(Economic Sociology)
Richard Sennett is one of the world’s most prominent critical sociological thinkers.
At the beginning of the interview I ask Richard Sennett to tell me more about how he got interested and involved in the study of sociology, and in particular the study of forms of new capitalism and its social and political consequences.
Richard Sennett: Well, I’d say two things. One was that I grew up in a rather unusual family, because all members of my family worked for the communist party in the 1930s. So, they were resolutely on the left. I just swam in this as a child. And even though my mother and my father and my uncle left the party – in 1939 my mother left, and my uncle left in 1956 – this was always there; this was social reality for me. When I started in sociology, I reacted quite strongly against some of the more doctrinaire aspects of it. This happened to many people in my generation from the extreme left, which was very tiny in the United States, a sect more than a political group. So when I was in graduate school, I was very attracted to in-depth interviewing and to ethnographic work, because it seemed so corrective on the ground that a lot of the ideological nostrums that the American communist party was able to say were the least intelligent and the most rigid of all the modern communist parties. You know, I reacted very much against that.
I suppose what’s happened in my career is that I re-turned to the left, but from a different kind of data, and that has produced a different kind of social analysis. I have studied two things in my career: work and cities – work and place. These are the two things I am interested in. And [in the late 1960s, early 1970s] I started doing research on the sociology of work for a book called the The Hidden Injuries of Class, which is just about to be published again in Britain, after thirty years of being out of print. It was a book that looked rather sceptically at a proposition about the United States, and at a proposi-tion about class. The proposition about the United States was that American workers had very low levels of class consciousness. And the proposition about class itself was about its bourgeoisification, a thesis that was in the 1970s quite dominant. The book used intensive interview data from a hundred people to combat that idea. And then in the nineties when the current phase of globalised capitalism started to become apparent, I got really interested in the subject of work. And the last four of the books I’ve written have taken up that interest. I still use a lot of ethnographic and intensive interview material, but I also tried to introduce more of a historical frame into the study of capitalism. But again, I focused on the labour process – that’s what these last four books have all been about. And I have to say that the more I’ve studied the effect of modern capitalism on ordinary workers the more I feel I return to the radical roots of my childhood. This system is obscene. And I think it’s really hard on ordinary workers, culturally and socially, not just in terms of familiar things like inequality gaps or wages, but also in terms of conducting a family life, relations to other people in the community, sense of life merit. It’s a culturally destructive system.
Economic Sociology pp.27-32 for more