The decline of the public man

One of the most stimulating and challenging books ever written, The Decline of Public Man , a classic from the 1970s and surprisingly still relevant today, examines the growing disconnect between the public and private spheres. It urges everyone to reconnect with the community.

Solitude and individuality. The duality of our time is also the basis of the tyranny of intimacy. We recognize only personal relationships and have lost touch with the sociopolitical universe. In other words, the other has practically become the enemy. In his classic *The Decline of Public Man* , Richard Sennett, one of today's most thought-provoking sociologists, analyzes the impersonal bureaucracy of public order.

From the changing nature of eighteenth-century urban society to the world we live in today, including the decline in political participation in recent decades, Richard Sennett traces the causes of our social withdrawal. In this indispensable study of the imbalance of modern civilization, he offers a fascinating perspective on the relationship between public life and the cult of the individual. Sennett also reminds us of how various forms of health, education, and social security services were dismantled in several countries in the last decade of the twentieth century. And he evaluates the arguments that social well-being should be a result of individual potential, not a government priority.

The result is a provocative thesis: that the public world has been usurped by the psychic-private scene to the detriment of the individual and society. Sennett's search for the causes of the impoverishment of civic life in modern industrial society opens fascinating perspectives on the relationship between theater, politics, urban life, and the changing function of the family.