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The Hidden Injuries of Class
Sennett, Richard; Cobb, Jonathon
Publisher: Random HouseYear First Published: 1966 Year Published: 1972 Pages: 275pp ISBN: 0-394-46212-2 Library of Congress Number: HD8072.s487 Dewey: 301.44'42'0973 Resource Type: Book Cx Number: CX7452 Sennett and Cobb look at human relations between people of different classes and analyze everyday life and ordinary situations to identify class signals that make people feel inadequate. Abstract: "It's not what you are, but what you do." This is the notion that Sennett and Cobb oppose in The Hidden Injuries of Class. They analyze everyday life and ordinary situations to identify class signals that make people feel inadequate. Their book looks at human relations between people of different classes. It is a sociological description of class conflict that focuses on how workers feel when addressing their bosses, and how individuals feel when dealing with people in a higher standing. The conclusion advocates the end of judgement based on success in the most desirable jobs and materialistic factors. Along with an introduction and a conclusion, there are two parts to the book: The Sources of Injury, and Dreams and Defences. Sources of Injury claims that, "dignity is as compelling a human need as food or sex," while Dreams and Defences discusses how the psyche defends itself from society in one of two ways: alienation or dream-chasing. The freedom to live as one desires and to pursue goals that are more prestigious is appealing enough to ward off the judgements of the upper class. "If I let the dream of a common dignity grow strong in me, then I want the barriers of privilege removed so that I can develop this potential." In the conclusion it is established that the remaining hierarchy in society and the scales by which we judge ourselves and others will result in revolution unless we achieve true egalitarianism through dignity for all. [Abstract by Mia Manns] Table of Contents Personal Acknowledgements Foreword Introduction Hidden Injuries Part One The Sources of Injury Badges of Ability Sacrifice and Betrayal The Uses of Injured Dignity Part Two Dreams and Defense The Divided Shelf Freedom Conclusion A Flawed Humanism Afterword, by Jonathan Cobb Related Writings of Interest Excerpts: The poverty of his childhood he speaks about as something shameful, not because there was a lack of things, but rather because the people who had nothing acted like animals.… he sees poverty, in other words, as depriving men of the capacity to act rationally, to exercise self-control. A poor man, therefore, has to want upward mobility in order to establish dignity in his own life... One way to make sense of these confusing metaphors of self-worth is to recast them as issues of freedom and dignity. Class is a system for limiting freedom: it limits the freedom of the powerful in dealing with other people, because the strong are constricted within the circle of action that maintains their power; class constricts the weak more obviously in that they must obey commands. What happens to the dignity men see in themselves and in each other, when their freedom is checked by class? What needs to be understood is how the class structure in America is organized so that the tools of freedom become sources of indignity. The essential character of money power for most manual workers is that it comes to them not individually, but collectively, through union action. … Yet the code of respect running through all these people's lives demands that a man "make something of himself," that he justify his material gains by a personal effort. In collective bargaining he is rewarded, if at all, for belonging to a category. The "Americanization" of Ricca Kartides, for example, is the transformation of a man who once sought respect as a member of a tight-knit community into one who has sought respect from others because he can take care of himself - in other words, because he can do without them. The complexity of feeling here is that you can know someone else has made work boring for you by telling you what and how to produce, yet since you are acting, since you are alive those eight or ten hours, your feelings are a problem about you; you aren't coping. This desire to do the best you can, yet not to stand out so that the others are put in a bad light and resent you, does resemble the divide between achievement and fraternity generated in the authority situation of the school. But the split now has a larger dimension. Now this man is not working just for himself, he is working for others, working so that his wife can remain home, so his son can grow and develop to lead a richer life. A wage-worker is attempting to perform the most difficult of balancing acts: on the one hand, he wishes to be with his wife and children, to play with and show concern for them; on the other hand, he knows that the only way he can provide decently for his wife and children, and give his life some great meaning, is by working longer hours, and thus spending much free time away from his family. Working-class fathers like O'Malley and Bertin see the whole point of sacrificing for their children to be that the children will become unlike themselves… To call the pressure working-class fathers put on their kids "authoritarian" is misleading in that the father doesn't ask the child to take the parents' lives as a model, but as a warning. …society injures human dignity in order to weaken people's ability to fight against the limits class imposes on their freedom. We do not mean that the men and women we encountered were ignorant of the fact that class conditions limited their freedom-it is palpable from the interviews that they do know this. Rather, the use of badges of ability or of sacrifices is to divert men from challenging the limits on their freedom by convincing them that they must first become legitimate, must achieve dignity on a class society's terms, in order to have the right to challenge the terms themselves. The dream of the future, enacted in one's own life as self-sacrifice, thus makes a man yield to rather than resist the productive order putting him in a vulnerable position in the first place. People never lose consciousness of society. What human consciousness can do is create new patterns out of the information society feeds to it, patterns which deaden or distance the emotional impact of the information. The more the effects of information from a hostile or repressive society are neutralized through these special patterns, the more balance and sanity human beings achieve. Throughout this book, we have treated personal consciousness as something other than a storage locker or receptacle for social information; consciousness, we think, is an active human power. …but in talking about himself he makes a break; it is less painful to think he "isn't much, just a part of the woodwork," than to respect his own mind. Such fragmentation gets him by from day to day, but it keeps him a prisoner as well. The middle-aged people we interviewed did not speak about the good life for their children in terms of small business. It exists, most of them believe, in the professions, in medicine or college teaching or architecture, in occupations where the child makes use of his or her intellectual powers. The reason for this intermixing of white- and blue-collar work is, we think, that people measure status at the top. Occupations in which the individual possesses some degree of autonomy - that is, some degree of freedom from authority and from having to define his own function in terms of the shifting demands of others - are more desirable than jobs where a person has to deal with others and respond to them. All the dreams of individuality now, all the anger and accusations, revolve around the issue of a common dignity. The working people of Boston have been denied the presumption, rather than responsibility, of societal respect, denied some way of moving through daily life without being defensive and on guard, some way of being open with other people without being hurt… These men love their wives and children as people to people, and want their love returned in the same classless way. They are afraid that what they have to give for love, however, depends on their standing in the larger world. Efface standards of dignity, in order to create an actual feeling of dignity threading man to man…. For the worthiness granted a person, and that he sometimes accepts as his own, is not an abstraction all-internal to the self, nor a purely relative issue of different personal abilities, but stems from the social value placed on his labors. Subject Headings |