Searching for Respect

In 1946, an aspiring writer named Dorothy Sennett moved with her 3-year-old son,

ALSO SEE: Richard Sennett

Richard, into Chicago's Cabrini Green housing project, which had been hastily constructed during the war. She was anxious about money. Her husband had left when Richard was an infant. Years later she wrote that her apartment building felt "like a beleaguered ship. Around it, from early morning until far into evening, there rose a sea of sound ... voices screaming, laughing, wailing, shouting."

On a December afternoon 56 years later, Richard Sennett sits in an astonishingly quiet pocket of New York City, practicing the cello. He lives half the year in a converted stable in Washington Mews, a cobblestone alley adjacent to New York University, where he is a professor of sociology. (Spring semesters he spends at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he teaches sociology and social policy.) It's the day after a heavy snow, and the streets are still hushed. If Mr. Sennett's childhood home felt like a beleaguered ship, this feels like the opposite. Despite whatever terrorist plots or social miseries threaten the city, Washington Mews offers a convincing illusion of security and permanence.

The cello was an anchor for Mr. Sennett as he grew up in Chicago. For several years he dreamed of performing professionally, but when he was 21, botched surgery for tendinitis left him with a disability in his left hand. Still, he practices for several hours a week. 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" -- "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."

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. It also can be a bulwark against the excesses of America's SAT-calibrated meritocracy. "There's so much emphasis on potential," he says. "Not on what people do, but on what they might do. ... The judgment of people's potential is devastating to people who lose out on that judgment. It deprives people of hope."

Mr. Sennett is a tall man with earnest eyes and a receded hairline. Smoking a pipe after his cello practice, he talks about his recent work on the problem of social status and personal identity -- a question he first explored 30 years ago, in The Hidden Injuries of Class. That book, which he wrote with a colleague, Jonathan Cobb, used hundreds of interviews with white working-class Boston residents to examine their feelings of shame and anxiety. They found that working-class men were, for example, hugely resentful of welfare recipients because the existence of the dole seemed to mock their position as breadwinners. What honor was there in struggling to feed your family with a low-status job if your wife and children could just as easily be cared for by the state?

Respect is intended as both an extension of and a corrective to Hidden Injuries, which Mr. Sennett says was written when he was "in a sort of ferocious Marxist phase." The earlier book has a polemic undercurrent, and ends with a call "to overturn a society based on validations of self, on rewards for performance, on the linking of dignity to special ability."

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. Bureaucracy, for example, is harmful because its impersonality forces welfare recipients to become "spectators to their own needs." On the other hand, Mr. Sennett insists that some sort of bureaucracy is indispensable to helping drug addicts and the homeless. Purely spontaneous, voluntary, and flexible efforts against homelessness and addiction, he says, are unlikely to have enough stability or structure to help distressed people over the long term.

Hidden Injuries

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.

Even as he racked up those titles, Mr. Sennett had begun work on the project that became The Hidden Injuries of Class. The book was spurred in part by Mr. Sennett's vague memories of the stigma in the air during his four childhood years at Cabrini Green. His most vivid memory is of participating in "glass wars," in which gangs of children would hurl empty bottles at one another from the vacant tenements ringing the project. When a girl was seriously injured during one of these games, the police notified the children's teachers and social workers but not their parents. Mr. Sennett's mother was deeply offended, feeling that she and her fellow parents had been infantilized and discounted.

Beginning in 1968, he and Mr. Cobb directed a Ford Foundation-financed project of interviews with white working-class residents of Boston and its suburbs. They hoped to identify ways in which working-class people define their own values and culture in the face of an indifferent (and occasionally hostile) professional and media class.

Central to the book are the workers' ambivalent feelings about social mobility and the Horatio Alger myth. The authors write: "Workingmen intellectually reject the idea that endless opportunity exists for the competent. And yet, the institutions of class force them to apply the idea to themselves: if I don't escape being part of the woodwork, it's because I didn't develop my powers enough."

The book also discusses the types of psychic satisfaction that are available to professional people with careers that involve diverse and self-directed tasks. That sort of job satisfaction can provide a renewed sense of identity in ways that aren't available to workers whose every move is clocked by a factory foreman or restaurant manager.

Mr. Sennett and Mr. Cobb consciously challenged what they saw as the New Left's contempt for the white working class -- the notion that American workers were racist, chauvinist, and otherwise reluctant to follow the revolutionary script. "When you make someone into a symbol," Mr. Sennett says, "a projected fantasy of your own anger and hope, then you stop dealing with him or her as a real human being, equal to you in confusion and uncertainty."

