The Fall of Public Man

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In middle age, Sennett says he has returned to his political roots. "I started out in the 60s when it was pretty fevered on the left. And then I moved right in reaction to all the bullshit of the counter- culture. I got fed up with that anti intellectualism, the rejection of serious ideas, of serious art and the measurement of reality by psychological categories of the moment, an emphasis on immediate gratification." Thompson J., 2005, « La nouvelle visibilité », Réseaux. Communication, technologie, société, 129-130, pp. 62-87.

Peters J. D., 2006, « Media as Conversation, Conversation as Media? », pp. 115-126, in: Curran J., Morley D., eds, Media & Cultural Theory, Londres, Routledge. Richard has the most astonishing ability to re-invent himself. He must be in about his fifth life by now," says the writer and old friend Marina Warner. However, on his private life, Sennett is guarded to a point of gracious stubbornness. He first married in 1968, the marriage being annulled later that year. He says only "I married very young and I divorced young." He was married again between 1974-78. He is more forthcoming on his present marriage to Saskia Sassen, 53, a formidable academic in her own right whom he met in New York in the early 80s and to whom he has been married for 14 years. Sassen, a specialist on the global economy, holds chairs in sociology at the University of Chicago and in political economy at the LSE. Sennett says "Saskia and I write about many of the same things. People imagine our pillow talk is all about the global economy. Well it isn't, well not much." Richard Rogers describes the couple as a "very interesting twosome, overlapping in their interests, but specialising in different areas. They are a powerhouse, but a very nice, humanist powerhouse."Pécqueux A., 2005, « Un témoignage adressé. : parole du rap et parole collective », C ahiers de psychologie politique. Revue d’information, de réflexion et de recherche, 7. Accès : http://lodel.irevues.inist.fr/cahierspsychologiepolitique/index.php?id=1166. Hofstadter R., 1964, Le Style paranoïaque. Théories du complot et droite radicale en Amérique, trad. de l’anglais (États-Unis) par J. Charnay, Paris, F. Bourin, 2012. Arendt H., 1954, La Crise de la culture, trad. de l’anglais (États-Unis) par un collectif, Paris, Gallimard, 1972. He is also a socialist, who has returned to radical politics in late middle age. Ruth Levitas, reader in sociology at the University of Bristol, says he thinks class is important and fundamental, "which lots of people don't, but he also talks about what class means for real lives without drifting off into stuff about identity. He also writes beautifully". Book Genre: Anthropology, Culture, ers, History, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, rs, Social Science, Society, Sociology, Theory

Speaking as one who has read very little sociology, I found this book to be very eye-opening. It made me aware of things I hadn't noticed, and it explained things that I had. Glendinning tells a story about the couple staying at a mutual friend's country house. The host told her that after everyone had gone to bed, peals of laughter were heard coming from their bedroom. Glendinning thinks that "for a couple who are apart an awful lot of the time, it works very well when they are together". Sennett, who has no children of his own, is by all accounts a devoted stepfather to Saskia's only son, Hilary, 25, a sculptor in New York. Are we now so self-absorbed that we take little interest in the world beyond our own lives? Or has public life left no place for individuals to participate? He was also one of the first writers to predict, again with admirable restraint, the economic and political turbulence that may lie ahead. For, as the chilling last line of the Corrosion Of Character observes, a regime "which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy". A sweeping, farsighted study of the changing nature of public culture and urban society, The Fall of Public Man spans more than two centuries of Western sociopolitical evolution and investigates the causes of our declining involvement in political life. Richard Sennett’s insights into the danger of the cult of individualism remain thoroughly relevant to our world today. In a new epilogue, he extends his analysis to the new “public” realm of social media, questioning how public culture has fared since the digital revolution. The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett – eBook DetailsPour J. Bonhomme (2012), c’est précisément l’absence d’un dispositif d’ordonnancement impersonnel d (...)