richard sennett the new capitalism

The NewBY RICHARD SENNETT

A HE word nexi' is a suspect word, the favored adjective ofadvertisers. Yet in tbe last twenty years profound changes inmaterial life have occurred, changes that a score of years ago itwas hard to foresee. Tben, the great corporate bureaucraciesand government hierarchies of the developed world seemedsecurely entrenched, the products of centuries of economicdevelopment and nation-building. Commentators spoke of"late capitalism" or "mature capitalism" as though earlierforces of growth had now entered an end-game phase.

Now a new chapter has opened: the economy is global andmakes use of new technology; mammoth government andcorporate bureaucracies are becoming both more flexible andless secure institutions. The social guarantees of the welfarestates of an earlier era are breaking down, capitalism itself hasbecome economically flexible, highly mobile, its corporatestructures ever less determinate in form and in time. Thesestructural changes are linked to a sudden and massiveoutpouring of productivity, new goods like computers, newservices like the global financial industries. The cornucopia isfor the moment full.

As a result, though, the ways we work have altered:short-term jobs replace stable careers, skills rapidly evolve; themiddle class experiences anxieties and uncertainties that were,in an earlier era, more confined to the working classes.

Place has a different meaning now as well, in large partthanks to these economic changes. An earlier generationbelie\ed nations, and within nations, cities, could govern theirown fortunes; now, the emerging economic network is less

SOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Summer 1997)

162 SOCIAL RESEARCH

susceptible to the controls of geography. One measure of thechanging relation between economy and place is itmnigra-tion—a force perplexing cities like New York and Vieima,since the appearance of immigrants is not accidental, but tiedto subtle structurai changes in the economy of these cities. Yetthe appearance of these strangers does not encompass themagtiittide of the transformation of place w'e are nowexperiencing. A divide has opened between polity—in thesense of self-rule—and the global economy.

The culture of this new capitalist order of work and place isthe focus of my own reflections —that is. what difference thenew political economy makes in our ethical values, our sense ofone another as social creatures, and our understanding ofourselves. As a point of departure, I'd like to put forward toyou two simple propositions that seem to be emerging fromthis new order.

The first is that the new capitalism is impoverishing thevalue of work. Becoming more flexible and short-term, work isceasing to serve as a point of referetice for defining durablepersonal purposes and a sense of self-worth: sociologically,work serves ever less as a forum for stable, sociable relations.

The second proposition is that the value of place has therebyincreased. The sense of place is based oti the need to belongnot to "society" in the abstract, but belong somewhere inparticular. As the shifting institutions ofthe economy diminishthe experience of belonging somewtiere special at work,people's commitments increase to geographic places likenations, cities, and localities. The question is, commitments ofwhat sort? Nationalism or ethnic localism—ofteti exptessed ashatred of immigrants or other outsiders —can indeed serve asdefensive refuges against a hostile economic order, but at asteep human price. The man who hates the outside isweakened, rather than strengthened, by his hatred.

These two propositions might suggest an unrelievedly bleakview of the culture of the etnergitig political economy. But thisis not my view. Work is a problematic frame for the self, since

THE NEW CAPITALISM 163

it tends to equate worldly success and personal worth. And therenewed value on place aroused by troubled fortunes might infact present an opportunity —the opportunity to construct apublic realm in w hich people think about themselves and actsocially other than as economic animals, their value as citizensnot dependant upon their riches.

At least, this was Hannah Arendt's hope a generation ago,when she made, in The Human Condition (1958), herfamous distinction between labor and pohtics. She hopedparticularly that in urban life, with its large scale andimpersonality, people could conduct a civic existence that didnot merely reflect, or depend upon, their personal fortunes.Today, the uncertainties of the new economy argue more thanever for a selfhood, as well as civic behavior, unchained fromthe conditions of labor. Yet the places in which this mightoccur can neither be cities of the classical kind that Arendtadmired, nor can they be defensive, inward-turning localities.We need a new kind of public realm to c(jpe with the neweconomy.

