Richard Sennett | |
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Born | |
Known for | Studies of social ties in cities |
Spouse | |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Sociology |
Academic advisors | David Riesman, Erik Erikson, Oscar Handlin |
Richard Sennett OBE FBA FRSL (born 1 January 1943) 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. [1] Sennett has studied social ties in cities, and the effects of urban living on individuals in the modern world.
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.
Sennett grew up in the Cabrini Green housing project in Chicago, [2] to a Jewish [3] family of Russian emigres. As a child he trained in music, studying the cello and conducting, working with Claus Adam of the Juilliard String Quartet and the conductor Pierre Monteux. When a hand injury and botched operation to fix it [4] 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 [5] in 1969. [6] 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. [7]
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.[ citation needed ]
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.[ citation needed ]
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. [8] [9]
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. [10] As president of the American Council on Work, [11] [12] [13] Sennett led a forum, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, for researchers trying to understand the changing pattern of American labor. Most recently he helped create, and has chaired, the LSE Cities Programme at the London School of Economics. The Urban Age project also emerged as a product of the research and ideas by Sennett and others at LSE Cities. In 2006, he served as Chair of the jury of the Venice Biennale.
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." [14] The Performer examines a wide range of human roles and interactions from nightclubs to political rallies throughout history to understand the role of performance in every human life. [15]
Sennett has been married to sociologist Saskia Sassen since 1987. [2]
Fiction
Literature on Richard Sennett
Lionel Mordecai Trilling was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, and political implications of literature. With his wife Diana Trilling, whom he married in 1929, he was a member of the New York Intellectuals and contributor to the Partisan Review.
David W. Harvey is a British Marxist economic geographer, podcaster, and Distinguished Professor of anthropology and geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He received his PhD in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1961. Harvey has authored many books and essays that have been prominent in the development of modern geography as a discipline. He is a proponent of the idea of the right to the city.
Saskia Sassen is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is a professor of sociology at Columbia University in New York City, and the London School of Economics. The term global city was coined and popularized by Sassen in her 1991 work, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo.
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Gerta Pohorylle, known professionally as Gerda Taro, was a German war photographer active during the Spanish Civil War. She is regarded as the first woman photojournalist to have died while covering the frontline in a war.
The Culture of the New Capitalism is a 2006 book written by Richard Sennett about the economic situation of the time. In the book, Sennett covers politics, economics, sociology and psychology.
Craig Jackson Calhoun is an American sociologist who currently serves as the University Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University. He is a strong advocate for applying social science to address issues of public concerns. Calhoun served as the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) from September 2012 until September 2016 and continues to hold the title of Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE.
Richard David Wolff is an American Marxian economist known for his work on economic methodology and class analysis. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. Wolff has also taught economics at Yale University, City University of New York, University of Utah, University of Paris I (Sorbonne), and The Brecht Forum in New York City.
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The Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal (Heinrich-Tessenow-Medaille) is an architecture award established in 1963 by the Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S. of Hamburg in honour of Heinrich Tessenow. It is awarded by the Heinrich-Tessenow-Gesellschaft e.V. "to honour people who have achieved distinction in craft and industrial form-making and in the teaching of the culture of living and building, and who have through their life's work acted in the spirit of Heinrich Tessenow". Until 2006, the medal was awarded annually.
Urban theory describes the economic, political and social processes which affect the formation and development of cities.
Mary Henrietta Kaldor is a British academic, currently Professor of Global Governance at the London School of Economics, where she is also the Director of the Civil Society and Human Security Research Unit. She also teaches at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). She has been a key figure in the development of cosmopolitan democracy. She writes on globalisation, international relations and humanitarian intervention, global civil society and global governance, as well as what she calls New Wars.
This bibliography of sociology is a list of works, organized by subdiscipline, on the subject of sociology. Some of the works are selected from general anthologies of sociology, while other works are selected because they are notable enough to be mentioned in a general history of sociology or one of its subdisciplines.
Christopher John Harman was a British journalist and political activist, and a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. He was an editor of International Socialism and Socialist Worker.
Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist and emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne.
LSE Cities is a research centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Urban Age is a research programme started in 2005. It is led by LSE Cities with support from Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Society into the relationship between the shape and society of cities. Research includes comparing urbanisation in already urbanised and currently urbanising regions of the world. Urban Age emerged as a product of the research and ideas of LSE Cities' Ricky Burdett, Philipp Rode and Richard Sennett and has since centred around conferences in a range of cities worldwide, as well as accompanying newspapers containing both global data sets and in-depth case studies.
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life is a 1970 book on the virtues of diversified communities written by Richard Sennett and published by Knopf. It was Sennett's first book, and is divided into two parts: the first analyzes the causes of stagnant and over-ordered communities, while the second contains Sennett's proposed solution.