Richard Sennett interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 3rd and 24th April 2009

0:09:07 Born 1943 in Chicago; grandparents, all Russian, and on both sides were mixed marriages of Russian Orthodox and Russian Jewish; middle class people; grandparents fled St Petersburg after the Revolution; paternal grandparents stayed in Canada for a while; maternal grandparents went to Chicago; maternal grandfather had trained as a mathematician; because of his religiously mixed background lessened the possibility of an academic career in Russia; in the US worked for the General Electric Corporation as an inventor; he worked on the mechanism for the answering machine and if he had been able to patent it he would have been a rich man; parents came from a similar cultural background but were both Communist Party members; they separated when I was about seven months old so I was brought up by my mother; only got to know about my father's family much later; we lived in a housing estate called Cabrini-Green which I have written about in a book, 'Respect'; my mother was a social worker but also working under cover for the Communist Party; after the Second World War the Party in the US felt that its last best hope for a kind of revolutionary base were African Americans who had moved up from the south to work in the war industries; the Party assumed they would see themselves as a ground-down industrial proletariat but for them they were upwardly mobile; the effect of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939 shook communists in the US though they had not been shaken by the show trials; began to look for an alternative version of communism and mother was half in and half out of the Party; financially, we fluctuated wildly; my maternal grandfather was quite well off but my mother had become a pariah to him; we were very poor when I was young until my grandfather began to soften and my mother agreed to take help; we were lower middle-class; the only British analogue to Cabrini-Green collapsed within five years

9:37:00 Mother was a very rigid ideologue under a sweet, motherly surface; the world I grew up in compares with the last half of Ralph Ellison's 'The Invisible Man' which is about black and white intelligentsia, a very peculiar and unrepresentative slice of America; the Jewish heritage did not pass on to my mother; I have a couple of half-siblings, my father's children; I left home when I was fifteen; my family life was quite wonderful in one way, but I was also glad to get out of this world; once I was able to support myself as a musician, I left; my childhood was really marked for me by music which I started when I was five, first with the piano and then the cello; I had a gift for it and progressed quite rapidly; I was spending a lot of time practising with great pleasure; I was the only musical person in my family; I was playing with a Bach cantata group; we had a grant from the Presbyterian Church to drive round parts of the mid-West, outside cities, and play Bach cantatas on Sunday mornings; we went to all sorts of places; we made a swing through the iron mining districts of Minnesota, playing in little churches where people had never heard live classical music, and the exhausted miners sleeping while we were playing; wonderful for us, and an incredible experience for me; we used English translations, and the words speak very simply and directly to people; I also played a little in Chicago and New York; I enrolled in the University of Chicago in order to study with a wonderful cellist, Frank Miller, who had been Casal's principal cellist in his orchestra; worked with him for a couple of years and then went to New York at eighteen, to study at Julliard for a workshop with Pierre Monteux; this is a career line for cellists to become conductors, and I thought I would do that too; I started having hand problems when I was in this conducting workshop; I was still performing when I could get work despite a tendon problem; I had an operation which went wrong and ended my musical career overnight; I had to decide whether to remain in conducting without actually being able to play or do something else; I knew the son of David Riesman, who is a composer; Riesman suggested that I come to Harvard and try something other than music; shows the difference between the early sixties in academia and where we are now; that is how I became a sociologist; I knew nothing about it except Riesman at the time; I think a lot of my sociology is built around the model of both the acquisition of skill in music, and even more, the way in which musicians work with each other is a kind of model of sociability - not just cooperation, but patterns of authority; for me, my childhood has not disappeared in my sociology; in the last ten years I have had more surgery and have been able to play again, and I realize how much my childhood has been able to guide the sociological models; compared my background in music with a student of Adorno, who apparently hated to perform - the performative aspect of social life is almost absent in Adorno; for me practice, and the shaping of practice has always been the centre of what I have done in sociology

