Destructive Gemeinschaft

Bibliographic Data

ID20052741
AuthorsRichard Sennett (corresponding author)
Year2019
Pages33-56
Publication date2019-03-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueIn Search for Community (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9780429051104-3
OpenAlexW4238836596
ISBN9780429051104
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Every generation engages in a life-long struggle with what it first believed. Sometimes people repudiate early ideals, but their temperament remains unchanged, as, for example, those rigid Stalinists who have become fiercely anti-Marxist. In other generations, like this, the first truths are not challenged explicitly, rather they are affirmed with a voice that grows ever more tired, weak, and resigned. Victorian bourgeois prudery was so extreme it occasionally acquired an almost surreal quality; a common practice, for instance, was to cover the legs of grand pianos with leggings, because a bare leg as such was thought "provocative." The phrase "the private family" seems to connote a single idea, but until the eighteenth century privacy was not associated with family or intimate life, but rather with secrecy and governmental privilege. Destruction of Gemeinschaft from within is obviously a difficult business: chancy in its outcome, perhaps too idealistic in its assumptions, certainly dependent on considerable character strengths for the people involved

Geography · Political science · Economic and Social Issues