Respect in a World of Inequality
By Richard Sennett
Norton, 288 pages, $24.95
Last December, tenants and Chicago Housing Authority officials met to discuss the CHA’s relocation of families from the city’s public-housing developments. The process was not going well, but the discussion did not revolve around reports of homelessness and lack of adequate assistance for families. Instead, there was a lively, sometimes antagonistic debate about who knows what’s best for the poor. In a strange twist, tenants construed support as being detached, impersonal giving, measured in such objective terms as dollar amounts and number of apartment choices. The bureaucrats felt the need to play psychologist and parent: In their eyes, tenants were children who had to be trained to get off the “project potty” and into the wider world. The client adopted the language of officialdom, while the officials parried with clientelism.
Missing was the basic recognition that conditions of persistent social inequality had produced a way of life, “project living,” that could not be wished away and turned into middle-class life with a stroke of policymaking. Missing, sociologist Richard Sennett would tell us, was the foundation of respect.
Sennett’s latest book, “Respect in a World of Inequality,” appears as Chicago wrestles with one of its largest postwar public-works initiatives, the redevelopment of its housing projects into mixed-income communities. This transformation addresses the very issues that Sennett grapples with, including changing the poor from dependent to self-sufficient individuals, and so “Respect” is both instructive and timely.
Public housing is everywhere in “Respect.” Sennett spent part of his own childhood, in the 1940s, in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green Homes. Before 1950s white flight and economic downturns transformed it into an all-black, mostly poor development, Sennett’s neighborhood was home to whites and blacks, poor and working class, aspiring and downtrodden. Sennett lived with his mother, a distinguished social worker and writer, under whose inspiration he embarked upon a career as an accomplished cellist. Damage to his hand would steer him to academics and writing.
Even after Sennett left Chicago, Cabrini-Green was formative in his upbringing. Visits there to mentor local youths revealed the social distance he had traveled. He wondered what had enabled him to climb the ladder and use the North Side community as was intended, namely as a way station. He volunteered, actively helping others to build their confidence. At the same time, Sennett was undergoing physical therapy to build his own self-assurance and prepare him for personal and career changes. In “Respect,” Sennett marshals his experiences on both sides of the social-work fence to argue for new ways of understanding inequality and organizing our approach to caregiving. (Sennett uses “caregiving” to describe various institutionalized forms of helping, from informal mentoring to professional labor such as social work, but the book focuses on the latter.)
“Respect” is intended to complement “The Corrosion of Character,” Sennett’s book on the ways modern capitalism has changed work in general. Sennett finds that our institutions of compassion, whether governmental, faith-based, or non-sectarian, undermine our efforts to work across what Sennett calls “the boundaries of inequality.” Our benevolence ends up as pity for the truly disadvantaged and, ultimately, pity breeds contempt because they do not quickly turn their lives around. We infantilize the poor rather than honoring their capacity for self-determination. We love too much, at other times not enough. In short, we liberal-democratic Americans still do not know how to handle inequality, let alone be comfortable with difference.
Getting out of this trap is not easy, Sennett tells us, because changing social welfare involves changing the nature of the work involved and shifting our view of each other as human beings. Sennett sees social welfare as the building block of a society, and he takes us through historical and philosophical waters, adroitly and with laughs along the way, to show us that there’s more to a handout than meets the eye. Even the smallest acts of kindness speak to such age-old conundrums as how to create community without dependency, how to ensure autonomy but prevent social isolation.
“Respect” is not a history of welfare, nor is it a “book of practical policies for the welfare state nor a full-blown autobiography.” Instead, Sennett draws selectively on his life and different ideas about welfare–and human nature–to analyze how we help each other today and how we could do it better. There is the general claim that modern society has become an “iron cage”; Sennett uses this phrase of sociologist Max Weber’s to suggest that the professionalization of welfare work has left case workers burdened and pressured to follow highly rational, formulaic strategies of caregiving. In the process, the client feels less a human being than a statistic. Beyond this, the book leaves conventional sociology behind.
