October 2008

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Richard Sennett, a sociologist-philosopher of pragmatic persuasion, aims in this volume and its two planned successors to explore ‘what the process of making concrete things reveals to us about ourselves’. There is something for all of us in a society that remarks on a job well done and Sennett’s convincing argument is made against a world in which job satisfaction and responsibility, whether for personal error or achievement, are dissolving in a deeply disturbing fashion.

There is much of Ruskin in these pages, little of Morris, except by inference. For the sage of Denmark Hill, printing (in its mechanistic form) and gunpowder were the twin ‘curses of the age’ and in an entertaining passage Sennett imagines the exchange between Diderot, the Enlightenment prophet of rational but satisfactory labour, and Ruskin, the Romantic for whom the only way forward was back and for whom Brunel epitomised all that was objectionable. Diderot’s achievement was to record, but also to innovate; for example, in the Encyclopédie he improved on the foul process of paper-making, pointing to transformations in production methods yet to come. In this debate Sennett (as, surely, most of us) finds himself entirely unequivocal, standing with his feet firmly on the Clifton Suspension Bridge. After all, he reminds us, even Watt’s steam engine was fabricated by hand, before its manufacture too was mechanised – a perfect circle.

When he turns to the question of mastering skills, Sennett, himself a cellist, cites the Isaac Stern ‘rule’ that a musician’s ability determines the amount of practice he or she can tolerate (try telling that to a child sawing its way towards Grade 2). Where the transmission of a particular skill is concerned, he makes an appealing comparison between three great cooks – two famous, one obscure – and their choice of language and method in conveying a recipe. Julia Child does so at great length, a meticulous step-by-step guide, Elizabeth David offers a feast of cultural references that open the mind as well as teasing the appetite, while his Persian-born tutor at American night-school conveyed each stage of the enterprise with intense physicality conveyed in a few surprising words. The crowning moment, when the sauce was poured over the cooked chicken, was, she said, the moment the bird ‘put on his jewels’.

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