For Lasch, the retreat of ritual is a causal factor in the new cultural nar­cissism. In his assessment of the state of modern sport and leisure, he argues that games have lost their illusional qualities: ‘Uneasy in the presence of fantasy and illusion, our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of the harmless […]

Christopher Lasch cuts a curious figure in the contemporary sociologi­cal landscape. His work of 1979, The Culture of Narcissism, propelled the debates about the cultural malaise to a new climax, and gave intellec­tual weight to the key Zeitgeist concerns being captured in slogans of ‘me-ism’. The Culture of Narcissism is a sweeping study of the […]

Alongside the figure of the craftsman, Sennett also values the figure of the actor for his capacity to self-distance. Predictably enough, however, because late modernity is marked by a ‘contempt’ for the masks of ritual, the modern social actor is an actor deprived of his art (1993 [1974], 15). Whereas the actor of Sennett’s praise […]

This is a good moment to revisit Sennett’s reading of contemporary ‘Destructive Gemeinschaft’. We recall Sennett’s argument that the myth of Gemeinschaft, confected as the moral consolation of open and hon­est intersubjectivity, contributes to the alienating economic order of late capitalism. Not only does the ‘authentic self’ become an exchangeable commodity, but the myth of […]

In keeping with Winnicott’s contention that play represents the transi­tional space of culture, Sennett argues that the impoverishment of one’s capacity to play — via the decline of culture’s transitional spaces — can be taken as a symptom of inhibited creativity. He explains that the waning of the art of public life reflects what occurs […]

One of the staple claims made about a therapeutic culture is that nar­cissistic investments in the present go hand in hand with a cultural devaluation of the past. In a deliberately contrary fashion, Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man (1993 [1974]) commits to identifying the echoes of the past — the past of London […]

In starting from the premise that our theoretical and practical moral lan­guage is in ‘a state of grave disorder’, MacIntyre presupposes a culture of general decline (2). Ours’ is a culture, he claims, in which ‘[t]here seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement’; it is a specifically ’emotivist’ culture where ‘all evaluative […]

In 1920, facilitated by his nephew and would-be American emissary Edward Bernays, Freud was in liaison with Cosmopolitan magazine regarding the commission of a series of popular articles on psychoanal­ysis. Freud proposed to write on the topic of not using psychoanalysis in polemics. However, when the editors suggested that, given the taste of the general […]

At the top of this chapter I asked whether there may be an affinity between narcissism as an object of sociological critique, and nostal­gia as a mode of sociological enquiry. Moreover, I intimated that it was necessary to inflect sociological accounts of the lost object with a revised theory of narcissism. We can now bring […]

We recall from above how Freud punctured a culturally optimistic narra­tive concerning nostalgia, namely, that the spatial estrangements which give rise to homesickness would be vanquished by the Gesellschaft conditions of technologically advanced societies. According to Freud, the technological innovations which facilitate our homeward jour­ney, or connect us to home, are the very same ‘advances’ […]