ABSTRACT
Those who are about to pray should learn from the common labourer, who sometimes take a whole day to prepare for a job. A wood-cutter who spends most of the day sharpening the saw and only the last hour cutting the wood, has earned his day’s wage. An abiding strength in Sennett’s work stretching back to his earlier study with Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class, is in the quality of ethnographic sociology that is morally informed. Sennett reveals the hidden injuries of class through the moral relations of power and subordination within liberal individual cultures of equality. There is an ethical humanism that is aware of differences, which informs Sennett’s work. It is attuned to earlier feminist insights and suspicious of an exclusive attention to texts as discursive practices, while at the same time, he can be dismissive of too much focus upon the personal and the subjective.
