"The best things in Western cultural tradition, in Sennett's view, derive from the conventions that once regulated impersonal relations in public. These conventions, now condemned as constricting, artificial, and deadening to emotional spontaneity, formerly established civilized boundaries between people, set limits on public display of feeling, and promoted cosmopolitanism, and civility. In eighteenth-century London or Paris, sociability did not depend on intimacy. "Strangers meeting in the parks or on the streets might without embarrassment speak to each other." They shared a common fund of signs which enabled people of unequal rank to conduct a civilized conversation and to cooperate in public projects without feeling called upon to expose their innermost secrets. In the nineteenth century, however, reticence broke down, and people came to believe that public actions revealed the inner personality of the actor. The romantic cult of sincerity and authenticity tore away the masks that people had worn in public and eroded the boundary between public and private life. As the public world came to be seen as a mirror of the self, people lost the capacity of detachment and hence playful encounter, which presupposes a certain distance from the self.
In our time, according to Sennett, relations in public, conceived as a form of self-revelation, have become deadly serious. Conversation takes on the quality of confession. Class consciousness declines; people perceive their social position as a reflection of their own abilities and blame themselves for the injustice inflicted on them. Politics degenerates into a struggle not for social change but for self-realization."
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