Sennett ran the institute with the writer Edmund White, and its first fellows included Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. White later wrote the experience up in his book Caracole as the "chat shop". Sennett says, "We did chat but we also supported a lot of starving intellectuals." It was in the mid to late 80s that Sennett also published three novels, The Frog That Dared To Croak, An Evening With Brahms, and Palais Royal, which were undertaken partly as a way "of recovering my word craft". Characteristically nuanced exploration into concepts of theatrum mundi, conflation of private and public identities, effects of urban population density, acts of presentation versus acts of representation, and other topics relevant to my interests. Are we now so self-absorbed that we take little interest in the world beyond our own lives? Or has public life left no place for individuals to participate? Such "warm collegiality" may have found its perfect expression in the New York Institute of Humanities, which Sennett co-founded and ran from the late 70s. He describes the institute as "an effort to create a 'town-gown' intellectual centre in new York, combining academia, the worlds of publishing and writing, musicians, diplomats, journalists, politicians, painters... a kind of All Souls with lousy food and lots of good talk". Le plus bel exemple du pouvoir comme re-présentation est sans doute celui du « roi sans visage » do (...)

A sweeping, farsighted study of the changing nature of public culture and urban society, The Fall of Public Man spans more than two centuries of Western sociopolitical evolution and investigates the causes of our declining involvement in political life. Richard Sennett’s insights into the danger of the cult of individualism remain thoroughly relevant to our world today. In a new epilogue, he extends his analysis to the new “public” realm of social media, questioning how public culture has fared since the digital revolution. The Fall of Public Man by Richard Sennett – eBook Details Dard O., 2018, « Complotisme », in : Publictionnaire. Dictionnaire encyclopédique et critique des publics. Accès : http://publictionnaire.huma-num.fr/notice/complotisme. Consulté le 22/11/2019. Plusieurs comptes rendus notent avec ironie que les réflexions de R. Sennett reflètent son propre m (...) Pour une analyse de la figure prétendument authentique de D. Trump comme processus de « dé-figurati (...)Ségol J., 2017, « La Philosophie du comédien : notes sur un paradoxe », pp. 341-351, in : Thouard D., Zimmermann B., dirs, Simmel, le parti-pris du tiers, Paris, CNRS Éd. In The Fall of Public Man, Sennett sets out his critique of the 'intimate society', in which, as he describes it, what is good is defined as personal, and the bad as impersonal. In this schema, 'warmth' is praised over things that are 'cold' or 'aloof'. Ways of thinking about society are transformed into psychological terms- a good political leader is one who is 'principled' or 'authentic'. As Sennett points out, the rationality of thinking about politics in this way is unclear, as those terms rely upon assessing an individual's character, which is not only almost impossible for people who don't know them personally, but also irrelevant to whether the political leader can achieve something for the public that puts them in power. Piette A., 2009, L’Acte d’exister. Une phénoménographie de la présence, Marchienne-au-Pont, Socrate Éd. Promarex. It was clear from these early books that Sennett was a skillful writer. At its best, his sociology reads like a subtle, psychological novel, an absorbing biography or a piece of really good journalism. It amply fulfils his claim to be "a report on the act of thinking". His aim, he says, is to make sociology a form of literature, "as it was in the 19th century. This question of style is a huge issue in sociology," he says. "There's a great gap between politics and expression. So many academics are closed, anxious about performance and status. Foucault wrote in clear evocative French, but his followers have a possessive obscurity. Roland Barthes was a wonderful writer but there is a paralysis about his acolytes."