Growth

To make sense of the culture of the emerging politicaleconomy, we need to understand its key word, growth. Growthoccurs, most simply, in four ways.

The simplest way is sheer increase in number, such as moreants in a colony, more television sets on the market. Growth ofthis sort appears in economic thinking among writers like JeanBaptiste Say, whose loi des debouches postulated that "increasedsupply creates its own demand." That's a form of growth thatappears in the modern economy, for instance, in the computerindustry, the ever-increasing supply of hardware and softwarearousing and pushing product demand.

An increase in number can lead to alteration of structure,which is how Adam Smith concei\ed of growth in The Wealth of

164 SOCIAL RESEARCH

Nations; larger markets trigger, he said, the divi.sion of labor inwork. Increase of size that begets complexiiy ot stiucture liasbeen the way government bureaucracy as well as industry havegrown in the past. The teclinology of the new capitalismexemplifies this kind of growth in the ever more complexstructure of information services linking the world.

A third kind of growth occtns through metamorphosis; abody changes its shape or structure without necessarilyincreasing in ntimber. A moth ttnning into a butterfly grows inthis way, so do characters in a novel. Much of the internalgrowth of modern corporations has occurred in this form.Though the press focuses on job loss and downsizing in themodern economy, radical metamorphoses in corporate struc-ture can often occur even when the nnmber of employeesremains relatively constant; metamorphosis characterizes therestructuring of banking and other financial service industries,for instance.

Finally, a systetu can grow by becoming mf)re demociatic.This kind of growth is antifoundatioual. as John Deweyargued: the elements in a system are ftee to interact andinfluence one atiother so that boundaries become febrile,forms become mixed; the system contracts or expands in partswithout overall coordination. Communications networks likethe early Internet are obviovis examples of how growth canoccur democratically. Stich a growth process differs from amarket mechanism, in which an exchange ideally clears alltransactions and so regulates all actors in the system.Resistances, irregularities, and cognitive dissonances take on apositive value in democratic forms of growtli. This is whysubjective life develops through something like the practice ofinner democracy —interpretative and emotional complexityemerges without a master plan, a hegetnonic rule, anundisputed explanation.

My own \iew is that this form of growth is more than amatter of pure process; the very freedom and flexibility of theprocess gives rise to the need for signposts, defined forms.


tentative rituals, and provisional decisions that matter in futureconduct, all of which help people orient themselves. And myargument is that the flexible economy is destroying exactlythese formal elements that orient people in the process of trulydemocratic growth. Put another way, what we need to copewith the emerging political economy is to promote more trulydemocratic forms of flexible growth. The question is, Where?At the workplace, in the community? Are they equally possible,or equally desirable, sites for democracy?

Smith\s Paradox

A cultural paradox of growth has dogged the developmentof modern capitalism throughout it long history: as materialgrowth occurs, the qualitative experience of work oftenbecomes impoverished.

The age of High Capitalism —which for convenience's sakecan be said to span the two centuries following the publicationof Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1776—was an era thatlusted for sheer quantitative growth, of the first sort I'vedescribed, but had trouble deahng with the human conse-quences of the second sort, in which the increase of wealthoccurred through more complex economic structures.

Adam Smith argued that the division of labor, a structuralcomplexity, was promoted by the expansion of free marketswith ever greater numbers of goods, services, and laborers incirculation; a growing society seemed to him like a honeycomb,each new cell the place for ever more specialized tasks. Anail-maker doing everything himself could make a fewhundred nails a day; Smith calculated if nail-making wasbroken down into all its component parts, and each worker didonly one of them, a nail-maker could process more thanforty-eight thousand nails a day. However, work experiencewould become more routine in the process. Breaking the tasksinvolved in making nails down into its component parts would

166 SOCIAL RESEARCH

condemn individtial nail-makers to a numbingly boring day,hour after hour spent doing one small job.

ril call this coupling of material growth and qualitativeimpoverishment Smith's Paradox —he recognized its existencebut didn't name it as such. Smith's Paradox came down intoour time as what we call 'Tordist production," the kind ofassembly-line work organized in Ford's Highland Park plant inMichigan during the First World War.

