Richard Sennett trained at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in 1969. He divides his time between New York University and the London School of Economics, as well as maintaining informal connections to MIT and to Trinity College, Cambridge University. His books include The Craftsman and The Corrosion of Character.
In a world filled with mobile people—economic immigrants and political exiles in particular—an old humanist ideal might help us to give shape to our lives.
I look at the practice of democracy not so much as a fixed set of procedural requirements, but as a process that needs to have certain kinds of symbolic markers and consummations that define where people are in relation to each other.