Richard Sennett
The Craftsman
Paperback $145
ISBN: 9780300151190 Published March 2009

舊了壞了的東西，我們多數會棄掉。逛街的時候，我們多數會選購新款的產品，只要好樣價錢平就是。然後產品愈出愈新愈快，我們變相只為了消費而消費。再然後買回家的東西未舊未壞我們便想棄掉，因為每天的廣告都叫我們要勤力消費……這是現代人的生活寫照，這是資本主義社會的基本運作模式。

作為研究現代社會人倫關係的專家，Sennett 在本書提出手作／工匠在現世代的社會意義：個性化的設計、作為產品創造者而建立的尊嚴、公匠與用家之間的直接溝通與情味。這些珍貴的倫理價值都被工廠大量生產模式的規格化、去人性化所取代。由古至今，作者舉出大量例子只想讀者明白一件事：以自己雙手創造物件，重新發現自我與世界。

As Richard Sennett makes clear in this lucid and compelling book, craftsmanship once connected people to their work by conferring pride and meaning. The loss of craftsmanship—and of a society that values it—has impoverished us in ways we have long forgotten but Sennett helps us understand.
— Robert B. Reich, Professor of Public Policy, University of California at Berkeley, and author of Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life

The Craftsman is [an] ambitious, thought-provoking look at how we humans connect with, relate to, and understand the world around us. . . . Sennett examines the making of things through the lenses of three different focal lengths—craftsmen, craft, and craftsmanship—each of which merits its own section. Within these overlapping perspectives, the view of the landscape slides from hand to human to humankind.
— Wayne Curtis, American Scholar

Defining craftsmanship far more broadly than “skilled manual labor,” Richard Sennett maintains that the computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen engage in a craftsman’s work. Craftsmanship names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, says the author, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. In this thought-provoking book, one of our most distinguished public intellectuals explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Richard Sennett is professor of sociology at New York University and at The London School of Economics. Before becoming a sociologist, he studied music professionally. He has received many awards and honors, most recently the 2006 Hegel Prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences.

伸延閱讀｜of related interest

Alain De Botton
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
Hardcover $190
ISBN: 9780375424441 Published June 2009

We spend most of our waking lives at work–in occupations often chosen by our unthinking younger selves. And yet we rarely ask ourselves how we got there or what our occupations mean to us.

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work is an exploration of the joys and perils of the modern workplace, beautifully evoking what other people wake up to do each day–and night–to make the frenzied contemporary world function. With a philosophical eye and his signature combination of wit and wisdom, Alain de Botton leads us on a journey around a deliberately eclectic range of occupations, from rocket science to biscuit manufacture, accountancy to art–in search of what make jobs either fulfilling or soul-destroying.

Along the way he tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can ask about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? And why do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also the planet? Characteristically lucid, witty and inventive, Alain de Botton’s “song for occupations” is a celebration and exploration of an aspect of life which is all too often ignored and a book that shines a revealing light on the essential meaning of work in our lives.

Robert B. Reich
Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life
Paperback $135
ISBN: 9780307277992 Published September 2008

From one of America’s foremost economic and political thinkers comes a vital analysis of our new hypercompetitive and turbo-charged global economy and the effect it is having on American democracy. With his customary wit and insight, Reich shows how widening inequality of income and wealth, heightened job insecurity, and corporate corruption are merely the logical results of a system in which politicians are more beholden to the influence of business lobbyists than to the voters who elected them.

Powerful and thought-provoking, Supercapitalism argues that a clear separation of politics and capitalism will foster an environment in which both business and government thrive, by putting capitalism in the service of democracy, and not the other way around.

Slavoj Žižek
In Defense of Lost Causes
Paperback $175
ISBN: 97818446744299 Published October 2009

當我們均以為現在可以為上世紀一些公認的社會主義「敗局」下定論，並全球一體朝經濟自由主義（再）進發之時，齊澤克大膽在本書為極權主義者翻案：究竟毛澤東、羅伯斯比、俄國多數派這些極權政治家的恐怖革命統治背後的核心主張是什麼？他們這一派真的再沒有當世值得借鏡之處了嗎？面向廿一世紀這已然可預視的生態大災難之世代，齊澤克與我們勇敢回顧近代一些「敗局」、猛力評擊二元政治論（非右即左、捨社會主義取資本主義）的弊處，並嘗試為新世紀開發出一條新革命之路。

A wealth of political and philosophical insight.
— Terry Eagleton, The Times Literary Supplement

Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.
— New Yorker

Is global emancipation a lost cause? Are universal values outdated relics of an earlier age? In this combative major new work, philosophical sharpshooter Slavoj Žižek takes on the reigning ideology with a plea that we should re-appropriate several “lost causes,” and looks for the kernel of truth in the “totalitarian” politics of the past. Examining Heidegger’s seduction by fascism and Foucault’s flirtation with the Iranian Revolution, he suggests that these were the “right steps in the wrong direction.”

Highlighting the revolutionary terror of Robespierre, Mao and the Bolsheviks, Žižek argues that while these struggles ended in historic failure and monstrosity, this is not the entire story. There was, in fact, a redemptive moment that gets lost in the outright liberal-democratic rejection of revolutionary authoritarianism and the valorization of soft, consensual, decentralized politics. Žižek claims that, particularly in light of the forthcoming ecological crisis, we should reinvent revolutionary terror and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the struggle for universal emancipation. We need to courageously accept the return to this cause —even if we court the risk of a catastrophic disaster. In the words of Samuel Beckett, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

伸延閱讀｜of related interest

Slavoj Žižek
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Paperback $110
ISBN: 9781844674282 Published October 2009

In this bravura analysis of the current global crisis following on from his bestselling Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek argues that the liberal idea of the “end of history,” declared by Francis Fukuyama during the 1990s, has had to die twice. After the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia, on the morning of 9/11, came the collapse of the economic utopia of global market capitalism at the end of 2008.

Marx argued that history repeats itself “occuring first as tragedy, the second time as farce” and Zizek, following Herbert Marcuse, notes here that the repetition as farce can be even more terrifying than the original tragedy. The financial meltdown signals that the fantasy of globalization is over and as millions are put out of work it has become impossible to ignore the irrationality of global capitalism. Just a few months before the crash, the world’s priorities seemed to be global warming, AIDS, and access to medicine, food and water — tasks labelled as urgent, but with any real action repeatedly postponed.

Now, after the financial implosion, the urgent need to act seems to have become unconditional — with the result that undreamt of quantities of cash were immediately found and then poured into the financial sector without any regard for the old priorities. Do we need further proof, Zizek asks, that Capital is the Real of our lives: the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing problems of our natural and social world?

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