An unorthodox and sensitive study of "the moral burdens and
emotional hardships of class" based on some 150 interviews with
working-class men and women living in Boston's crumbling ethnic
enclaves. The authors venture far beyond the usual easy empiricism
of pollsters to explore, with great delicacy, the ambivalent
feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy, low esteem, and lack of
dignity which, they suggest, have a greater visceral reality to the
blue-collar worker than the dollars and cents "calculus of material
well being" generally used to gauge working-class discontents. Or
as one "successful" working man making $10,000 + hesitantly said,
"I feel like I'm taking shit even when, actually, even when there's
nothing wrong." Nurtured on the American myth that social mobility
is the reward of "ability," Sennett and Cobb argue that from
elementary school on the worker bears the stigma of being
"average," blaming himself for his own inability to achieve the
status privileges of the elite while at the same time despising the
"unreal" content of work in the white-collar world. Hence the
bitter paradoxes - an increase in material power and freedom of
choice is accompanied by a "crisis of self-respect"; anger is
vitiated by self-hatred; "equal opportunity" shibboleths insure
that class is experienced as a personal responsibility often
accompanied by shame. Among the many recent studies of working
class life (the Sextons' Blue Collar and Hard Hat, 1971; Andrew
Greeley's Why Can't They Be Like Us?, 1971; Michael Novak's The
Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, p. 244), this stands out both for
its compassion and its willingness to venture into subjective
psychic realities painfully difficult to articulate and impossible
to quantify. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this intrepid, groundbreaking book, Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb uncover and define a new form of class conflict in America—an internal conflict in the heart and mind of the blue-collar worker who measures his own value against those lives and occupations to which our society gives a special premium. The authors conclude that in the games of hierarchical respect, no class can emerge the victor; and that true egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity. Examining personal feelings in terms of a totality of human relations, and looking beyond the struggle for economic survival,
The Hidden Injuries of Class takes an important step forward in the sociological critique of everyday life.
"Their work is subtle, refined and sympathetic. It is an excellent example of social-science work in which the authors do not pretend impartiality but state their values and allow their readers to learn from their findings and argue with their conclusions." —The New Yorker
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