Search results for ""Author Richard Sennett""
Penguin Books Ltd The Performer: Art, Life, Politics
An exploration of public performance in everyday life, by the leading cultural and social thinkerThe Performer explores the relations between performing in art (particularly music), politics and everyday experience. It focuses on the bodily and physical dimensions of performing, rather than on words. Richard Sennett is particularly attuned to the ways in which the rituals of ordinary life are performances.The book draws on history and sociology, and more personally on the author's early career as a professional cellist, as well as on his later work as a city planner and social thinker. It traces the evolution of performing spaces in the city; the emergence of actors, musicians, and dancers as independent artists; the inequality between performer and spectator; the uneasy relations between artistic creation and social and religious ritual; the uses and abuses of acting by politicians. The Janus-faced art of performing is both destructive and civilizing.This is the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression: performing, narrating, and imaging.
£22.50
Penguin Books Ltd The Fall of Public Man
Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man examines the growing imbalance between private and public experience, and asks what can bring us to reconnect with our communities. 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? Tracing the changing nature of urban society from the eighteenth century to the world we now live in, and the decline of involvement in political life in recent decades, Richard Sennett discusses the causes of our social withdrawal. His landmark study of the imbalance of modern civilization provides a fascinating perspective on the relationship between public life and the cult of the individual. 'Brilliant ... One admires the breadth of Professor Sennett's erudition, the reach of his historical imagination, the doggedness of his analysis ... Buy this book and read it. Ironically, it may provide a key to happiness' Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times 'A powerful argument for a more formal public culture and a swipe against the rise of a self-indulgent counter-culture' Melissa Benn, Guardian 'A provocative book ... Sennett brings us to an undeniably recognizable place, the contemporary urban scene' Richard Todd, Atlantic Monthly Richard Sennett's previous books include The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, Flesh and Stone and Respect. He was founder director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and is now University Professor at New York University and Academic Governor and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
£14.99
Notting Hill Editions The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile
Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays he visits two of the world's greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical and psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom was translated into a rich community identity; and nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city's culture at large.
£14.99
Penguin Books Ltd Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation
Living with people who differ - racially, ethnically, religiously or economically - is one of the most urgent challenges facing civil society today. Together argues that co-operation needs more than good will: it is a craft that requires skill. In modern society traditional bonds are waning, and we must develop new forms of secular, civic ritual that make us more skilful in living with others. From Medieval guilds to today's social networks, Richard Sennett's visionary book explores the nature of co-operation, why it has become weak and how it can be strengthened.
£10.99
Penguin Books Ltd Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality
Richard Sennett's Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Equality is a provocative and timely examination of the forces that erode respect in modern society. 'Unlike food, respect costs nothing. Why, then, should it be in short supply?' Respect can be attained by gaining success, by developing talents, through financial independence and by helping others. But, Sennett argues, many who are not able to achieve the demands of today's meritocracy lose the esteem that should be given to them. From his childhood in a poor Chicago housing project to the contrasting methods of care practised by a nun and a social worker, from the harmonious interaction of musicians to the welfare system, Sennett explores the ways in which mutual respect can forge bonds across the divide of inequality. 'One of the boldest social thinkers of his generation ... [Sennett] has a genius for revealing the roots of our discontents' Boyd Tonkin, Independent 'Dazzling ... an elegant mix of interview, anecdote and wide research' Jenny Turner, Guardian 'This is the voice of a prophet' Scott McLemee, Washington Post 'Wise and humane ... Sennett has set his sights on that most daring of missions: to make the world a better place' Alain de Botton, Daily Telegraph 'Wholly engrossing ... [Sennett] explores ways of preserving an equality of respect' Alan Ryan, New York Review of Books Richard Sennett's previous works include The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, Respect, Flesh and Stone and The Craftsman. He taught for many years at the New York Institute of the Humanities and is now a Professor at the London School of Economics.
£14.99
Penguin Books Ltd The Craftsman
Provocative and enlightening, Richard Sennett's The Craftsman is an exploration of craftsmanship - the desire to do a job well for its own sake - as a template for living. Most of us have to work. But is work just a means to an end? In trying to make a living, have we lost touch with the idea of making things well? Pure competition, Sennett shows, will never produce good work. Instead, the values of the craftsman, whether in a Stradivari violin workshop or a modern laboratory, can enrich our lives and change the way we anchor ourselves in the world around us. The past lives of crafts and craftsmen show us ways of working - using tools, acquiring skills, thinking about materials - which provide rewarding alternative ways for people to utilise their talents. We need to recognize this if motivations are to be understood and lives made as fulfilling as possible. 'Lively, engaging and pertinent ... a lifetime's learning has gone into the writing of this book' Roger Scruton, Sunday Times 'An enchanting writer with important things to say' Fiona MacCarthy, Guardian 'Enthralling ... Sennett is keen to reconnect thinking with making, to revive the simple pleasure in the everyday object and the useful task. There is something here for all of us' Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times 'A masterpiece' Boyd Tonkin, Independent Richard Sennett's previous books include The Fall of Public Man, The Corrosion of Character, Flesh and Stone and Respect. He was founder director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and is now University Professor at New York University and Academic Governor and Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics.
£10.99
Verso Books Designing Disorder: Experiments and Disruptions in the City
In 1970, Richard Sennett published the groundbreaking The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed. Fifty years later, Sennett returns to these still fertile ideas and, alongside campaigner and architect Pablo Sendra, sets out an agenda for the design and ethics of the Open City.The public spaces of our cities are under siege from planners, privatisation and increased surveillance. Our streets are becoming ever more lifeless and ordered. What is to be done? Can disorder be designed? In this provocative essay Sendra and Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the social life of our cities. 'Infrastructures of disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide up, remain open to change rather than closed off.
£13.79
Penguin Books Ltd On Suicide
Emile Durkheim's On Suicide (1897) was a groundbreaking book in the field of sociology. Traditionally, suicide was thought to be a matter of purely individual despair but Durkheim recognized that the phenomenon had a social dimension. He believed that if anything can explain how individuals relate to society, then it is suicide: Why does it happen? What goes wrong? Why do certain social, religious or racial groups have higher incidences of suicide than others? As Durkheim explored these questions he became convinced that abnormally high or low levels of social integration lead to an increased likelihood of suicide. On Suicide was the result of his extensive research. Divided into three parts - individual reasons for suicide, social forms of suicide and the relation of suicide to society as a whole - Durkheim's revelations have fascinated, challenged and informed readers for over a century.
£12.99
Princeton University Press The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy
In a book full of playful irony and striking insights, the controversial social philosopher Gilles Lipovetsky draws on the history of fashion to demonstrate that the modern cult of appearance and superficiality actually serves the common good. Focusing on clothing, bodily deportment, sex roles, sexual practices, and political rhetoric as forms of "fashion," Lipovetsky bounds across two thousand years of history, showing how the evolution of fashion from an upper-class privilege into a vehicle of popular expression closely follows the rise of democratic values. Whereas Tocqueville feared that mass culture would create passive citizens incapable of political reasoning, Lipovetsky argues that today's mass-produced fashion offers many choices, which in turn enable consumers to become complex individuals within a consolidated, democratically educated society. Superficiality fosters tolerance among different groups within a society, claims Lipovetsky. To analyze fashion's role in smoothing over social conflict, he abandons class analysis in favor of an inquiry into the symbolism of everyday life and the creation of ephemeral desire. Lipovetsky examines the malaise experienced by people who, because they can fulfill so many desires, lose their sense of identity. His conclusions raise disturbing questions about personal joy and anguish in modern democracy.
£31.50