The Fall of Public Man 40th Anniversary Edition

This book formed a cornerstone for my research into urbanity. Sennett has an ability to inspire with moments of pure insight whilst writing about everyday social encounters in cities that few other authors manage to achieve.

READ THIS BOOK.

Great review of how life on the city streets have changed.

Sennett scrutinizes those problems caused by the inbalance between personal and public life.According to Sennett, the 'public life' which is a significant piece of life besides the family and friendships was once so lively and meant much to individuals.There used to be a 'publicity' that contributed to the individuals' skills of 'play'through emotinal ties with strangers and to the civilization of the individual.Being a 'public man' well expressed in the 18th century European cities has become a gradually weakened phenomenon being replaced with the 'private life'.And has become as significant as the private life allows it to...Sennett asks,"How has the stranger been transformed into a threatening factor? How is it that today, keeping silent and remaining as the audience is the only way of joining the public life? In turn, how do these factors foster personality deficiencies? Solitude that is a result of modernism renders the individual a person captured by the private life.Sennett explains this process through works of Balzac and Diderot, theater, music, architecture,Dreyfus case and Richard Nixon. Richard Sennett is by no means hopeless; he is exploring the possibilites of getting to know 'the other' instead of imagining a 'lost public paradise'.

This book is another academic exercise in saying things that sound meaningful, using sentences that are immune from interpretation, because their meaning is unclear, but sound "deep." Here is a sample: "The theory of expression is incompatible with the idea of individual personality as expressive. If the sheer recital of what I've seen, felt, experienced, without any filtering or shaping or falsifying of my experience to fit to a standard, if this were expressive, then 'pity' in my life can hardly be expressive in the same way to you as your own sense of pity, derived from different experience." Blah, blah, blah... The sum of the parts is zero. 400 plus pages that MIGHT have been a good 10-page magazine article, if the author could get to a clear point - though it's not clear if he even has one. He apparently was a student or peer of David Riesman, an equally lousy writer.

Beyond Habermas' description of the changes that have taken place in the Western public sphere, with a better emphasis on empirical and historical data, the book gives a detailed account on the rise and fall of our interacting abilities. From the marketplace to the theater, the 19th century (and then the 20th) saw the decline of «play», along with its replacement by vicarious figures, like the «genius», the performing arts «vedettes» and now the politician as someone who feels (and does) what we are not anymore able to feel. Instead of hysteria, the civilizational disease is now narcissism, the unableness to act regardless of one's inner feelings. To be read along with Sennett's other masterpiece, a romance entitled «Palais-Royal».

Like it because it's very wide presentation of topic

great!

I have only recently become a reader of Sennett's work (see The Corrosion of Character: Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism or Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Co-operation as further examples of his work that I have read recently, been impressed with, and has led me to seek out this book, which I seem to recall was recommended to me when I was doing my Masters nearly 20 years ago). In this book, from the 1970's, Sennett discusses the ways in which the presentation of self in the public domain has come to focus on personality, an insincere construct that so distorts feeling and emotional display that genuine expression seems no longer possible. To present his case, he reaches back into the French Enlightenment, particularly its theatrical tradition, to examine the erosion of a distinction between public and private, into the faux emotions of public figures that mislead us into notions of trust. This was an idea that must have been rather lively at the time the book was written, given Nixon's recent perfidious manipulation of public trust, and Carter's appeal as the righteousness mender of social and political wrongdoing as his sole qualification to the Presidency.Sennett's success is difficult to gauge, given the broad range of evidence from which he can draw; a history of ideas about public and private conduct; his examination of the rise of psychology; and his astounding knowledge of theatre practice as an art and in its presentation to the public, are all enlisted in a critique of modern Western manifestations of public life. This is a very dense and difficult text, and Sennett further adds to the complexity through an appealing and credible ability to extend a given idea one step further, or to give it a polish to reveal something further than the satisfying aphorism from which he started. His contempt for the personal converted into currency for the public space is clear, but I am somewhat mystified as to why, or what alternative modern capitalism (his favourite target) might have thrown up (though as a Marxist, I suspect he doesn't think this would be possible).What Sennett could not have foreseen is the way in which we are all now involved in these games, in the personal brand management through social media that removes our privacy by making us all into public figures in some way. To the modern reader, the playing out of his concerns since the time of writing is certainly alarming, and has me questioning my own public conduct (or as he might witheringly put it, my ersatz sincerity as only an expression of disingenuous attempts to be thought of as a feeling person).

Bought it after reading about it in Time Magazine. But never got to the point of reading it.

Ich habe viel besser verstanden das was ich schon wüsste. Sehr empfelungswert in der Zeit von à la facebook etc Selbstdenunziations- und faschistoide Beobachtungsmechanismen.

Fair quality, readable.