The Uses of Disorder

"Utopian in the best sense—it tries to define a radically different future and to show that it could be constructed from the materials at hand." —Kenneth Keniston, New York Times Book Review

The distinguished social critic Richard Sennett here shows how the excessively ordered community freezes adults—both the young idealists and their security-oriented parents—into rigid attitudes that stifle personal growth. He argues that the accepted ideal of order generates patterns of behavior among the urban middle classes that are stultifying, narrow, and violence-prone. And he proposes a functioning city that can incorporate anarchy, diversity, and creative disorder to bring into being adults who can openly respond to and deal with the challenges of life.

"We are prompted to think and dream and question old and tired clichés and some more recent ones, too, by an author whose mind is rich, wide-ranging, and, best of all, not afraid of life's ambiguities, not tempted to banish them all with ideological rhetoric." —Robert Coles

"An important contribution. . . . Sennett illustrated with concrete, humane and telling instances a truth which I consider vital: that in this last part of the twentieth century it is not disorder but an excess of order . . . which threatens our society." —Denis de Rougemont