Proponents of the new order claim that Smith's Paradox isnow coming to an end; modem technology promises to banishrotitine work iv the innards of new machines, leaving evermore w-orkers free to do flexible, nonroutine tasks. But in fact,the qualitative impoverishment has instead taken new forms.

The new technology frequently "de-skills" workers, who nowtend, as the electronic Janitors of robotic machines, complextasks the workers once performed themselves. The conditionsof job temire often compound deskilling, for workers will learnto do a partictilar job well, only to find that work task at anend. An executive for AT&T recently summed up the aim ofreorganizing work this way: "In AT&T we have to promotethe whole concept of the work force being contingent, thoughmost of the contingent workers are inside our walls. 'Jobs' arebeing replaced by 'projects' and 'fields of work.' " The realitynow facing young workers with at least tv\() years of college isthat they will change jobs, on average, at least eleven times inthe course of their working lives.

More brutally, the division of labor now separates those whoget to work, and those who don't: large numbers of people areset free of routine tasks onh to find themselves useless orunderused economic alh, cspeciallv in (he contexi ofthe globallabor supply, (ieography no longer simply separates the skilledFirst World frotn the unskilled Third World; comptiter code iswritten efficiently, for instance, in Bombay for a third to aseventh its cost in IBM home offices.

Let me sav a few words more about this particular


phenomenon. Statistics on job creation do not quite get at thefear of uselessness: the number of jobs, even good skilled jobs,does not dictate wbo will have access to them, how long thejobs can be held, or, indeed, how long the jobs will exist. Tenyears ago, for instance, the U.S. economy had a deficit ofcomputer systems analysts, today it has a surplus of such highlytrained workers. And many do not, contrary to ideology,retrain well; their skills are too specific. The specter ofuselessness, shadowing the lives of educated middle-classpeople, has now compounded the older experiential problemof routine among less-favored workers: as well as too manyquahfied engineers, programmers, .systems analysts, there is agrowing glut of lawyers, M.B.A.s, securities salesmen, andacademics. The young suffer the pangs of uselessness in aparticularly cruel way, since an ever-expanding educationalsystem trains them ever more elaborately for jobs that do notexist.

The undertow connotation of uselessness. deskilling, andtask labor is a dispensable self. Instead of the institutionallyinduced boredom of the assembly hne, this experiential deficitappears more to lie within the worker, who hasn't made him orherself of lasting value to others, and so can simply disappearfrom view\ The economic language in use today —"skills-basedeconomy," "hiformational competence," "task-flexible labor,"and the like—shifts the focus from impersonal conditions likethe possession of capita! to more personal matters ofcompetence. Economic flexibility is legitimated by appeals topersonal autonomy. While the shift in language seemspsychologically empowering, in fact it can increase tbe burdenson the working self.

In turn, the sense of failing personally to be of much value inthis economy has great sociological implications. What MichaelYoung feared in his prophetic essay The Rise of Meritocracy (1959)has come to pass: as the economy needs ever fewer, highly ed-ucated people to run it, the "moral distance" distance betweenmass and elite widens. The masses, now comprising

168 SOCIAI. RESEARCH

people in suits and ties as well as those in overalls, appearperipheral to the elite productive core; the emerging economyprofits by shrinking its labor base. The economy's emphasis onpersonal agency helps explain why welfare dependency andparasitism are such sensitive issues for people whose fortunesare now troubled in the world.

Enthusiasts for the new economy are, as they say inCalifornia, "in denial" on the subject of disposable labor. In apopular classic about modern corporations, Re-engineering theCorporation (1993), the authors Michael Hammer andJames Champy defend "re-engineering" against the chargetbat it is a mere cover for firing people by asserting"downsizing and restructuring only mean dohig less with less.Re-engineering, by contrast means doing more with less." The"less" in the last sentence re\erberates with tbe denials of anolder Social Darwinism: those who are not fit will somehowdisappear.

