Richard Sennett: biography of this American sociologist.

We review the life and work of this Illinois author, philosopher, sociologist and thinker.

Richard Sennett is an American sociologist known for his research on social relations in urban environments, for his studies on the effects of city life on individuals in today's modern society, or for his various academic 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 the Cabrini-Green tenements of 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 end his musical career.

Sennett briefly attended the University of Chicago and then enrolled at Harvard, where he studied history with Oscar Handlin, sociology with David Rieswhere she studied history with Oscar Handlin, sociology with David Riesman and philosophy with John Rawls. He received his Ph.D. in the history of American civilization in 1969, and has since published several works on sociology.

Over the past five decades, Sennett has written on social life in cities, changes in forms of work and phenomena related to the activity of human societies. His books include "The Corrosion of Character", which won the European Sociology Prize.

He has also had a prolific public career, first as founder of the New York Institute for the Humanities and then as President of the American Council for Labor. For thirty years he has served as a consultant to various agencies within the United Nations; most recently, he wrote the mission statement for Habitat II, 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 Harvard University Centennial Medal.

Published works

Richard Sennett's scholarly works are mainly on the development of cities.The nature of work in modern societies and the sociology of cultures.

The following are some of the most important works in his academic career.

Urban Life and Personal Identity: The Uses of Disorder

In this book, Sennett shows how an excessively 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 are stultifying and incite violence.

Sennett proposes more functional cities that can incorporate anarchic elements, more diversity and creative disorder.Sennett proposes more functional cities that can incorporate anarchic elements, more diversity and creative disorder to produce adults who can respond to and openly face life's challenges.

2. The hidden injuries of class

In this work, entitled "The hidden injuries of Class" in its original version, Richard Sennett treats the concept of class not as an economic or statistical question, but as something that has to do with emotions. Sennett, with the collaboration of Jonathan Cobb, isolates the "hidden signs of class" through which today's worker measures his own worth against those lives and occupations to which our society attaches special significance.

The authors examine intimate feelings in terms of the totality of human relations within and between classes, and by looking beyond, though never beyond, those of the working class.The authors examine intimate feelings in terms of the totality of human relationships within and between classes, and looking beyond, but never ignoring, the struggle for economic survival. This work goes a step beyond the sociological critique of everyday life.

The authors criticize both the claim that workers are merging into a homogeneous society and the attempt to "save" the worker in order to place him in a revolutionary role, as is done in 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 attempts to answer questions such as the following: Why have we become so fearful of authority? What are our real needs for authority: 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 (the father in the family, the 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.

4. The Decline of the Public Man

Richard Sennett shows in this work how our lives today are deprived of the pleasures and reinforcements of social relations 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, because of the change in public life, private life becomes distorted as we necessarily become more and more self-focusedin ever more 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 playfulness 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

Drawing on interviews with laid-off IBM executives in Westchester, New York, bakers in 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 short-term teamwork, where what matters is being able to reinvent yourself on a dime.

6. The Craftsman

In "The Craftsman," Richard Sennett names a basic human drive: the desire to do good work for its own sake.. 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 the Politics of Cooperation

In this work, Sennett argues that cooperation is a craft.and the basis for skillful cooperation lies in learning to listen and debate, rather than argue. Sennett explores how people can cooperate on the Internet, in schools, at work, and in local politics.

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

8. Building and Living: Ethics for the City

In this wide-ranging work, Richard Sennett explores the differences between how cities are built and how people live in them, from ancient Athens to the present day.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 lives.

Sennett's "materialist pragmatism".

Richard Sennett calls for a return to a culture of the material that redirects the relationship humans have with nature and the way we live. and with the way we live and inhabit our cities. For Sennett, today's 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 relationship between life and work, calling for workers not to mass-produce and to be able to work more in the long term, in jobs that may be technologically very advanced but at the same time, like ancient craftsmen, have the ability to pause and reflect on what is being worked on.

For Sennett, artisan work connects the person with his or her material reality and allows him or her to make mistakes, to learn from mistakes by overcoming obstacles, the best way to ensure deep inner satisfaction and to gain the respect of others. In a world in which speed and, the American sociologist continues to believe in values such as patience, practicality and the importance of a job well done..

Moreover, Sennett is clearly against the devaluation of certain skills in modern societies, as a few are systematically rewarded for their ability to perform certain tasks, while the rest of the common people are left to fend for themselves in a life devoid of respect and dignity.

All in all, Sennett's pragmatism has constantly pushed him to a search for practical solutions to each and every one of the problems he has been revealing in his works, and he himself has declared himself to be an optimist, even though he is aware that if we continue as we have been doing we are doomed to a progressive disappearance.

Bibliographical references:

• Joas, H., Sennett, R., & Gimmler, A. (2006). Creativity, pragmatism and the social sciences: A discussion between hans Joas and Richard Sennett. Distinktion: 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. WW Norton & Company.

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

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