How long does it take to read The Hidden Injuries of Class?
Richard Sennett, Jonathan Cobb
The Hidden Injuries of Class by Richard Sennett, Jonathan Cobb takes about 5 hours 3 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 3 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1972. 275 pages, about 75,625 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 24 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 3 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 9 minutes |
The page count is the median across 11 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This book deals with class not as a matter of dollars or statistics but as a matter of emotions. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb isolate the “hidden signals of class” through which today’s blue-collar worker measures his own value against those lives and occupations to which our society attaches a special premium. The authors uncover and define the internal, emotionally hurtful forms of class difference in America now becoming visible with the advent of the “affluent” society. Perceiving our society as one that judges a human being against an arbitrary scale of “achievement,” that recognizes not a diversity of talents but a pyramid of them, and accords the world’s best welder less respect than the most mediocre doctor, the authors concentrate on the injurious game of “achievement” and self-justification that result. Examining intimate feelings in terms of a totality of human relations within and among classes and looking beyond, though never ignoring, the struggle for economic survival, The Hidden Injuries of Class takes a step forward in the sociological “critique of everyday life.” The authors are critical both of the claim that workers are melting into a homogenous society and of the attempt to “save” the worker for a revolutionary role along conventional socialist lines. They conclude that the games of hierarchical respect we currently play will end in a fratricide in which no class can emerge the victor; and that true egalitarianism can be achieved only by rediscovering diverse concepts of human dignity to substitute for the rigidly uniform scale against which Americans are now forced to judge one another- and validate themselves.
Subjects: Labor, Labor and laboring classes, Labor movement, Social classes, Social conflict, Social history