Some tough-minded economists argue that current formsof unemployment, under-employment, deskilling, and para-sitism are incurable in the emerging order, since theeconomy indeed profits from doing "more with less." What Iwish to emphasize is that the modern economy, no morethan the classical capitahst economy, offers a solution toSmith's Paradox, to the problem of impo\erished workexperience. The sheer increase of jobs, the reorganization ofthe division of labor, are not forms of growth that increasetbe quality of laboring experience. Instead, this qualitativeimpoverishment makes increasing numbers of people feelthat they personalh have no footing in the process ofeconomic growth. And that lack of footing poses a profoundpolitical challenge: can we, through political means, providepeople with a sense that they are worthwhile and necessaryand consequent human beings?


Durable Time

In the modern economy, management gurus preacb growththrough metamorphosis, that is, the willful remaking ofinstitutions from tbe top down; it is a rupturing form ofgrowth. Social democrats have also resorted to this image ofgrowth, from the bottom up, to cope with Smith's Paradox. Wecall this practice variously "auto-gestion," "self-management,"or simply "change from within" —all strong variants of socialdemocracy. Though the aim is admirable, the act of changeneeds to be looked at more closely. It supposes the reform ofwork, and more largely social justice, achieved through adecisive act of collective will.

The model of growth on which these efforts are basedharken back to Ovid's declaration in tbe Metamorphoses: "Mypurpose is to tell of bodies which bave been transformed intoshapes of a different kind." You will recall Ovid believed thatthe w orld came into being when a god first sorted into distinctforms a primal "shapeless, uncoordinated mass . . . whoseill-assorted elements were indiscriminately heaped together inone place." Change from within supposes order can be madeout of chaos by an act of will; in political terms, the polity isself-creating. The social difficulty with this model arises,though, from the framing of time in this act of will.

Basic social bonds like trust, loyalty, and obligation require along time to develop; you cannot instantly create loyalty theway you can form a new government corporation —by an act ofwill, by sheer metamorphosis. And time equally develops thesense of personal worth, which is founded on the convictionthat one's experience is more than a series of random events.Personal time, like civic time, must possess duration andcoherence. You form a sense of subjective strength, of yourpositive agency, through making things last, but will alone isinsufficient to accomplishing that task.

In the previous capitalist era, duration became a precariousdimension of time. The progress of nineteenth-century

170 SOCIAL RESEARCH

capitalism was anything but steady and linear, lurching insteadfrom disaster to disaster in the stock markets and in irrationalcapital investment. A certain kind of character t y p e -appearing in the pages of Balzac but also in the more mundaneannals of finance—fed on these crises, thrived on disorder,and most of all possessed a capacity for disloyalty. For everyresponsible capitalist like Andrew Carnegie, there werehundreds of Jay Goulds, adept at walking away from their owndisasters. Less powerful or more respcmsible human beings,though, could hardly flourish under these conditions.

Max Weber's famous image of modern life confined in an"iron cage" shghts stability as a positive event in the lives ofordinary people. For instance, the service ethic of steady,self-denying, lifelong effort Weber evoked in The Prote.\lantEthic and the Spirit of Capitalism {1930) aided his less-favoredcontemporaries in purchasing a home, and home ownership inthe nineteenth century became one ofthe few bulwarks againstthe capitalist storm, as well as a source of personal and familyhonor.

Weber again feared the rise at the beginning of thetwentieth century of large national bureaucracies and corpora-tions that made use of the service ethic, earning the loyalty ofthose whom they made secure; Weber doubted that loyalservants make objectively minded citizens. Yet petty bureau-crats, time servers, and the like derived a sense of status andpublic honor frt>m their stations in bureaucracies. T. H.Marshall, the intellectual father ofthe modern British welfarestate, understood this well: however static big institutions maybe, however resistant to change from within, they provide theirmembers a scaffolding of mutual loyalt\ and of trust thatevents can be controlled, w-hich are prerequisites of citizenship.The bureaucrat as good citizen is not a pretty picture, but tlien.Jay Gould had no interest in the subject at all.

