The Spectacular Failure of Richard Sennett’s Call for Cooperation
Richard Sennett’s Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation is a jumbled mess of disparate anecdotes brought together in a near stream-of-consciousness narrative that illuminates little and does little to encourage cooperation over competition. This is no surprise; as a professor of sociology, Sennett has likely encountered little game theory (or, if he has, he has clearly missed its value). To be sure, Sennett’s pleasure in narrative and paucity of figures demonstrates either a distrust for quantitative analysis or a lack of skill in harnessing it to prove a point.
That doesn’t mean Sennett won’t use figures when they benefit his argument — or, at least, when he thinks they do. In his chapter titled “Inequality,” Sennett brings out the statistic that “the odds of a student in the middle classes making as much income as his or her parents are 2 to 5; the odds of the top 5 per cent becoming as wealthy as their parents are over 90 per cent.” The mixing of metrics here is weird and obscures the meaning; I’ve made things clearer with a chart below.
The numbers are correct, and when graphed out it becomes very obvious just how serious this is a social, economic, and cultural problem. Higher inequality is correlated with more crime, drug use, unhappiness, and several other outcomes that are undesirable regardless of your political persuasion. The fact that income and wealth inequality have been growing at an alarming rate over the last few decades is another issue worth immediate and decisive action.
Which is why academics need to get the facts right and urge the general public as well as policymakers into the right direction. As an example of someone doing this the right way, one need only read Thomas Piketty. But to see how this is done the wrong way, Sennett is your man.
The Inequality chapter goes beyond poor presentation of numbers — and that may be the least of its sins.
The chapter begins by lambasting the “capitalist beast” of the nineteenth century, citing the rash of suicides from the 1890s among workers and the alienated workers of the period. Sennett then instantly goes on to write:
“Some old ills have become deeper. Most notably, inequality has extended its reach, as the gap between the rich and the middle classes grows ever wider. In the United States, the wealth share of the middle quintile has increased 18 per cent in real dollars during the last fifty years” (Sennett, 133–134).
Again, this is true, but inequality, while getting much worse, was not higher at the time of Sennett’s writing (the book was published in 2012) than it was in the nineteenth century’s “capitalist beast” years. Again, Piketty is useful with the actual numbers:
Source: The New Yorker, Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Still, we can agree with Sennett that this is a big problem that requires a big solution. Sennett’s solution is downright bizarre — he points to the Chinese notion of guanxi.
“Modern China offers one way to do so. The country is now aggressively capitalist, yet it has a strong code for social cohesion. This code the Chinese call guanxi. … Guanxi invokes honor as a key ingredient of social relations … You can count on other people in the network, especially when the going gets tough; they are honour-bound to support you rather than take advantage of your weakness” (Sennett, 135)
I suppose Xinjiang and Hong Kong haven’t got the memo — or does guanxi not scale to respecting international agreements? Does Sennett mean to suggest that China was better off before, as he puts it, the “corrosive” influence of capitalism? The many millions who died due to Mao Zedong’s incompetence (or malice, depending on which version of history is right) might disagree — if they had lived long enough to counter Sennett’s bizarre orientalist and somewhat racist fetishism of non-western history.
Then there is the problem of Sennett’s juxtaposition undermining itself. If guanxi is a corrective to corrosive capitalism, why is China itself so very capitalist? Sennett lambasts Anglo-American countries for having some of the worst measures of inequality by pointing to the GINI coefficient. And he’s right; America scores poorly on this metric.
Just one problem for Sennett’s argument: China scored worse at the time he was writing this book.
Fundamentally, Sennett’s problem is in how he frames the conversation; he, like many non-economists, seems to see the production and distribution of wealth as following one of two alternatives: capitalism or socialism. In reality, no country on earth is either; even in the beastly capitalism of modern-day America, there is a mixed system of a variety of government subsidies to individuals and corporations and a variety of markets ranging from lightly to tightly regulated. There are social welfare networks and holes in those networks; there are corporations, co-ops, unions, and individual entrepreneurs. The shifts in power and prevalence of each group evolve over time, but America is not purely capitalist anymore than China is (or ever was) purely socialist. Framing the debate this way is a setup for failure.
And as for failures, Sennett’s book needs to be dismissed as one as well. It reads as the cri du coeur of a well-meaning aged leftist whose sympathies and ideals are broadly sympathetic, but who also lacks a sufficient grasp of the concepts he’s writing about to provide any useful answers.
