Synopses & Reviews
The distinguished social critic Richard Sennett here shows how the excessively ordered community freezes adults--both the young idealists and their security-oriented parents--into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle classes that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. And he proposes a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and deal with the challenges of life.
Synopsis
"[Sennett] has ended up writing the best available contemporary defense of anarchism. . . . The issues [he] raises are fundamental and profound. His book is utopian in the best sense--it tries to define a radically different future and to show that it could be constructed from the materials at hand." -Kenneth Keniston,
About the Author
Richard Sennett teaches sociology at the London School of Economics and New York University