The current rush to take apart this institutional architectureis undoing the social, civic dimensions of durable linie. Takeloyalty, for example: in the emerging political economy, as


people increasingly do shifting, task-centered jobs, loyalties toinstitutions diminish. This generalization of course needs allsorts of qualification; for instance, one study of dismissed IBMprogrammers found that the people with more than twentyyears of service remained enthusiastic about the company,while accepting their firing as a matter of fate. A morediminished sense of loyalty appears among younger workers,who have more brutal dealings with the new economic order;many of these younger workers view the places where theywork mostly as sites to make contacts with people who can getthem better, or simply other, jobs.

In this, the young have not failed to do their duty, since neweconomic institutions make no guarantees in return, replacingpermanent workers whenever possible with temporary work-ers, for instance, or "offshoring" work. Loyalty requires thatpersonal experience accumulate in an institution, and theemerging political economy will not let it accumulate. Indeed,the profitable ease with which international capital todayassembles, sells, and reassembles corporations erases thedurability of institutions to which one could develop loyalty orobligations.

Time, then, is everything in reckoning tbe social conse-quences of the new political economy. And as a cultural value,rupture —that favored child of post-modernism —is less politi-cally challenging than the assertion that people ought to havethe right lo develop loyaltv and commitment within institu-tions. If tbe dominant poweis of the political economy violatedurable time, could individuals provide for themselves orinformally amongst one another the time frame institutionsdeny them?

This question is less abstract than it might fust seem. Themodern economy did not simply wipe out the social strugglesand personal values formed iu au earher phase of capitahsm.What has been carried into the present from the past are a setof subjective values, values for making time coherent anddurable, but in entirely personal terms. This personal, durable

172 SOC;iAL RKSF.ARCH

time intersects with tbe new economy of work in particularlydisturbing ways.

A Coherent Se!J

Tbe Victorians founded their sense of self-worth on lifeorganized as one long project: the German values oi form at ion,the English virtues of purpose, were for keeps. Careers inbusiness, military, or imperial bureaucracies made the lifelongproject possible, grading work into a clear sequence of steps.Such expectations devalue the present for the sake of thefuture—the pteseni, which is in constant upheaval and whichmay tempt an individual into byways or evanescent pleasures.Weber thus described future-orientation as a mentality ofdelayed gratification, ^'et this Victorian experience of coberingtime has another side, which they subsumed under the ethicalcategory of taking responsibihty for one's life. Will enters intotbat act of taking responsibility for one's life, though iu a wayquite opposite from the innovatory character of the will tochange from within.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra Nietzsche wrote, "powerlessagainst wbat has been done, he is an angry spectator of allthat is past. The will cannot will backwards." But Nietzsche'scontemporaries did bend the will backwards in time. TheVictorians bent consciousness backwards to compose out ofthe dislocations, accidental changes of direction, or unusedcapacities of a life a record for wbich one had to takepersonal responsibility, even though these events might bebeyond the actual control of the person who experiencedthem. Freud's early case histories, like his study of tbe"Wolf-Man," revolve around costs of organizing time in thiscohering fashion —particularly the act of taking responsibility,with its consequent feelings of guilt, for past events beyondone's control. The poet Senancour combined the subjective timeof future and past in declaring that "I live to become, but


I canv the unshakable burden of what I have been." Freudremarks that such feelings of responsibility are modernsentiments, in contrast to earlier ages when people felt theirlife histories in the hands of the gods, God, or blind fortune.

Today, these late Victorian values of personal responsibilityare as strong as a century ago but their institutional context haschanged. The iron cage has been dismantled, so thatindividuals struggle for security and coherence in a seeminglyempty arena. 1 he destruction of institutional supports at work,as in the welfare state, leaves individuals only their sense ofresponsibility; the Victorian ethos now often charts a negativetrajectory of defeated will, of having failed to one's life coherethrough one's work.

Twenty-five years ago (for the book The Hidden Injuries ofClass [1973], I interviewed workers in Boston who knewwork was beyond their control, like Nietzsche's "angryspectators." yet took responsibilitv for what happened to them.Iu that generation, a catastrophe in the economy that caused aworker, say, to lose his home, roused this double consciousnessof being an angry spectator and a responsible agent. Today,exactiv the processes that expand the economy put workers inthis double bind.

