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Richard Sennett. The Culture of the New Capitalism

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The distinguished sociologist Richard Sennett surveys major differences between earlier forms of industrial capitalism and the more global, more febrile, ever more mutable version of capitalism that is taking its place. He shows how these changes affect everyday life¡ªhow the work ethic is changing; how new beliefs about merit and talent displace old values of craftsmanship and achievement; how what Sennett calls ¡°the specter of uselessness¡± haunts professionals as well as manual workers; how the boundary between consumption and politics is dissolving.

In recent years, reformers of both private and public institutions have preached that flexible, global corporations provide a model of freedom for individuals, unlike the experience of fixed and static bureaucracies Max Weber once called an ¡°iron cage.¡± Sennett argues that, in banishing old ills, the new-economy model has created new social and emotional traumas. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary institutions: the culture of the new capitalism demands an ideal self oriented to the short term, focused on potential ability rather than accomplishment, willing to discount or abandon past experience. In a concluding section, Sennett examines a more durable form of self hood, and what practical initiatives could counter the pernicious effects of ¡°reform.¡±

TOC

1 Bureaucracy

2 Talent and the Specter of Uselessness

3 Consuming Politics

4 Social Capitalism in Our Time

Half a century ago, in the 1960s¡ªthat fabled era of free sex and free access to drugs-serious young radicals took aim at institutions, in particular big corporations and big government, whose size, complexity, and rigidity seemed to hold individuals in an iron grip. The Port Huron Statement,

a founding document of the New Left in 1962, was equally hard on state socialism and multinational

corporations; both regimes seemed bureaucratic prisons.

and

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