A High-Wire Act

The Fall of Public Man By Richard Sennett Knopf, 373 pp., $15 It’s a portentous title, but gloomy coinage may be needed to convey the narcissism and social promiscuity of our culture. Richard Sennett, the New Left sociologist, is not the first to notice that Western society has been trading the protection of impersonality and social distance for ready candor and shallow, clinical intimacies. All this direct access to one another (by “relating,” “being real,” etc.) and the huge inventory of pop-psych strategies designed to get us in touch with ourselves reflect a focus on feeling over acting and behaving; on mood over manners.

One senses that compulsive self-immersion leads ultimately to some loss of self, but Sennett, in this interesting social history, goes further, arguing that the determination to invest all public expression with personal inflection saps the creative political energies of our society as a whole. When we can no longer conduct our business in the public sphere without personalizing it, he warns, we may no longer be able to act together effectively.

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Susan Schwartz McDonald

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The Fall of Public Man By Richard Sennett Knopf, 373 pp., $15 It’s a portentous title, but gloomy coinage may be needed to convey the narcissism and social promiscuity of our culture. Richard Sennett, the New Left sociologist, is not the first to notice that Western society has been trading the protection of impersonality and social distance for ready candor and shallow, clinical intimacies. All this direct access to one another (by “relating,” “being real,” etc.) and the huge inventory of pop-psych strategies designed to get us in touch with ourselves reflect a focus on feeling over acting and behaving; on mood over manners.

One senses that compulsive self-immersion leads ultimately to some loss of self, but Sennett, in this interesting social history, goes further, arguing that the determination to invest all public expression with personal inflection saps the creative political energies of our society as a whole. When we can no longer conduct our business in the public sphere without personalizing it, he warns, we may no longer be able to act together effectively.