Take what happens when career paths are replaced byintermittent jobs. Many temporary workers have a dualconsciousness of their work, knowing such work suitsobligation-resistant companies, vet nonetheless believing that ifonly they had themselves managed their lives differently, theywould have made a career out of their skills, and so bepermanently employed. The tiew economic map that devalueslifelong career pr()jects has shifted the optimal age curves ofw<jrk to younger, raw employees (it used to be late twenties tomiddle fifties; now it's early twenties to early forties), e\enthough adults are living longer and more vigorously. Studiesof dismissed middle-aged workers find them both obsessedand puzzled by the liabilities of age. Rather than believingthemsehes faded and o\er the hill, thev feel thev know what to

174 SOCIAL RKSKARCH

do, that they are more organized and purposeful than youngerworkers. Yet they blame themselves for not having made theright moves in the past, for not having prepared. Their workhistories are like Senancour's burden, heavy tuemories.

This legacy of personal responsibility deflects anger awayfrom economic institutions. The rhetoric of modern manage-ment indeed attempts to disguise power in the new economyby making the worker believe he or she is a self-directingagent; as the authors of Re-engineering the Corporation declare,in the emerging institutions "managers stop acting likesupervisors and behave more like coaches." It is not falseconsciousness that makes such statements credible to thosewho are likely to suffer from them; rather, a twisted sense ofmoral agency.

In his On the Dignity of Man (1965), the Renaissancephilosopher Pico della Mirandola declared, "man is an animalof diverse, multiform, and destrtictible nature"; in this pliantcondition, "it is given to him to have that which he chooses andto be that which he wills." Man is his own maker; the chief ofhis works is his self-worth. In modernity, people takeresponsibility for their lives because the whole of it feels theirmaking. But when the ethical culture of modernity, with itscocies of personal responsibility and life purpose, is carriedinto a society without institutional shelters, there appears notpride of self, but a dialectics of failure in the midst of growth.Growth in the new economy depends on gutting corporatesize, ending bureaucratic guarantees, profiting from the fluxand extensions of economic networks. People come to knowsuch dislocations as their own lack of direction. The ethics ofresponsibility becomes, ironically, and terribly, a subjectiveyardstick to measure one's failure to cohere.

This is w'hy I'd like to see new discussions about socialdemocracy enlarged beyond the frame of reference of workerself-management or collective participation. We have to thinkthrough social democracy in terms of this legacy of subjectivity,one in which time is deeply personal, in which self-


management of durable time becomes an ethics of responsibil-ity. This subjectivity now coexists with capitalist practices ofmetamorphosis and rupture, as a terrible duet—or, if you like,dialectics—of continuity and change.

As I've listening to this duet, I've wondered if its strengthmight be weakened by easing the subjective voice; that is, bylightening the burden of self-responsibility and time thatpeople bear in modernity. And that reflection brings me backto the question of place.

Place

The city is democracy's home, Hannah Arendt declared;that meant to her it was a place for forming loyalties andresponsibilities, relieved of the burdens of material circum-stance and its subjective interpretation. However, the cities weknow bear little relation to this ideal place, nor do smallercommunities. Places instead are valued simply as refuges fromdislocation, and they strengthen the cultural, subjective voiceseeking stability and duration. In Ameiica for instance, I amconvinced, though I couldn't prove it statistically, that the riseof the religious right in American suburbs, a movement nowspreading toward the city from its traditional small-town base,correlates to an increased feeling of threatened economicfortunes. So does our emphasis on "family values" in an agewhen very few families can afford to practice the tradition of asingle, male wage-earner supporting the home.

