Nations; and most recently, he wrote the Habitat II mission statement at the Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development.

Five years ago, Sennett created Theatrum Mundi (“The Theater of the World”), a foundation dedicated to research for urban culture and whose board of directors he currently chairs. Among other awards, Sennett has received the Hegel Prize, the Spinoza Prize, an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.

published works

Richard Sennett's academic works deal mainly with the development of cities, the nature of work in modern societies and the sociology of cultures.

Next, we describe some of the most important works in his academic career.

1. Urban life and personal identity: the uses of disorder

In this book, Sennett shows how an overly ordered community pushes adults into rigid attitudes that stifle their personal growth. The author argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior that are stunned and incite violence.

Sennett proposes more functional cities that can incorporate anarchic elements, more diversity and creative disorder to procure adult people who can respond and openly face the challenges of life.

2. hidden class injuries

In this work, entitled "The hidden injuries of Class" in its original version, Richard Sennett deals with the concept of class not as an economic or statistical question, but as something to do with the emotions. Sennett, with the collaboration of Jonathan Cobb, isolate the "hidden signals of class" through which the worker of today it measures its own value against those lives and occupations that our society gives meaning to special.

The authors examine intimate feelings in terms of the totality of human relationships within and between classes., and looking beyond, though never ignoring, the struggle for economic survival. This work goes one step beyond sociological criticism of everyday life.

The authors criticize both the claim that workers are merging into a homogeneous society and the attempt to "save" the worker to place him in a revolutionary role, as is done from the socialist approach conventional.

3. Authority

In this book, Sennett analyzes the nature, role, and faces of authority in personal life and in the public sphere, as well as the concept of authority itself.

This work tries to answer questions such as the following: Why have we become so fearful of authority? What real authority needs do we have: guidance, stability, images of strength? What happens when our fear and our need for authority come into conflict?

In exploring these questions, Sennett examines traditional forms of authority (the father in the family, the lord in society) and contemporary styles of authority. dominant, and shows how our needs for nothing less than our resistance to authority have been shaped by history and culture, as well as dispositions. psychological.

4. The decline of public man

Richard Sennett shows in this work how our lives are today deprived of the pleasures and reinforcements of social relationships with strangers.

Sennett 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.

And according to him, due to the change in public life, private life is distorted as we necessarily focus more and more on ourselves, in increasingly narcissistic forms of intimacy and self-absorption.

Because of this, Sennett concludes that our personalities cannot fully develop because we lack that simplicity, that spirit. game play and the kind of discretion that would allow us to have real, pleasurable relationships with those we may never meet intimately.

Based on interviews with laid-off IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in a Boston's high-tech bakery, a waitress-turned-ad executive, and many others, 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 a sense of character was what mattered. personal, and the brave new world of corporate reengineering, risk, flexibility, networking, and short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself in a penny.

6. the craftsman

In "The Craftsman," Richard Sennett names a basic human drive: the desire to do a good job for oneself. Although the word may suggest a way of life that diminished with the advent of society industrial, Sennett argues that the realm of the artisan is much broader than manual labor. skilled.

According to him, jobs like computer programmer or doctor, parents and citizens themselves need to learn the values ​​of good craftsmanship today.

7. Together: rituals, pleasures and the politics of cooperation

In this play, Sennett argues that cooperation is a trade, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen and debate, rather than argue. Sennet explores how people can cooperate online, at school, at work, and in local politics.

It traces the evolution of cooperative rituals from medieval times to the present, and in situations as diverse as slave communities, socialist groups in Paris, or workers in Wall Street.

8. Build and inhabit: ethics for the city

In this extensive work, Richard Sennett explores the differences between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to 21st century Shanghai.

Furthermore, he argues for "open cities" where citizens actively discuss their differences and planners experiment with urban forms that make it easier for residents to cope with their day to day.

Sennett's "materialist pragmatism"

Richard Sennett calls for a return to a culture of the material that redirects the relationship that human beings have with nature and with the way we have of living and inhabiting our cities. For Sennett, current capitalism is hostile to the construction of life and is partly responsible for the loss of the notion of craftsmanship in the workplace.

Sennett advocates rebuilding the relationship between life and work, appealing to workers not to mass-manufacture and to be able to work more in the long term, in jobs that they can be very technologically advanced but at the same time, like the ancient craftsmen, have the ability to pause and reflect on what is being working.

For Sennett, craft work connects the person with their material reality and allows them to make mistakes, learn from mistakes avoiding obstacles, the best way to ensure a deep inner satisfaction and to obtain the respect of others. the rest. In a world where speed prevails and, the american sociologist continues to believe in values ​​such as patience, practicality or the importance of a job well done.

In addition, Sennett is clearly positioned against the devaluation of certain skills in modern societies, since he systematically rewards a few for their ability to perform certain tasks, while the rest of the commons are left in the gutter to fend for themselves in a life lacking in respect and dignity.

However, Sennett's pragmatism has constantly pushed him to search for practical solutions to each and every one of the problems that he has revealed. in his works, and he himself has declared himself an optimist, despite the fact that he is aware that if we continue as we have been up to now, we are doomed to a progressive disappearance.

Bibliographic references:

• Joas, H., Sennett, R., & Gimmler, A. (2006). Creativity, pragmatism and the social sciences: A discussion between Hans Joas and Richard Sennett. Distinction: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory, 7(2), 5-31.

• Sennett, R. (1998). The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism. W. W. Norton & Company.

• Sennett, R. (2007). The culture of the new capitalism. Yale University Press.

• Sennett, R. (2017). The fall of public man. W. W. Norton & Company.