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The Fall of Public Man (Open Market Edition) | 
 enlarge | Author: Richard Sennett
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Category: Book
List Price: $19.95
Buy New: $11.62
You Save: $8.33 (42%)
New (22) Used (16) from $6.75
Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 36426
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 408
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0393308790
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.09
EAN: 9780393308792
ASIN: 0393308790
Publication Date: June 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
"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."--Carl Schorske, Princeton University. "Stimulating and challenging."--Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times.
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| Customer Reviews:
An intellectual Celebration Ranging from History toSociology April 14, 2000
26 out of 29 found this review helpful
Sennett scrutinizes those problems caused by the inbalance between personal and public life.According to Sennett, the 'public life' which is a significant piece of life besides the family and friendships was once so lively and meant much to individuals.There used to be a 'publicity' that contributed to the individuals' skills of 'play'through emotinal ties with strangers and to the civilization of the individual.Being a 'public man' well expressed in the 18th century European cities has become a gradually weakened phenomenon being replaced with the 'private life'.And has become as significant as the private life allows it to...Sennett asks,"How has the stranger been transformed into a threatening factor? How is it that today, keeping silent and remaining as the audience is the only way of joining the public life? In turn, how do these factors foster personality deficiencies? Solitude that is a result of modernism renders the individual a person captured by the private life.Sennett explains this process through works of Balzac and Diderot, theater, music, architecture,Dreyfus case and Richard Nixon. Richard Sennett is by no means hopeless; he is exploring the possibilites of getting to know 'the other' instead of imagining a 'lost public paradise'.
The end of the public realm January 3, 2000
20 out of 27 found this review helpful
Beyond Habermas' description of the changes that have taken place in the Western public sphere, with a better emphasis on empirical and historical data, the book gives a detailed account on the rise and fall of our interacting abilities. From the marketplace to the theater, the 19th century (and then the 20th) saw the decline of play, along with its replacement by vicarious figures, like the genius, the performing arts vedettes and now the politician as someone who feels (and does) what we are not anymore able to feel. Instead of hysteria, the civilizational disease is now narcissism, the unableness to act regardless of one's inner feelings. To be read along with Sennett's other masterpiece, a romance entitled Palais-Royal.
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