In terms of the modern urban, we are seeing in many ad-vanced societies the appearance of building projects that areexercises in withdrawal from a complex world, deploying self-consciously "traditional" architecture that bespeaks a mythiccommunal coherence and shared identity in the past. Thesecomforts of a supposedh' simpler age appear in the New -Engiandish housing developments designed by the American

176 SC)C;iAL RF.SF.ARCiH

planners Elizabeth Platter-Zyberg and Andreas Duwany,among the architects in Britain working for the Prince ofWales to reptoduce "native" English architecture, and in theneighborhood renovation work on the contitient undertakenby Leon Kricr. All these place-makers are artists of claustro-phobia, whose icons, however, do indeed promise stability,longevity, and safety.

We need instead a different kind of urbanism, one attunedto public values and that avoids place-making on theseconservative terms. In this sense. 1 agree with jCirgenHabermas that the public realm and the democratic realmhave to be considered as identical —whereas in the past historyof cities, they certainly were not. But, given what is nowhappening in the economy, a public and democratic city has totake form through three concrete principles.

Eirst, it has to assert itseif as a physical polity. Moderncorporations like to present themselves as having cut free fromlocal powers: a factory in Mexico, an office in Bombay, a mediacenter in low^er Manhattan —these appear as mere nodes in aglobal network. Toda\ , localities fear that if they exercisesovereignty, as when a business is taxed or regulated locally,the corporation could as easily find another node, a factory inCanada if not Mexico, an office in Boston if not Manhattan.

Already we are seeing signs, though, that the economy is notas locationally indifferent as has been assumed: you can buyany stock you like in Dubuque, Iowa, but not make a market instocks in the corniields; the i\y cloisters of Harvard mayfui nish plenty of raw intellectual talent, yet lack the craziness,messiness, and surprise that makes Manhattan a stimulating ifunpleasant place to work. Similarly, in Southeast Asia, it isbecoming clear that local social and cultural geographiesindeed ctmnt for a great deal in investment decisions. This is tosay that communities can indeed challenge the new economyrather than defensively react to it. Put simply, place has power.

Second, a modern sense of place has to be internallystructured by a geography of borders rather than boundaries;


a democratic community is not just diverse, diversities have tohave a physical meeting ground, they have to grow into eachother. Planning, especially in large-scale environments, canopen groups up to one another by focusing on the borders oflocal subcommunities as active zones. For instance, "activeedge" planners today seek to direct new building away fromlocal centers and toward the boundaries separating communi-ties: as in some experiments in East London, the aim is to makethe edge a febrile zone of interaction and exchange betweendifferent groups. Another strategy is to diversify centralspaces, so that different functions overlap and interact ingeographic centers: planners in Los Angeles are seeking wayslo put clinics, government offices, and old-age centers intoshopping malls that have been formerly devoted solely toconsumption activities; planners in Germany are similarlyexploring how pedestrian zones in the centers of cities canregain light manufacturing.

In honor of Arendt, many of these planners call themselvesmembers of a "new agora" mo\ement. In the case of theactive-edge planners, the animating belief is that the morepeople interact, the more they will become involved with thoseunlike themselves; in the case of the central zone planners, thatthe value of place will increase when it is of more thancommercial value. Such planning is democratic in my own useof the word; the agora has a defined shape, and that shapeaims to increase complexity rather than clarity of purpose orhegemony of use.

Third, a public, democratic city has to address thesubjectivities of labor I have described. It can do so by creatingspheres of impersonality, places where people can relate to oneanother positively as strangers. This may seem an abstract orcold proposition, but we experience it vividly whenever weplunge into a crowded street.

A hoary cliche \iews impersonal crowds as an evil;throughout the historv of the city, people have voted otherwisewith their feet. And one great theme in the literature of

178 SOCIAL RESKARCH

modern urban culture —from Baudelaire to Aragon toBenjamin to j ane Jacobs —finds in crowds a peculiar antidoteto selfhood with all its burdens, a release into a lesspersonalized existence. Wben she moved to WashingtonSquare in 1006, beginning an affair with another woman, WillaGather declared, "At last I can breathe," by wbich she meantthat her erotic life no longer defined tbe terms of her socialexistence—at least in the dense, impersonal place to which shehad moved. Impersonality does more than shelter outsiders ormembers of subcnltures; it offers the possibility for what StuartHall calls "hybridity," a mixture of social elements beyond anysingle definiti(m of self.

