Solidarity and Isolation

Hosted by The Institute for Human Sciences at Boston University

The BU Institute for Human Sciences Fourth Jacek Kuron Debate features Alfred Gusenbauer, chancellor of Austria, and Richard Sennett, University Professor of the Humanities at New York University and Centennial Professor of Sociology at London School of Economics, discussing the tensions and relationships linking solidarity and isolation.

Gusenbauer speaks first about solidarity from the social democratic perspective. He says that young people today do not expect to exceed their parents’ achievements, in part because of “the economic process that is putting parts of the middle class under pressure.” There has been a change in the distribution of wealth, he says, with the middle class — the backbone of democracy — being ignored. He adds that long-term unemployment develops an underclass, and increasing isolation occurs when people are alone at home. A purely welfare state is not the answer. What’s necessary, he says, are social services, such as pensions, a high-quality health system, and access to high-quality education. He touches on the recent financial crisis — fear is now predominant, he says, and everyone is now in favor of regulation. He calls for a redefinition of the social public sphere, for bringing back political decisions to where democracy is prevailing, and for extending solidarity to those segments of society that were the so-called blind spots.

Sennett begins begins by saying that he cannot think of anything that he and Gusenbauer disagree on. He talks about the U.S. economic crisis, which came as no surprise to him. Over 15 years of studying the new economy, for reasons that have more to do with sociology, he says, he's found that the behavior of the new economy's dominant class has made the collapse almost inevitable. We need to know the distinction between isolationism and solidarity, he says, calling it “a distinction between alone and together.” He notes that there are different threads of solidarity — the present crisis is linked to what he refers to as complacent solidarity. The financial elite live in their own world, where they understand one another so well and admit no possibility of being wrong, which breeds decay. Their dominant ideology may not seem complacent, but it is: to assume the market would always go up, that rescue would always be possible. These players, relatively few in number, assumed they sould always be in control. He calls them ethically complacent — they don’t think of consequences; they say 'the system needs to be fixed,' rather than 'I destroyed the lives of a million people' and 'I’m sorry I ruined your old age.' He says his point is that complacency comes in many forms and is rife among people with the power to do other people harm. They are incapable of ethical solitude, of looking at their actions, of spending much time by themselves. They belong to a class that needs to be taken apart, he says, not just regulated; they are a class that has been corrupted.

September 26, 2008, 6 p.m.
School of Management

Video length is 01:36:19.

About the Speakers:
Alfred Gusenbauer, the leader of the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) from 2000 to the present, has been chancellor of Austria since January 2007. He studied political science, philosophy, and jurisprudence at the University of Vienna, where he earned a doctorate in political science. He was federal chairman of the SPÖ youth wing, the Socialist Youth, from 1984 to 1990 and vice president of the International Union of Socialist Youth from 1985 to 1989. In 2000, he was elected leader of the SPÖ Group in the Bundesrat and on January 11, 2007, he became chancellor of Austria at the head of a Social Democratic Party and Austrian People’s Party coalition.

Richard Sennett studied at the University of Chicago and at Harvard University, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1969. He then moved to New York, where in the 1970s he founded, with Susan Sontag and Joseph Brodsky, the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University. In the 1980s he was an advisor to UNESCO and president of the American Council on Work. In the mid-1990s he began to divide his time between New York University, where he is University Professor of the Humanities, and the London School of Economics, where he is Centennial Professor of Sociology; he also maintains informal connections to MIT and to Cambridge University’s Trinity College. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has written many books.

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