The Hidden Injuries of Class has inspired a long line of successors, notably Michèle Lamont's The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Imagination (Harvard University Press, 2000). In that work Ms. Lamont, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, uses field interviews to compare American and French workers' notions of personal dignity, social solidarity, and racial difference. She found, for example, that both French and American white workers tend to "draw boundaries against" a lower-class Other -- African-Americans in the United States, Algerian immigrants in France. Unlike their American counterparts, however, white workers in France also carry a rich vocabulary for criticizing and drawing boundaries against the elite professional class.

Ms. Lamont says that Hidden Injuries was "enormously important in making not only the academic community, but also the broader public, attuned to the diversity of people's life-chances and worldviews ... That's why it became a classic."

On the other hand, Ms. Lamont says, the sociological literature today is "far, far beyond" what Mr. Sennett and Mr. Cobb's team did. Field researchers today, she says, are more concerned about proceeding inductively -- that is, they ask neutral questions and try hard not to contaminate the interviews with any unwarranted assumptions about their subjects' experiences or attitudes. "We need to bring in a lot of safety devices to ensure that we're not projecting."

Scholars are also more attentive, Ms. Lamont says, to the ways in which privileges might be transmitted (or not) across generations. "Look at the amount of energy that people invest in the passing on of privilege. ... A lot of white people object to affirmative action because it is viewed as giving unfair advantages to black people, and they don't perceive the upper middle class's ability to pass on privileges through networks, summer jobs, internships, all kinds of things."

Mr. Sennett is inclined to agree with those criticisms. "I made so many errors in that project," he says with a laugh, "I don't know where to begin." If he could travel back in time and reinterview the same subjects, he says, he would pay much more attention to intergenerational issues. "The transmission of class, and the regeneration of class culture, is something that I wish we'd done more interviewing about."

Skills and Respect

Respect grew out of what Mr. Sennett originally envisioned as a long book about the transformations of welfare and the workplace over the last two decades. He was persuaded by an editor, however, to split the project in two. The first half appeared in 1998 as The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. That short volume, based on fieldwork with autoworkers and computer programmers, argued that transient jobs in which "teamwork" is emphasized can leave workers with new kinds of anxieties and a weak sense of self. "Fictions of teamwork," he wrote, are "useful in the exercise of domination."

Among other things, Respect explores the question of how a society based on the possession of "skills" can provide social respect to people who aren't deemed to have them. "Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man keeps a kind of contemporary power which really transcends race," he says. "Because that phenomenon of invisibility is now seeping into differences of culture, education, even geography." Where Hidden Injuries attempted to reconcile Marxist egalitarianism with the New Left's dreams of participatory communities, Respect is much more skeptical of traditional socialist prescriptions. Mr. Sennett is still a man of the left, but today he worries that Marx's notion of class consciousness itself impedes the construction of "inclusive social bonds" across classes.

Mr. Sennett also uses the book to work through his mixed feelings about whether social workers and other advocates for the poor should demonstrate "compassion," or if they should instead employ a more detached, professional ethic. (That is a question that decades ago troubled Mr. Sennett's mother, who trained to become a social worker shortly after the two of them moved into Cabrini Green.) The book recounts the early-20th-century quarrel between the Chicago reformer Jane Addams, who insisted that social workers in her settlement houses act as "practical advisers" and never overrule the democratic will of their clients, and Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, an activist nun for whom the housing project was later named. Mother Cabrini saw Addams's "coolness," in Mr. Sennett's words, as "middle-class arrogance." She herself believed in an explicitly religious and compassionate form of solidarity.

The secular Mr. Sennett tends to sympathize with Addams's side of the quarrel, but not without hesitations. Because she practiced the vivid Christian ethics that she preached, he writes, Mother Cabrini was at least able to avoid the problems of arrogance and condescension -- "compassion which wounds" -- that tend to shadow secular projects of social uplift. "The religious language of sin applies equally to all human beings," he writes. "It does not single out and stigmatize the poor."

Echoes of the Addams-Cabrini argument appeared last summer, when Mr. Sennett wrote a scathing article for the Guardian, a British newspaper, criticizing Prime Minister Tony Blair's proposals for reforming the British welfare state. Mr. Blair's rhetoric has emphasized equality of opportunity and providing chances for social mobility. In Mr. Sennett's eyes, that approach can only lead to an army of condescending social workers and educational consultants. He would much prefer to see a well-financed "clean" welfare system that provides a guaranteed minimum income, without an apparatus of advice-giving. "The job of the state is to make sure that everyone has enough to eat, can get medical care when they need it, can get to work without risk," he wrote. "Climbing the greasy pole of success should be left to individuals."