Impersonal release bas a particular value in terms of socialclass and material fortune. Various studies of existingmixed-class areas of big cities like New York and London yieldan interesting portrait: intimate "neighborliness" is weak, butidentification with tiie neighborhood is strong: the poor arerelieved of social stigma, those richer—contrary to commonsense, that most fallible of all guides —fuid daily life in adiverse neighborhood more stimulating than in places thatserve as private mirrors. These studies exemplify the sociolog-ical proposition advanced by Durkheim that impersonality andequality have a strong affinity.

Modern planners are bad, the architect Rem Koolhas hasjustly observed, in working on a large scale. Our urbanism isbedeviled by the desire for intimacy, as if only the small andthe gemeimchaftlkh is human. Moreover, there are manytechnical issues of urban design involved—witb which I won'ttry your patience —about how make impersonal large spaces,as well as live edges or mixed function spaces, durable .sites. Iwant only to emphasize that the relief of self to be found indense streets, mixed pubs, playgrounds, and markets cannotbe treated as inconsequential. Such dense forms of civil societydo affect bow people think of themselves as citizens; as the lateHenri Lefebvre put it, sensing one's "right to the city" helps

THE NEW CAPITALISM !79

people feel entitled to other rights, rights not based onpersonal injuries or on victimhood.

A democratic commtinity as I understand it relieves peopleof certain burdens of identity that inhere in class, and in bothidentification with and representation of one's materialcircumstances. The impersonality of citizenship seems to me astronger relief from the psychological damage people experi-ence in the economy than class consciousness. Of course noone could argue that a democratic city life will extinguisheither the reality or the sentiments aroused by economicfailure. But "extinguish," like "rupture." belongs to the sphereof growth envisioned through metamorphosis. I imaginerather a kind of concurrent consciousness, in which amiddle-aged supposedly over-the-hill worker can also think ofhim or herself in an entirely other way, by virtue of where heor she lives; this doubleness of self seems to me morepracticeable than the striving for rebirth, as in a metamorpho-sis.

To conclude: whether we seek democracy in workplaces orin cities, we need to address the culture of the new capitalism.The economy does not "grow" personal skills and durablepurposes, nor social trust, loyalty, and commitment. Economicpractice has combined, however, with a durable cultural ethic,so that institutional nakedness coexists with the will to takeresponsibility for one's life. The forms of polity we need toinvent must help people trausceud both elements of thatcombination: we need a model of growth that helps peopletranscend the self as a burdensome possession. Place-makingbased on exclusion, sameness, or nostalgia is poisonotismedicine socially, and psychologically useless; a self weightedwith Its insufficiencies cannot lift that burden by retreat intofamasy. Place-making based on more diverse, denser, imper-sonal human contacts must fuid a way for those contacts toendure; the agora has to prove a durable institution —thechallenge that urbauists like myself must now confront.

Baudelaire famously defuied modernity as experience ofthe

lHO SOCIAL RESEARCH

fleeting and the fragmented. To accept life in its disjointed

pieces is an adult experience of freedom, but still tbese pieces

must lodge and embed themselves somewhere, in a place that

allows them to grow and to endure.

References

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Conditiou (Chkago: University ofChicago Press, 1958).

Hammer, Michael, and Clianipy. James, Re-engineering the Corpora-tion: A Manifesto [or Business Revolution (New York: HarperBusiness, 1990).

Mirandola, Giovanni Pico della, On the Dignity of Man (Indianapolis,Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965).

Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra. Walter Kaufmann. tr.(New York: Modern Library. 1955).

Sennett, Richard, Thr Hidden Injurie.'i of Cla.ss (New York: VintageBooks, 1973).

Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (1776).Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic ami the Spirit of Capitalism (London:

G. Allen Unwin, Ltd., H)-K)).Young, Michael, The Rise oj Meritocracy, 1870-2033: The New Elite of

Ottr Social Revolution (New York: Random House, 1959).

Documents

richard sennett the new capitalism