In The Fall of Public Man (1977), Richard Sennett argues that modernity has brought about a "confusion ... between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning." Against the idea popularized by David Riesman that American life had become too conformist and "outer-directed," Sennett claims instead that an "intimate vision of society" had taken hold by which "citizens" are led to "measure all social life in terms of personal feeling." People interpret public figures by the standards of private life and expect them to be unique personalities, assessed in terms of their perceived authenticity or individual creativity rather than for the functions they are performing, the roles they are filling, or the ideas they are articulating. (Christopher Lasch would later extrapolate this idea into the "culture of narcissism.") We also come to believe that we can participate in public discourse only on the same terms, that is, at the expense of our privacy.
Someone take these dreams away
Someone take these dreams away
Someone take these dreams away
In The Fall of Public Man (1977), Richard Sennett argues that modernity has brought about a "confusion ... between public and intimate life; people are working out in terms of personal feelings public matters which properly can be dealt with only through codes of impersonal meaning." Against the idea popularized by David Riesman that American life had become too conformist and "outer-directed," Sennett claims instead that an "intimate vision of society" had taken hold by which "citizens" are led to "measure all social life in terms of personal feeling." People interpret public figures by the standards of private life and expect them to be unique personalities, assessed in terms of their perceived authenticity or individual creativity rather than for the functions they are performing, the roles they are filling, or the ideas they are articulating. (Christopher Lasch would later extrapolate this idea into the "culture of narcissism.") We also come to believe that we can participate in public discourse only on the same terms, that is, at the expense of our privacy.