Books by Richard Sennett

This book is a study of both how we experience authority and how we might experience it differently. Sennett explores the bonds that rebellion against authority paradoxically establishes, showing how this paradox has been in the making since the French Revolution and how today it expresses itself in offices, in factories, and in government as well as in the family.

Suggests that modern architecture reflects society's fear of exposure, and looks at ways to overcome the impersonality, blandness, and neutrality of modern cities.

Richard Sennett, who has written preceptively about work and workers in America, discusses the notion of craft and how it is practiced. Sennett intelligently (and creatively) draws examples from a range of cultural periods, classical through modern, and he includes chefs and computer programmers as contemporary practitioners. Said to be the first volume in a projected trilogy, THE CRAFTSMAN heightens our appreciation of craftspeople and underscores their importance to the individual and society.

A distinguished MIT sociologist surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global version that is evident today to illustrate how the work ethic is changing, new beliefs about merit and talent are displacing old values of craftsmanship and achievement, and how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.

Follows an exceptional cellist, who uses his music to keep emotions at bay, to a tragedy-caused release into a fulness of musical and emotional reality.

Combining what the 'Chicago Tribune' calls 'all the resources of modern scholarship and an impressive intelligence of his own Mr. Stennett analyzes how middle class families lived and worked in Chicago a century ago.

This vivid history of the city in Western civilization tells the story of urban life through bodily experience.

"Flesh and Stone" is the story of the deepest parts of life--how women and men moved in public and private spaces, what they saw and heard, the smells that assailed them, 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.
Early in "Flesh and Stone" Richard Sennett probes the ways in which the ancient Athenians experienced nakedness, and the relation of nakedness to the shape of the ancient city, its troubled politics, and the inequalities between men and women. The story then moves to Rome in the time of the Emperor Hadrian, exploring Roman beliefs in the geometrical perfection of the body.
The second part of the book examines how Christian beliefs about the body related to the Christian city--the Venetian ghetto, cloisters, and markets in Paris. The final part of "Flesh and Stone" deals with what happened to urban space as modern scientific understanding of the body cut free from pagan and Christian beliefs. Flesh and Stone makes sense of our constantly evolving urban living spaces, helping us to build a common home for the increased diversity of bodies that make up the modern city.

The fictional memoirs of Tibor Grau, a leading Marxist thinker, recounts his public and private lives from the early revolutionist period to the time of Stalin, detailing his official career, philosophical development, and homosexuality.

In this intrepid, groundbreaking book, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb uncover and define a new form of class conflict in America--an internal conflict in the heart and mind of the blue collar worker who measures his own value against those lives and occupations to which our society gives a special premium. The authors conclude that, in the games of hierarchical respect, no class can emerge the victor, and that true egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity. Examining personal feelings in terms of a totality of human relations, and looking beyond the struggle for economic survival, "The Hidden Injuries of Class" takes an important step forward in the sociological critique of everyday life.

Ablaze with intellectual and social change, Paris in the 1830s and 1840s beckons to two English brothers-Frederick and Charles Courtland, an architect and a priest-each of whom is struggling for self-definitionand social recognition. Of their lives and this world Sennett has made a remarkable work of fiction that transports the reader into nineteenth century Europe and into the nature and inconsistencies of culture and faith, and the way each is shaped by the passage of time.

Presents a case for a society of mutual respect, recounting the author's experiences of growing up in Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, proposing welfare system improvements, and citing the consequences of disrespectful behaviors in today's competitive society.

In his first book to be published in the United States, German photographer Thomas Struth explores the social space and mental state of the modern metropolis. Thomas Struth: Strangers & Friends covers the entire trajectory of Struth's career and his work in several subject matters, including his restrained and rigorous architectural photographs, intimate family portraits, and frenzied museum interiors. A former student of artist Gerhard Richter and of photographers Hilla and Bernd Becher, Struth began in the early 1980s to make steely black and white photographs of deserted city streets and decaying buildings in a restrained and rigorous style that seemed to underscore his debt to his teachers. In recent years, his work has diversified in subject, scale, and color to embrace increasingly ambitious subjects and challenging locations. Struth has extended his urban investigation to the inhabitants and interior spaces of the city, from Naples to Tokyo to Chicago to Berlin, portraying the relationships, conscious and unconscious, through which we build and abandon our identities in a world of transitory physical and social structures. Thomas Struth: Strangers & Friends continues a notable tradition of books by German photographers from August Sander and Albert Renger-Patzsch to Hilla and Bernd Becher. It is the most complete presentation of Struth's work to date, following Unconscious Places (1987) and Museum Photographs (1993).

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 challenge of life.