Richard Sennett has explored how individuals and groups make social and cultural sense of material facts — about the cities in which they live and about the labour they do. He focuses on how people can become competent interpreters of their own experience, despite the obstacles society may put in their way. His research entails ethnography, history, and social theory. As a social analyst, Mr. Sennett continues the pragmatist tradition begun by William James and John Dewey.
Books in order of publication:
Nineteenth Century Cities: Essays In The New Urban History, coauthor, Yale (1969)
Classic Essays on the Culture Of Cities, editor (1969)
The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life (1970)
Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872–1890, Harvard (1970)
The Hidden Injuries of Class, with Jonathan Cobb, Knopf (1972)
The Fall of Public Man, Knopf (1977)
Authority (1980)
The Conscience of the Eye: The design and social life of cities, Faber and Faber (1991)
Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City In Western Civilization, Norton (1994)
The Corrosion of Character, The Personal Consequences Of Work In the New Capitalism, Norton (1998)
Respect in a World of Inequality, Penguin (2003)
The Culture of the New Capitalism, Yale (2006)
The Craftsman, Allen Lane (2008)
The Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile, Notting Hill (2011)
Together: The Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics of Cooperation, Yale (2012),
Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2018)
The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda, Routledge (2018)
The Performer: Art, Life, Politics, Penguin (2024)