The Fall of Public Man (40th Anniversary Edition)

A landmark study of urban society, reissued for the 40th anniversary of the original publication with a new epilogue by the author.

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.

A fascinating evocation of changing styles of personal and public expression. . . . Sennett is at once a historian, sociologist, student of psychoanalytic doctrine . . . and celebrant of city life. . . . Seldom have I read a serious work of social theory that explains as much contemporary experience as Sennett's does. -- Robert Lekachman

Sennett presses social theory and historical experience to his service in developing a provocative thesis: that the public world stage has been usurped by the private psychic scene to the detriment of both individual and society. Sennett's quest for the causes of the impoverishment of civil life in modern industrial society opens fascinating perspectives into the relationship between theater, politics, urban life, and the changing function of the family. --Carl Schorske, Princeton University

One of the most stimulating and challenging books to be written in years. . . . A major attempt . . . to re-examine the assumptions and objectives of the 1960s and transcend them without compromising their ideals. One admires the breadth of Professor Sennett's erudition, the reach of his historical imagination. . . . By all means buy this book and read it. --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

Richard Sennett is a sociologist who writes with the narrative vibrancy of a novelist, the intellectual sensitivities of a historian of ideas, the fathomless erudition of a nineteenth-century philologist, and the exploratory energies of a contemporary social theorist. No one has done more to illuminate our turbulent modernity, with a keen sense both of how it emerged and of where it may be heading. --Kwame Anthony Appiah

We bemoan the incivility that afflicts our politics and the media-hyped clamor that drowns out public discourse. Four decades ago, Richard Sennett saw it coming and offered a striking diagnosis: The insistence on intimacy or (as we call it today) ‘transparency’ in all human relations undermines our capacity for sociability and depreciates the public realm. This classic work challenges us to lift our gaze from our cell phones and to engage in a wider civic life. --Michael J. Sandel