cwr | exercise #1 | readwrite understand

Richard Sennett

“The Craftsman”, 2008

Sennett writes about how the role and esteem of the craftsman has been diminished and how this has become a problem for the development of society. Starting from ancient times where the craftsman was highly regarded and there was a strong community around the idea of craft and “making things better”. Craftmanship slowly became degraded in the collective consiousness of the cultural elite, and therefore society. The making of society became seperated from the thinking behind society. This separation of thinking and doing, Sennett claims, is harmful to human development.

Another degredation also took place, between mens crafts and womens crafts. Only traditional men’s crafts done outside the home are even today considered “crafts”. He compares parenting and plumbing as an example. Sennett, in connection with this, mentions Plato, who said that seperating people into different boxes made them unavare that they were working for the same greater good.

He then goes on to talk about open-source against closed corporate stuctures – how the sense of community and the openness between the workers improves a product much faster than internal competition in a corporate structure.

In a political sense he concludes that, neither ‘doing it for the greater good’ (marxism) or individual competition (capitalism) provide as much incentive to make something better than the concept of corporation simply for the sake of the work itself. Not for the recognition or mother Russia.