Richard Sennett has dedicated his work to understanding how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of their urban environments and labor. His research focuses on empowering people to become adept interpreters of their own experiences, even amidst societal obstacles. As a social analyst, Sennett builds upon the pragmatist tradition of William James and John Dewey. He delves into the formation of identity within cities, explores how modern capitalism reshapes the lives of workers, and examines the consequences for responsibility, cooperation, and craftsmanship.
Exploring the relationship between architecture and democracy, the book revisits Richard Sennett's 1981 lectures, emphasizing how urban design can influence public discourse. It argues that cities have the potential to either foster or hinder democratic engagement. With contemporary political polarization in mind, the text examines how thoughtful architectural choices can enhance civic dialogue and participation, highlighting the enduring significance of these ideas in today's context.
A master of the interplay between politics and psychology, Richard Sennett here 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? In exploring these questions, Sennett examines traditional forms of authority (The father’s in the family, the lord’s in society) and the dominant contemporary styles of authority, and 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.
Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man examines the growing imbalance between private and public experience, and asks what can bring us to reconnect with our communities. Are we now so self-absorbed that we take little interest in the world beyond our own lives? Or has public life left no place for individuals to participate? Tracing the changing nature of urban society from the eighteenth century to the world we now live in, and the decline of involvement in political life in recent decades, Richard Sennett discusses the causes of our social withdrawal. His landmark study of the imbalance of modern civilization provides a fascinating perspective on the relationship between public life and the cult of the individual.
"In this sweeping study, one of the world's leading thinkers about the urban environment traces the often anguished relation between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to twenty-first-century Shanghai. Richard Sennett shows how Paris, Barcelona and New York City assumed their modern forms ; rethinks the reputations of Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford and others ; and takes us on a tour of emblematic contemporary locations, from the backstreets of Medellin, Colombia, to the Google headquarters in Manhattan. Through it all, he shows how the 'closed city' - segregated, regimented, and controlled - has spread from the global North to the exploding urban agglomerations of the global South. As an alternative, he argues for the 'open city,' where citizens actively hash out their differences and planners experiment with urban forms that make it easier for residents to cope. Rich with arguments that speak directly to our moment - a time when more humans live in urban spaces than ever before - Building and Dwelling draws on Sennett's deep learning and intimate engagement with city life to form a bold and original vision for the future of cities."--[Source inconnue]
The Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances. The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing. This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression- performing, narrating, and imaging.
“[Sennett] has ended up writing the best available contemporary defense of anarchism. . . . The issues [he] raises are fundamental and profound. His book is utopian in the best sense―it tries to define a radically different future and to show that it could be constructed from the materials at hand.” –Kenneth Keniston, New York Times Book Review The distinguished social critic Richard Sennett here shows how the excessively ordered community freezes adults―both the young idealists and their security-oriented parents―into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle classes that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. And 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.
Living with people who differ -- racially, ethnically, religiously, or economically -- is one of the most difficult challenges facing us today. Though our society is becoming ever more complicated materially, we tend to avoid engaging with people unlike ourselves. Modern politics emphasizes unity and similarity, encouraging the politics of the tribe rather than of complexity. Together: the rituals, pleasures and politics of Co-operation explores why this has happened and what might be done about it. Sennett argues that living with people unlike ourselves requires more than goodwill: it requires skill. The foundations for skillful co-operation lie in learning to listen well and to discuss rather than debate. People who develop these capacities earn a reward: they can take pleasure in the company of others. Together traces the evolution of cooperative rituals in medieval churches and guilds, Renaissance workshops and courts, early modern laboratories and diplomatic embassies. In our lives today, it explains the trials and prospects of cooperation online, face-to-face in ethnic conflicts, among financial workers and community organizers. Exploring the nature of cooperation, why it has become weak, and how it could be strengthened, this visionary book offers a new way of seeing how humans can live together.
