Book reviews: THE CRAFTSMAN

Abstract

The Craftsman Richard Sennett 2009 Penguin 336 £9.99 9780141022093 ![Graphic][1]</img> If there is one guiding thought behind Richard Sennett's The Craftsman , a long digressive series of reflections on his life's work as a social critic, it is the maxim ‘making is thinking’. This brings him directly into conflict with his old teacher, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who erected a division between the world of animal needs (‘unreflecting work for beasts of burden’) and the higher world of Homo Faber , of those who reflect on art and work, and even draw moral conclusions from it. That division started with Plato who belittled cooking as a ‘knack,’ something done without the full exercise of reason. As a pragmatist, Sennett believes this is a serious philosophical error with important ethical and political consequences. It isn’t only that it demeans those who do manual labour, it suggests that thinking comes after making: it is a justification for the kind of politics which gives status to expert elites and technocrats (ours), and in which the word ‘benchmark’ is nothing more than an empty signifier. Some of the best pages of his book are devoted to that great Victorian thinker John Ruskin who spent much of his life defending the old idea of the economy as a husbanding of resources against the new idea of maximum output for minimum effort. His prose has ‘an almost hypnotic tactile … [1]: /embed/inline-graphic-1.gif