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. That is especially important, he says, because rewards (both financial and status) are tending to flow to smaller elites in each field. In his 1977 book The Fall of Public Man, he argued that the world of concert pianists has become more hierarchical during the past 200 years, as audiences have embraced "a belief in the artist as an extraordinary, electrifying personality. ... The result [is] massive concert audiences, and fewer and fewer pianists at work."

In the new book, Mr. Sennett similarly argues that we need to discover and promote new ways of "enacting social respect." Here, too, he turns to classical music for an analogy. We should think of mutual respect as an expressive task, he writes, not unlike the task of a chamber quartet: "The gestures in sound they create become rituals which orient them to one another and speak together."

He has no simple prescriptions, however, for translating that analogy into greater mutual respect in the world at large. He wishes that unions would focus less on dollars and cents and more on "the quality of people's experiences. This is something that becomes very palpable with the problems that women workers with children have ... That wasn't something traditionally on unions' agenda. Unions grew apart from the things that were actually on the minds of workers themselves."

"The most difficult kind of inequality for people to bridge is differences in ability," he says. "What I hope from this book is that, even though I don't think my treatment of that problem is very satisfactory, it will at least start a conversation." He is not optimistic about the prospects of using collective political action to reduce social snobbery or shame based on personal talent. But he does offer, again, the idea of craft-love as a personal strategy for maintaining self-respect. "Craftwork certainly does not banish invidious comparison to the work of others," he writes. "It does refocus a person's energies, however, to getting an act right in itself, for oneself."

Grounded in Reality

Mr. Sennett has always battled his own tendency to lapse into abstraction. He says that he strives to keep his work grounded in people's concrete behaviors and experiences. "There's a kind of renaissance of fieldwork and ethnography in sociology, which is wonderful," he says. He cites in particular the work of Mitchell Duneier, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Eric Klinenberg, of NYU.

That admiration is reciprocated by Mr. Klinenberg. "I think one of the signal features of Sennett's work is that he's been able to ... write uncompromising theoretical work without alienating readers," he says. "He's done that by respecting the intelligence of readers, not presuming that there's some superior insight or capacities that elite academics have."

Not everyone agrees that Mr. Sennett has been so successful. In a 1991 essay in The New Criterion, Roger Kimball complained that Mr. Sennett's work "deals in large, fuzzy abstractions, ill-digested theories, and highly personal aperçus and anecdotes." And in his 1985 novel, Caracole, Edmund White offers a surreal (but biting) satire of the New York Institute for the Humanities, which Mr. Sennett founded in 1975. (Mr. White was the institute's executive director in its early years.) The host of Caracole's salon greets a visiting geologist with absurd flattery ("You should be much better known. Our leaders would be well advised to memorize your texts. Your observations on schist ... !"). The next day, however, the geologist is scorned when he declines to offer an opinion on "the evolution of cult images over the past five centuries," a subject outside his expertise. "To recover, he'd have to make his first awkward venture into art criticism ..."

Mr. Sennett and Mr. Klinenberg are now collaborating on a book (tailored to a narrower audience than most of Mr. Sennett's projects) about how ethnographers can best apply social theory to their findings from fieldwork, and vice versa. "We're trying to get graduate students to move from reading social theory to reading human beings," says Mr. Sennett. "What do your subjects tell you that should change the way you theorize?"

Perhaps following his own advice, Mr. Sennett is also preparing to write a theoretical treatise that will attempt to explain the performance and reproduction of social behavior. "I've done a lot of research in the course of my life," he says. "But I've never properly written a theory book." In April, Mr. Sennett will give the Castle Lectures at Yale University, and there he will present a first cut at his theoretical argument. "One of the things that I think is sad about writing about culture among academics of my generation," he says, "is that they took on a lot of European theory as 'theory' in quotation marks. Foucault's work was completely anesthetized when it crossed the Atlantic. It became so dry."

The day after discussing his life and ideas, with the dedication of habit he first learned as a cellist, he will sit down at his desk from 8 until noon, working on one or both of his new books. He finds writing difficult and says he goes through "far too many drafts." But "you can't just practice when you feel like it," he says.

• Studied cello and conducting in New York City, 1960-1962
• B.A. in history, University of Chicago, 1964
• Ph.D. in American civilization, Harvard University, 1969
  

• New York University, 1972-present
• London School of Economics and Political Science, 1998-present