Ginzburg C., 1980, « Signes, traces, pistes. Racines d’un paradigme de l’indice », Le Débat, 6, pp. 3-44. Speaking as one who has read very little sociology, I found this book to be very eye-opening. It made me aware of things I hadn't noticed, and it explained things that I had. I’m not acting. This is who I am » cité dans le Whashington Post , 27/01/2016. Accès : https://www (...)A provocative book ... Sennett brings us to an undeniably recognizable place, the contemporary urban scene' Public expression rests upon an idea of “human nature” or “character,” that might be informed by a religious world view, for instance. Personality, which came to replace character, is spawned from an atomistic secular point of view whose belief lies within an immanent interpretation of the world which attempts to grasp an unmediated point of view (this, of course, is a grand illusion…). In a paradoxical way, we put a premium on being able to express your so-called inner self, but this self is constantly isolated and lost since society no longer provides a set of queues which would allow the individual to act politically. What results is a world where the individual is an isolated spectator from their fellow beings, easily swayed and subdued by charismatic moments where, if only for a split second, they “identify” with another. In this society, there is no agency since community is defined as mutual personal disclosure rather than an act where a community produces meaning together, impersonally. The former has no public life—or, rather, public life consists almost exclusively of a set of similar “kinds” of people whose authenticity (are you really our “kind”?) is constantly being put into question—proving authenticity, then, usually comes in the form of an attempt to purify their community. A true public life has little concern for authenticity or purity. What matters is the common impersonal currency of expression.

Pécqueux A., 2005, « Un témoignage adressé. : parole du rap et parole collective », C ahiers de psychologie politique. Revue d’information, de réflexion et de recherche, 7. Accès : http://lodel.irevues.inist.fr/cahierspsychologiepolitique/index.php?id=1166. Dulong R., 1992, « Dire la réputation, accomplir l’espace », Quaderni. Communication, technologies, pouvoir, 18, pp. 109-124. Accès : https://www.persee.fr/doc/quad_0987-1381_1992_num_18_1_974. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Fall_of_Public_Man_40th_Anniversary_E_-_Richard_Sennett.pdf, The_Fall_of_Public_Man_40th_Anniversary_E_-_Richard_Sennett.epub The work takes a view of public performance on the stage, in civic and political capacities, and in general social encounters. Settings for consideration range from the courts of Versailles to cafes and gentlemen's clubs in London. Thoroughfares, promenades, and the home are all given due attention as well.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. And the fullest flowering of that public life was realized in the 18th Century in the great capital cities of Europe.

Horton R., Wohl R., 1956, « Mass Communication and Parasocial Interaction. Observation on Intimacy at a Distance », Psychiatry. Interpersonal and Biological Processes, 19, pp. 215-229.
Kaufmann L., 2013, « Les médiations de l’expérience. Retour sur l’œuvre de Dorothy Smith », EspacesTemps.net. Accès : https://www.espacestemps.net/articles/les-mediations-de-lexperience/. The architect Richard Rogers, who has known Sennett for 15 years, says, "We are very much on the same intellectual wavelength. Richard believes in the importance of the public domain, that people should have direct involvement in relation to public space and buildings. We are both interested in sustainable development and the role of cities in a civil society." urn:oclc:878524934 Republisher_date 20120901075410 Republisher_operator [email protected] Scandate 20120828181245 Scanner scribe12.shenzhen.archive.org Scanningcenter shenzhen Source Comme le dit D. Trump, dans un entretien avec le Time en mars 2017 : « Je suppose que je ne me débrouille pas si mal ; la preuve ? je suis le Président et vous ne l’êtes pas » (« I guess I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m president, and you’re not. You know ») . But Sennett's work can also be understood as a life-long attempt to come to terms with his radical heritage, to both honour the idealism of an old left and re-mould it in the light of contemporary realities. Born in Chicago in 1943, he was a classic child of the left. His father and all his uncles were in the Communist party and his mother "was always involved in the labour movement", he says. His father and uncle fought in the Spanish Civil War, first against the fascists, and then against the communists. Proudly he shows me a portrait on his study wall of the Lincoln section of the International brigade. It includes his father and uncle, upright men in caps prepared to die to defend someone else's freedom.Seabright P., 2005, The Company of Strangers. A Natural History of Economic Life , Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2010. Smith D., 1990, The Conceptual Practices of Power. A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge , Boston, Northeastern University Press. He was also one of the first writers to predict, again with admirable restraint, the economic and political turbulence that may lie ahead. For, as the chilling last line of the Corrosion Of Character observes, a regime "which provides human beings no deep reasons to care about one another cannot long preserve its legitimacy". Sennett takes a skeptical view of our tendency to judge by apparent personality and intention, above or even in place of acts on record. He notes the dangers of this view: a crippling personal (and societal) incidence of narcissism and susceptibility to charlatans and charismatic exploiters to name a few.