Fall of Public Man - Softcover

The fall of public man.

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Kloof Booksellers & Scientia Verlag
(Amsterdam, Niederlande)

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Buchbeschreibung Zustand: very good. Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1977. Paperback. xii,386 pp. ; 24 cm. - Richard Sennett examines the imbalance that exists today between public and private life why it has arisen, and why it matters. 'Public' life once meant that vital part of one's life outside the circle of family and close friends. Connecting with strangers in an emotionally satisfying way and yet remaining aloof from them was seen as the means by which the human animal was transformed into the social - the civilized being. But, he argues, our lives today are bereft of the pleasures of this lost interchange with fellow citizens. The stranger is a threat; silence and observation have become the only ways to experience public life, especially street life, without being overwhelmed; each person believes in the right to be left alone. As a result, private life becomes distorted, as we focus more on ourselves, on our families, and on increasingly narcissistic forms of intimacy and self-absorption. We lack the capacity to experience pleasurable relationships with those whom we may never know intimately. To understand this modern malaise, Sennett looks back to the prime of Public Man. He describes the London and Paris of the ancien régime, the rituals, codes, and signals (styles of dress, modes of speech and gesture) people once used to identify themselves in public as confidently as they did within the shelter of the family, to 'recognize' each other on the street making civility possible, keeping suspicion at a minimum. Under the industrial, secular, revolutionary pressures of the nineteenth century, however, these rituals and institutions gradually became casualties of a new, inward-turning culture. Now, as Professor Sennett demonstrates, our own lives, which we define as psychologically liberated, are to an extraordinary extent poorer for the loss of public restraints upon the self. Sennett's lively argument encompasses the history of fashion, the writings of Diderot and Balzac, the performing styles of Liszt and Paganini, the behaviour of revolutionary mobs, the Dreyfus Affair, and the career of Richard Nixon. The result is an important contribution to our understanding of present society and our idea of individual identity. Condition : very good copy. ISBN 9780521292153. Keywords : SOCIOLOGY, Artikel-Nr. 295439

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