25:20:20 When I listen to my own repertoire I am a dreadful listener; with pieces I don't know or have learned in the last decade I tend to be a better listener; as a sociologist, my trade is learning to listen actively, and maybe that was shaped by music too; I write in silence and concentrate on what I am doing, but can understand that music could be a stimulus to writing

28:14:24 First school was a Catholic school run my nuns of the Order of the Blessed Virgin; it had corporal punishment, which was particularly difficult for black parents who thought these were southern racists who had come to get them; mother tried to explain the ways of the Catholic church and their belief in original sin; that aside, it was an incredible school and all of us did really well; the nuns were not interested in understanding racism, but they wanted us to achieve; if we didn't, it was because we were sinful and slothful; school had no resources but the children did very well; I have a lot of respect for the Catholic church and as an adult I have sympathy for liberal Catholics who are caught between what is now a very degraded institution and the actual faith that Catholics in a parish will have; I have never become a Catholic but have a feel for the ritual elements; I never had any faith, but became a non-believer in left-wing politics of a sectarian sort that my mother was caught up in; I was a real believer in the new left in its non-sectarian, rather relaxed way of dealing with politics; never had any religious conviction although we had a wonderful collection of icons and also Jewish religious stuff about the house; on Monday I had a conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury, sponsored by the Guardian, on capitalism; it was a strange occasion because to me there is an ethical problem in what capitalism has done to people's lives; to him it is a problem of virtue rather than ethics; we rather bored our audience because we got into the difference between ethics and virtue; Rowan Williams is quite a remarkable man who has a real belief in sin, but it is not a language I could ever believe in

36:29:13 Feel that Richard Dawkins has the wrong end of the stick; what he should be really asking about is the strong correlation between religious belief and the practice of violence; seems to me the reason for atheism would not be that beliefs are wrong, we all have them, but the kind of magical thinking that goes on in religion is so correlated to the notion of destroying or causing suffering to people who don't share that belief, that it is in my view something that humanity has to outgrow; much better to find other magical practices which don't lead to violence; I can understand as a scientist, particularly in terms of evolution, how galling it must be for Dawkins that creationism and intelligent design has taken hold; can't get rid of irrational beliefs but need to deal with the nature of the belief if it predisposes believers to violence; once asked Dawkins whether he could be tempted by Zen Buddhism; Islam and Christianity are full of evidence of injustice, as is Israel now; perhaps we should flip Pascal's wager, that the safest position is to deny the existence of God and if you are wrong you have made a catastrophically bad bet but will probably have done your fellow human beings a great service by being a resolute atheist rather than an agnostic

41:57:08 Was at the Catholic school from six until ten when we moved briefly to Minneapolis where my mother worked as a social worker; I stayed there for four years and then started touring; went back to Chicago to University of Chicago; I was interested in politics though at that time McCarthyism was still warm; was what was termed a 'red diaper baby'; we were cautioned about what we talked about; I can only remember being interested in music; I was a very sociable little kid and I have remained so all my life; I never had the usual sufferings that people had in school; I have talked to many musicians about this and what was true for me was often true for them; there is something very sociable about music; I had some suffering, I did not see my father but had lots of surrogate fathers, but on the whole had a really wonderful childhood; the fact of being an adult at the age of fifteen was great; when I lived in New York aged seventeen I rented a flat with others over a bar that by day served stevedores and at night was a transvestite bar run by the mafia; we could hear the juke box all night and for three musicians it was heaven for us; we could practice until four in the morning in complete freedom; when I listen to what happens to my British students who grew up in rigid secondary schools, competing all the time, heavily supervised - a totally foucauldian scopic regime, a terrible way to have an adolescence

Second Part, 24th April 2009

0:09:07 Discussion on why Beatrice Webb's "one fact one card" is a disastrous method of working; accumulating information and remembering; taped interviews and learning how to listen

