If I were a carpenter...

Richard Sennett's The Craftsman praises the true value of craftsmanship, says Stephanie Merritt
The Craftsman by Richard Sennett
Buy The Craftsman at the Guardian bookshop

If I were a carpenter...


The Craftsman

by Richard Sennett

Allen Lane £25, pp325

Think of a 'craftsman' and you are likely to summon a nostalgic image of small, dusty workshops filled with patiently honed, bespoke objets, made by skilled artisans left all but extinct by cheap, mass-produced consumer goods. Richard Sennett, professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, wants to expand this definition of 'craftsmanship' to a broader understanding of the enduring human capacity for passionate engagement with one's work for its own sake, whether that be making violins by hand or developing Linux software or fields such as parenting and citizenship.

The Craftsman is the first of a planned trilogy of books examining our relationship with material culture and is, in part, a response to a conversation the author had with his former teacher, Hannah Arendt, who drew a distinction between Animal laborens, the labouring man or woman absorbed unreflectingly in routine tasks, and Homo faber, a superior state in which we evaluate this work through discussion and draw moral conclusions about it. A pragmatist, Sennett refutes such a distinction, which implies a contempt for practical work. 'Another, more balanced view is that thinking and feeling are contained within the process of making,' he writes.

For the ancient Greeks and the medieval guilds, the craftsman was no mere manual labourer, but a respected member of the community. The ancient Greek word demioergos, which translates as 'craftsman', included not only artisans such as potters but also doctors, magistrates and heralds, those professions that stood between the ruling class and the slaves and contributed practically to the functioning of society. In the European guilds of the Middle Ages, the master craftsman also had an obligation to teach, handing down to the next generation knowledge and skills acquired through experience and practice. Rather than being motivated by personal gain and competition with fellow workers, the craftsman in this definition shares his knowledge and solves problems for communal benefit. 'Good craftsmanship implies socialism,' Sennett explains, paraphrasing John Dewey, John Ruskin and William Morris.

History has since created divisions between practice and theory, craft and art, head and hand, and the book follows this history through the medieval guilds to the ateliers of Renaissance artists. Unlike a master craftsman, however, an artist may pass on something of his technique but not his talent: Antonio Stradivari handed down his luthier business to his sons, but it quickly foundered.

In conclusion, Sennett argues for the values of craftsmanship and the sense of vocation they inspire to be incorporated into a modern economic regime in which 'dislocation is a permanent fact'. In our 'skills society', 'people are meant to deploy a portfolio of skills rather than nurture a single ability in the course of their working histories; this ... erodes the belief that one is meant to do just one thing well'. Yet such a sense of vocation goes to the very heart of the worker's self-esteem and purpose: 'Most people want to believe that their lives add up to more than a random series of disconnected events.'

This is a straightforward and humane vision as applied to the workplace, but Sennett then makes the leap into the abstract by arguing that we should apply the lessons of craftwork to the whole of experience: 'I recognise that the reader may balk at thinking of experience in terms of technique,' he goes on, but it is not so much that one balks at the idea, more that he doesn't really explain in concrete terms how he proposes we go about it. 'I argue no more and no less than the capacities our bodies have to shape physical things are the same capacities we draw on in social relations.' Developing a set of skills that one applies to all relationships and experiences as the luthier applies his techniques to every raw piece of wood can't help but feel limiting in principle, particularly in a modern culture which places such importance on the primacy of subjective feeling.

As in his previous books, Sennett ranges fluently across philosophy, literature, art, music and technology. It is only a pity in a book about workmanship that the production standards of this edition should be so sloppy. The pages are littered with typographical errors and amendments or corrections often left in - a testament, perhaps, to the declining craft of the proofreader in modern publishing.