Richard Sennett

Richard Sennett is a distinguished American-born sociologist who has in the past written compellingly about ways in which social and economic developments have shaped larger cultural frameworks. This new work, which the publishers advertise as ‘the first in a trilogy of books on the fundamental DNA of human expression’, is even more wide-ranging in its scope, attempting as it does to cover how the nature of performance has shaped not only politics but also the creative arts and ‘life’ itself. Sennett’s first words are taken from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, ‘All the world’s a stage’, and he aims to track the implications of Jaques’s words across different periods of history, looking for ‘the bonds between people that stretch across time as well as space’.

We begin by peering through a window, watching a carpenter hard at work, engaged, precise, among tools and apprentices. Suddenly, we are glimpsing a lab technician working on rabbit cadavers; next, we are in a concert hall, our eyes keenly directed toward the conductor. We encounter these three craftsmen many times throughout Richard Sennett’s enthralling inquiry into the nature of craftsmanship. Their ranks are joined by ancient weavers, medieval goldsmiths, Linux programmers, brick-builders, luthiers, architects, glassblowers and those who constructed the first atomic bomb.