Richard Sennett

Author of The Hidden Injuries of Class which I found lame when I read it in 1980.

his 2003 book Respect in a World of Inequality http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4585097,00.html |excerpt Profile http://chronicle.com/free/v49/i18/18a01201.htm

• As he writes in his new book, Respect in a World of Inequality (W.W. Norton), his adolescent cello-playing gave him a permanent sense of "craft-love" (The Craft) - "by constructing an accurate, free sound I experienced a profound pleasure in and for itself, and a sense of self-worth which didn't depend on others."

  • related excerpt: The resistance matters as much as the mastery. We often assume that when children become frustrated at doing something, they give up - the logic of making everything as "user-friendly" and easy as possible. In learning music this logic can't hold. Resistance and difficulty are constant companions, and they serve a positive purpose: they motivate learning by setting an objective standard, how something ought to be done. The more a music student pursues playing correctly in tune or in time, rather than wallowing and emoting, the more his or her expressive craft develops. This is secure self-respect, this capacity to engage something for its own sake. (Educating Kids)

• That sort of "craft-love," he argues, represents a counterweight to a market-driven society in which people assign value to each other (and themselves) according to socioeconomic status.

• The new book is much more hesitant and ambivalent. Each of his central chapters examines a particular concept - Talent, compassion, bureaucracy - and describes how it both helps and hinders the development of healthy social respect.

• The Hidden Injuries of Class was published when Mr. Sennett was just 29, but it was not his first book; it was his fifth. Before his 28th birthday, he had published an expanded version of his dissertation, on late-19th-century class politics in Chicago; edited a volume titled Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities; co-authored a history of 19th-century cities in the United States; and published his first widely reviewed book, The Uses of Disorder. That last book argued that urban planning and zoning laws produce excessively ordered cities with segregated, stultified cultures. (Urban Design)

• In arguing against the centrality of social mobility, Mr. Sennett is dissenting from one of the cherished principles of liberals and conservatives alike. He is much more concerned with the need to provide social respect to people who fail to climb the greasy pole defined by the professional classes.