Richard Sennett (born 1 January 1943) is an American sociologist who is the Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and former University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. He is currently a Senior Fellow of the Center on Capitalism and Society at Columbia University.
He has been a Fellow of The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Royal Society of Literature. He is the founding director of the New York Institute for the Humanities.
Early life and education
Sennett grew up in the
Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago,
[Melissa Benn: "Inner-city scholar" in The Guardian, 3 February 2001] to a
Jewish family of Russian emigres. As a child he trained in music, studying the cello. When a hand injury and botched operation to fix it
put an end to his musical career, he entered academia. He studied under
David Riesman,
Erik Erikson, and
Oscar Handlin at Harvard, graduating with his Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization
in 1969.
His intellectual life as an urbanist came into focus during the time he spent as a fellow of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of
Harvard and
MIT.
[London School of Economics: "Professor Richard Sennett", retrieved 25 May 2013]
Career
Sennett's scholarly writing centers on the development of cities, the nature of work in modern society, and the sociology of culture.
Families Against the City, his earliest book, examines the relationship between family and work in 19th-century Chicago. A subsequent quartet of books explores urban life more largely:
The Uses of Disorder, an essay on identity formation in cities;
The Fall of Public Man, a history of public culture and public space, particularly in London, Paris, and New York in the 18th and 19th Centuries;
The Conscience of the Eye, a study of how Renaissance urban design passed into modern city planning, and
Flesh and Stone, an overview of the design of cities from ancient to modern times.
Another quartet of books is devoted to labor. The Hidden Injuries of Class is a study of class consciousness among working-class families in Boston; The Corrosion of Character explores how new forms of work are changing our communal and personal experience; Respect probes the relation of work and reforms of the welfare system; and The Culture of the New Capitalism provides an overview of these changes.
Authority is an essay in political theory; it addresses the tools of interpretation by which we recast raw power into either legitimate or illegitimate authority.
Sennett is working on a project called 'Homo Faber,' exploring material ways of making culture. The first book in this series is The Craftsman, published in 2008; subsequent volumes are Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation, published in 2012, and Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City (2018) on the making of the urban environment.[David Runciman: "Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation by Richard Sennett – review", in The Guardian, 3 February 2012]
In the public realm, Sennett founded, and directed for a decade, the New York Institute of the Humanities at New York University. Sennett then chaired a United Nations commission on urban development and design.[ Richard Sennett Comes To Mit / Balzan Prize Finalist Will Relinquish Post at NYU – PLAN issue 62 published Oct, 2005] As president of the American Council on Work,
In 2024, Sennett published The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, which is intended as "the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging."
Personal life
Sennett has been married to sociologist
Saskia Sassen since 1987.
Awards
-
1999 – elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
-
2006 – winner of the Hegel Prize awarded by the German city of Stuttgart,
[LSE: "Richard Sennett wins prestigious Hegel Prize", 30 November 2006]
-
2008 – awarded the Gerda Henkel Prize, worth 100,000 Euros, by the Gerda Henkel Foundation of Düsseldorf, Germany,
-
2009 – awarded the Heinrich Tessenow Medal, an honour which, until then, had been reserved for architects and designers.
-
2015 – awarded Premio Hemingway
-
2016 – received the Prix Européen de l'Essai awarded by the Charles Veillon Foundation in Lausanne.
[Charles Veillon Foundation: [6], March 2016]
-
2018 – appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to design in the 2018 New Year Honours
-
2018 – elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).
Selected works
-
Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays in the New Urban History, coauthor, Yale (1969)
-
Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, editor (1969),
-
(1970),
-
Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872–1890, Harvard (1970),
-
The Hidden Injuries of Class, with Jonathan Cobb, Knopf (1972),
-
The Fall of Public Man, Knopf (1977),
-
Authority (1980),
-
The Conscience of the Eye: The design and social life of cities, Faber and Faber (1991),
-
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City In Western Civilization, Norton (1994),
-
The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton (1998),
-
Respect in a World of Inequality, Penguin (2003),
-
The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale (2006),
-
The Craftsman, Allen Lane (2008),
-
The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile, Notting Hill (2011),
-
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation, Yale (2012),
-
Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2018),
-
The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda, Routledge (2018),
-
The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, Penguin (2024),
Fiction
-
The Frog Who Dared to Croak (1982),
-
An Evening of Brahms (1984)
-
Palais-Royal (1986),
Literature on Richard Sennett
-
Dominik Skala: Urbanität als Humanität. Anthropologie und Sozialethik im Stadtdenken Richard Sennetts. Paderborn: Schoeningh (2015),
-
Igor Pelgreffi: "Soggetto, tecnica, scrittura. Su How I write: Sociology as Literature di Richard Sennett ", in M. Iofrida (Eds) Officine Filosofiche, 2, Mucchi, Modena 2015, pp. 95–108
-
Igor Pelgreffi: "Qualità artigianale del lavoro. Elementi per un'antropologia filosofica in Richard Sennett", in M. Iofrida (Eds) Officine Filosofiche, 3, Mucchi, Modena 2016, pp. 95–108
External links
