Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett: The Cellist Who Studied Cities

A surgeon's mistake made him a sociologist. Richard Sennett trained from childhood as a cellist, and had every expectation of a life on the concert platform, until a hand injury and a botched repair closed that door for good. What followed was one of the strangest career pivots in modern social thought — a musician who spent the next half-century applying a performer's attention to the things that scholarship usually treats as too ordinary to notice: how people work, how they talk in public, how a wall meets a street.

Cabrini Green

Sennett was born in Chicago on 1 January 1943, into a Jewish family of Russian emigrants, and grew up in Cabrini Green — at the time a pioneering racially mixed public housing project, decades before its name became a byword for American urban failure. The biographical detail matters more than most, because Sennett's entire body of work circles the question of whether strangers who differ can share a place without dissolving into either hostility or bland consensus. He watched an experiment in exactly that, from the inside, as a child.

Music came first and came seriously. When the hand gave out, he went to the University of Chicago and then to Harvard, taking a doctorate in the History of American Civilization in 1969 under an extraordinary trio of supervisors: David Riesman, author of *The Lonely Crowd*; the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson; and the immigration historian Oscar Handlin. Sociology, psychology and history are braided through everything Sennett has written since, and the braid was tied at Harvard. A fellowship at the Joint Center for Urban Studies, run jointly by Harvard and MIT, gave him the third element: the city itself.

The Public Man and the Hidden Injury

Sennett's early books arrived at a moment when American intellectual life was turning inward, and both of them argued against the turn. *The Uses of Disorder* (1970) made the counter-intuitive case that cities should be less planned, not more — that the friction of unresolved difference does more for adults than orderly zoning. *The Hidden Injuries of Class* (1972), written with Jonathan Cobb, went into the homes of Boston working-class families and found something the era's politics had largely missed: that class in America wounds through dignity rather than through income, producing a private ledger of shame in people who have, on paper, done well.

Then came *The Fall of Public Man* (1977), still his most cited book. Its argument is that Western societies have progressively confused sincerity with virtue, hollowing out the impersonal, theatrical, mask-wearing conventions that once let strangers deal with one another as citizens rather than as intimates. The result, Sennett argued, is a politics of personality and an exhausting demand for authenticity that makes public life both more emotional and less effective. It is a thesis written by someone who understood, from the concert hall, that a performance is not a lie.

Character Under the New Capitalism

By the 1990s Sennett was working in two countries at once, holding chairs at New York University and at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he became Centennial Professor of Sociology. In the 1970s he had co-founded the New York Institute for the Humanities with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky; in the 1980s he advised UNESCO and served as president of the American Council on Work, a forum sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation.

That institutional life fed a second great sequence of books about labour. *The Corrosion of Character* (1998) asked what happens to a person when the modern economy demands flexibility, short-term projects and constant reinvention — when a career no longer accumulates into a story a person can tell about themselves. *Respect* (2003) and *The Culture of the New Capitalism* (2006) extended the argument into welfare, inequality and the psychology of dependency. The books were read far outside sociology, in management schools and by politicians, largely because they described a feeling that had no vocabulary before Sennett supplied one.

Homo Faber

His late work is the most personal and the most idiosyncratic: a trilogy under the heading Homo Faber, man the maker. *The Craftsman* (2008) is the anchor. Against the assumption that skilled manual work is a lesser cousin of thinking, Sennett argued that craftsmanship — the desire to do a job well for its own sake — is a basic human impulse and an intellectual practice in its own right, one that runs from the goldsmith's bench to the surgeon's theatre to the writing of code. Skill, he insisted, is a form of knowledge that cannot be separated from the hand that carries it. Nobody who had lost a hand to a surgeon's error could have written that book casually.

*Together* (2012) treated cooperation as a craft that must be learned and can be lost, and *Building and Dwelling* (2018) returned to the city, distinguishing the built environment from the lived one. He has not stopped: *The Performer: Art, Life, Politics* (2024) opens a new trilogy on performing, narrating and imaging, closing a circle back to the cello. Alongside the books he chaired a United Nations commission on urban development and design, created the LSE Cities Programme that grew into the Urban Age project, and chaired the jury of the 2006 Venice Biennale.

Why Richard Is Called a Genius

The quality Sennett is credited with is not analytical firepower but an unusual kind of vision — the ability to see a whole society through a small physical thing, and to move between the workbench, the psyche and the political economy without the joins showing. Xiao-Li Meng, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, put the claim plainly when awarding him the 2017 Centennial Medal: Sennett "has shaped our understanding of some of the most fundamental questions of modern life: what it means to live in a city and what it means to work." The honours are not modest — the Hegel Prize in 2006, the Gerda Henkel Prize in 2008, the Heinrich Tessenow Medal in 2009 as its first recipient who was neither architect nor designer, the Prix Européen de l'Essai in 2016, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature and of the British Academy, and an OBE in 2018.

The honest counter-case is that Sennett is an essayist as much as a social scientist, and his critics have said so for decades. His books proceed by illuminating anecdote, historical sweep and analogy rather than by systematic evidence; the sweeping historical claims of *The Fall of Public Man* have been contested by historians, and the celebration of craft has been read as nostalgia dressed in theory. He founded no school and left no method behind him. His genius, if the word applies, is closer to a novelist's than a scientist's: not the discovery of laws, but the naming of experiences that millions of people were having without language for them.

Legacy

Sennett's reach is unusual for a sociologist — architects, urban designers and policy makers read him at least as closely as academics do, and his vocabulary of corroded character, hidden injury and craftsmanship has escaped into ordinary argument about work and cities. He married the sociologist Saskia Sassen in 1987, forming one of the field's genuinely formidable intellectual partnerships. Well into his eighties and still opening trilogies, he remains what he has always been: a performer who changed instruments.

Achievements

• European handicraft prize — 2008
• Gerda Henkel Prize — 2008
• Hegel Prize — 2006
• Fellow of the British Academy
• Officer of the Order of the British Empire
• Held posts at London School of Economics and Political Science
• Fields: sociology