12:59:05 Wrote 'The Hidden Injuries of Class' to show how, despite perceptions that US is a classless society, social distinctions of class are very marked in America; focuses on the resentment felt by the working-class against the middle-class; we experimented with all sorts of ways of interviewing people; that book was the touchstone for me of my own politics; it was well received here, and published by Cambridge University Press; in the States, Lionel Trilling wrote a quite negative review, but invited me to lunch to explain why he had done so; we had a long discussion on what the new left never learnt from the old left which was that the whole rhetoric of class conflict had to end, and he was depressed to see somebody from the new left speaking it again; it was typical of the reaction I got from older people; although Britain must be the extreme of class, since living here in the last twelve years have not found the working-class cringe, deference, that you do find in the States; in France and Germany, class counts but not so strongly as in Britain

22:25:18 'The Fall of Public Man'; ideas of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas; own idea of a public realm that is dramaturgically based on behaviour between strangers, where people act out in front of others; argument of the book was that the ability of people to communicate with strangers has decreased in the course of modernization, with a reign of intimacy of like speaking to like; has an effect on public space but is also a consequence of how space is organized; the book is looking at stage as street and has a lot of architecture in it because I think spatial relations and conditions play an enormous role in the way in which strangers deal with each other; I had a tremendous response to that book which continues; subject has always interested me; I knew Hannah Arendt who told me I was probably wrong, but to do it; she was an amazing person and so was her husband; I got to know her when she had just finished 'Eichmann and Jerusalem' where she had hard things to say about the Jewish councils in the organization of the death camps; she was being condemned as a self-hating Jew; what impressed me about her was her absolute courage; she loathed psycho-analysis, didn't like anthropology much, but I enjoyed intellectual arguments with her; she loathed people who worshipped her, she had terrible relations with people like Isaiah Berlin - partly because of Zionism, partly because of his prudence; all her life she remained a German exile, Isaiah Berlin was a member of the establishment in Britain

33:22:00 'Flesh and Stone' is a book that is close to me but nobody knows, a history of the material culture of cities from Ancient Greeks to the present; 'The Craftsman' is a whole new intellectual chapter of my life and will be part of a set of three books about practise, or 'performativity' - example of the problem that we get into language codes and do ourselves terrible harm with it; what treating sociology as literature forces people to think about whether a sentence has signification; Foucault, even Derrida, and Elias write, as in 'The Civilizing Process', scintillating prose which reflects an excitement and energy; find the coterie language now used very worrying; find that so long as we speak in code we have no idea of the connotations or import of what we say or hear; by writing simply, something we may understand deeply can be made comprehensible to someone who doesn't understand it

41:08:04 Thought Lewis Mumford was a dreadful romantic about cities; I only met him once when his mind was going; he was a believer in garden cities and loathed the work of Jane Jacobs; the unplanned was anathema to him; the urbanism that I have studied is about unforeseen encounter, uncontrollable relationships in the city; I never believed that relations between blacks and whites in American cities were bound to follow a certain form; that is what interests me, so Mumford and I couldn't be more different; he set himself up as a defender of the Fabian city idea against the anarchists, Jane Jacobs, David Harvey and myself; there was no need to do that but he had a kind of Fabian condescension that you feel in that you feel in that generation of socialists; the person that he was most like was Peter Mandelson; urbanism is a problematic enterprise because it either tends to collapse into regulatory practise or it gets wild and practical; the latter gives much more life; because I had written 'The Fall of Public Man' through which I developed a satisfying engagement with architecture, in the 1980s I was asked by UNESCO to start a committee of urban studies to look at how some of the issues of public space play out internationally; we ran this committee for many years and basically it was a forum for people in Latin America, Asia and Western Europe to exchange ideas; as a result of that, when there was a change of regime at the LSE, John Ashworth set up an urban studies programme and asked me to run it; I have been doing so for the last twelve years; I am no longer concerned with the teaching aspect but I am chairman of Urban Age, a chat shop where people engaged in practical projects get a chance to talk with and criticise each other; for me it has been a great pleasure because I am interested in craftsmanship and material culture