Richard Sennett's Not So Hidden Contradictions of Class

My first contact with Richard Sennett's work was when I read his The Culture of the New Capitalism way back when it was a recent release. I was underwhelmed by it. After all, not only was there my knee-jerk suspicion of those who look at hard economic relations from a "subjective" or cultural perspective rather than a more materially minded one. It was also the case that Sennett bought into the ebullient claims about the neoliberalized, globalized, "New Economy" and its capacity for generating technological progress and economic growth , the market populist propaganda for Silicon Valley billionaires as idealists out to do good, and the "Third Way" offering governments a meaningful chance of blunting the more painful effects of the economic model. I was skeptical on all three counts--and I dare say, reality has shown that that skepticism was well warranted.

Still, for all the limitations of Sennett's picture of the "culture" that was its subject I can still credit the book with summarizing much of Sennett's earlier work, some of which strikes me as rather more valuable, like the classic book about working-class Bostonians he coauthored with Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class. Rich in striking insights about such matters as working people's understanding (and misunderstanding) of what it means to be "educated," their ambivalence about "getting ahead," the complexities of the much-touted talk of "sacrifice" for family (work terrible hours at miserable jobs they did, but —expecting absolute obedience in return) among much, much else, one such insight resonates with me particularly. This is the contradiction Sennett and Cobb found in the outlook of so many of those they interviewed, who were well aware that given their social origins, and the limited opportunities that went with them, they had never had much power over their lives, they still blamed themselves for those aspects of their lot with which they remained dissatisfied. That even though they knew it wasn't "all up to them" they were still ultimately responsible for their distress, that they were "failures" who could and should have acted differently somehow along the way.

Considering it today that self-blame seems to me testimony to the pervasiveness and intensity of the insistence of "society" that they were responsible, the propaganda for which view came at them round-the-clock from every direction from the moment they were old enough to hear it, from the multitude of figures in authority over them at home and at school and everywhere else, from every pitch from a "self-help"-selling huckster, from every lousy movie and TV show they were likely to see, from every story they saw in the news, barraging them not only with exhortations to self-denying efforts in the name of "aspiration" but tales of those for whom "hard work" "paid off" in the "success stories" in which a self-made man pulled themselves up by their bootstraps from rags to riches, and the tales of failure in which those who did not do so well had no one to blame but themselves. It is also testimony to how alongside driving home the message that propaganda delegitimized every other way of understanding their situations as, in its hysterical hostility to any suggestion that anything could be a systemic issue, ever, it told them that it is the unvirtuous, weak, cowardly, self-pitying, "whiny," foolish individual who does so much as acknowledge the limits of one individual's will power against the resistances of a whole big world arranged not for their benefit, as it held that to be not a matter of facing realities but only "making excuses," and unworthy of an American, an adult, and above all a ("Don't blame other people for your problems!" "Personal responsibility!")

It is testimony, too, of how all this moralizing was the more effective because they had few if any of the intellectual resources for resisting it, particularly when and where they were growing up. In contrast with their counterparts even in many a Western country in the Red Scared America in which they grew up they simply did not have much access to any sort of critical perspective on the world, while if they did find their way to one there was little chance of their finding a community sharing it, leaving them alone at war with the world as even their nearest and dearest take the world's side against them in that way so cruelly reminding one that "even in the home circle, success is a necessity." Indeed, the propaganda for aspiration, opportunity, success, failure, personal responsibility exacts its toll even on people who do have such resources, with the case of Theodore Dreiser ever recurring to me when I consider that situation. Questioning the world around himself from very early on, and to such a degree that he was able to write the novel that a century after its publication still stands as the greatest artistic indictment of the economic individualism that is the American creed, he nevertheless suffered horribly from the self-doubt and self-blame the Conventional Wisdom instilled in him through his life, such that he were ever wishing he had been Frank Cowperwood rather than Forbes Gurney, even as Gurney proved himself a genius and was recognized as such by the world.