Sennett methodically explores the relationship formed between social workers and their clients. He looks at how work in general can build up character or not impart dignity. To show how talent is distributed across individuals and groups, he traverses human history. Thus, the reader finds a discussion of piano competitions in 1970s England, which leads to remarks on talent in the court of Louis XIV, which leads to the writings of Plato and the poetry of Auden. This intellectual-historical voyage is purposive. Sennett asks how one could organize professional social work in such a way that the needy feel dignified, their talents are recognized, and they come out with a sense of honor.
We should begin, he says, by looking at the worker who provides the care. This labor, for Sennett, is best thought of as a form of craft work. (Yes, craft work.) Craft, he says, “concerns the capacity to make a thing well.” Social work–and such related fields as counseling, mentoring and teaching–are all types of expression, activities that have ends in themselves, like the making of a painting or the performance of a play. Too often, Sennett says, these labors are seen as useful only because they help others, but each also “gives the service worker satisfaction.” By viewing such professions as crafts, Sennett suggests, problems such as “compassion fatigue” (or “the exhaustion of our sympathies in the face of persistently painful realities”) and the high turnover of part-time teachers may be reduced–although he never tells us how.
Sennett realizes that craft work can also “isolat[e] the maker” because it develops his or her character but does not necessarily lead to better interpersonal relationships, i.e., to mutual respect. For this to occur, society must separate shame from dependence, so that people asking for help should not feel weak or demeaned.
But, Sennett says, we must also remove compassion from caregiving. Here his argument blurs. On the one hand, Sennett draws on political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s view that “the best kind of social welfare would be an accounting transaction involving no subjective relations” to argue that when social workers get too attached for too long, they burn out and their work suffers. On the other hand, he wonders whether the doctor who operated on his hand would have continued giving him a high level of attention–even after failing to perform the necessary surgery successfully on the first attempt–if there had not been a personal relationship between them.
Sennett does not ultimately tell us what level of compassion is necessary and sufficient to create an improved, “liberated welfare.” Instead, he constructs a parallel between postwar organization man, working in the hierarchical firm, and the welfare client, serviced by large bureaucracies. Sennett believes that “[t]he iron cages of bureaucracy . . . could not have been built simply as prisons; they had to offer something to lure people inside.” At places such as IBM, workers were told what to wear and how to act at home, but Sennett finds this only partly limiting. He believes these corporate workers found this atmosphere to be meaningful, even pleasurable, because the firm was also giving them approval and promoting creative thought.
From this, Sennett learns that “[i]t is not liberation from formal constraint but a better connection to others which the welfare client requires.” Thus, he concludes, welfare clients must not be treated as adversaries, as they are now when agency staff ask them to prove their need with extensive interviews and personal disclosure. Instead, they must be given the kind of approval and respect that corporations afford.
But Sennett does not give us much specific guidance in terms of refashioning welfare bureaucracies into craft work regimes that can yield this kind of respect, either for the social worker or the client. Nor does he marshal much evidence, based on studies of welfare institutions or innovative social-work programs, to make his case. Instead, he wants to change how we look at service work by noting the power of institutions “to regulate self-respect and communal respect by passing judgment and awarding approval to whole human beings.” Beyond this, he seems content to end the book by defending his decision not to provide policies and programs.
“Respect” isn’t always easy reading. Sometimes Sennett’s forays into sociological ideas can be forced and alienating. And he can leave a story mid-tale, returning to it in the middle of a paragraph pages later with no rationale. Thankfully, his life is interesting enough to warrant combing through memories, but we must tolerate such errors as his incorrect placement of the Robert Taylor Homes next to Cabrini-Green.
With our welfare institutions stagnating and philanthropy and volunteerism at all-time lows, fresh perspectives are certainly needed to reshape how we deal with inequality. Sennett is better known as a social observer and critic than a policymaker. And therein lie the book’s strength and weakness: You will find yourself looking at old problems in a different, sometimes refreshing way, but you will not find much guidance for putting your thoughts and feelings into practice.
