Richard Sennett: Biography Of This American Sociologist
Richard Sennett 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 in today’s modern society or for his various academic works on the nature of work and life. sociology of different cultures throughout time and history.
In this article we explain who Richard Sennett is, and we review his main published works.
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 the Cabrini-Green tenements of this American city. As a child he 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 doctorate in the History of American Civilization in 1969, and since then he has been publishing various works on sociology.
Over the course of the last five decades, Sennett has written about social life in cities, changes in ways of working, and phenomena related to the activity of human societies. Among her books, it is worth highlighting “The Corrosion of Character”, which won the European Prize for Sociology.
He has also had a prolific public career, first as founder of the New York Institute for the Humanities and later as President of the American Council on Labor. For thirty years he has held the position of consultant in various organizations within the United Nations; and most recently, he wrote the mission statement for Habitat II 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 the University of Cambridge, and the Centennial Medal from Harvard University.
Richard Sennett’s academic works deal mainly with the development of cities the nature of work in modern societies and the sociology of cultures.
Below, we break down 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 ideal of accepted order generates patterns of behavior that stun and incite violence.
Sennett proposes more functional cities that can incorporate anarchic elements more diversity and creative disorder to seek adults who can respond and openly face life’s challenges.
2. Hidden injuries of sorts
In this work, titled “The hidden injuries of Class” in its original version, Richard Sennett treats the concept of class not as an economic or statistical issue, but as something that has to do with emotions. Sennet, with the collaboration of Jonathan Cobb, isolate the “hidden signals of class” through which today’s worker measures his own worth against those lives and occupations to which our society gives special meaning.
The authors examine intimate feelings in terms of the totality of human relationships within and between classes, and looking beyond, although never ignoring, the fight for economic survival. This work goes one step beyond the 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 them in a revolutionary role, as is done from the conventional socialist approach.
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 conflict?
In exploring these questions, Sennett examines traditional forms of authority (father in the family, lord in society) and dominant contemporary styles of authority, and shows how our needs for nothing less than our resistance to authority have been shaped. by history and culture, as well as by psychological dispositions.
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 becomes 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 of play, and the kind of discretion that would allow us to have real and pleasurable relationships with those we may never know intimately.
5. Corrosion of character
Based on interviews with laid-off IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers at a high-tech Boston bakery, a waitress turned advertising executive, and many others, Sennett explores the disorienting effects of the new capitalism
It 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 reengineering, risk, flexibility, networking and work as a team in the short term, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime.
6. The craftsman
In “The Craftsman,” Richard Sennett names a basic human impulse: the desire to do good work for yourself Although the word may suggest a way of life that declined with the advent of industrial society, Sennett argues that the realm of the artisan is much broader than skilled manual labor.
According to him, jobs such as computer programmer or doctor, parents and citizens themselves need to learn the values of good craftsmanship today.
7. Together: rituals, pleasures and politics of cooperation
In this play, Sennett maintains that cooperation is a craft, and the foundations for skillful cooperation lie in learning to listen and debate, rather than argue. Sennet explores how people can cooperate on the internet, in schools, 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 on Wall Street.
8. Build and live: 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 analyze their differences and planners experiment with urban forms that make it easier for residents to cope with their daily lives.
Sennett’s “materialist pragmatism”
Richard Sennett demands the return to a material culture that redirects the relationship that human beings have with nature and with the way we live and inhabit 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.
Sennet advocates recomposing the relationships 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 can be technologically very advanced but at the same time, like the ancient artisans, have the ability to pause and reflect on what you are working on.
For Sennett, artisanal work connects the person with their material reality and allows them to make mistakes, learn from mistakes by overcoming obstacles, the best way to ensure deep inner satisfaction and gain the respect of others. 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
Furthermore, Sennett clearly positions himself against the devaluation of certain skills in modern societies, since a few are systematically rewarded for their ability to perform certain tasks, while the rest of the common people are left by the wayside to get by as best you can in a life lacking 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 has declared himself an optimist, despite the fact that he is aware that if we continue as we have been until now we are doomed to a progressive disappearance.
