Second Part, 24th April 2009

0:09:07 Discussion on why Beatrice Webb's "one fact one card" is a disastrous method of working; accumulating information and remembering; taped interviews and learning how to listen

12:59:05 Wrote 'The Hidden Injuries of Class' to show how, despite perceptions that US is a classless society, social distinctions of class are very marked in America; focuses on the resentment felt by the working-class against the middle-class; we experimented with all sorts of ways of interviewing people; that book was the touchstone for me of my own politics; it was well received here, and published by Cambridge University Press; in the States, Lionel Trilling wrote a quite negative review, but invited me to lunch to explain why he had done so; we had a long discussion on what the new left never learnt from the old left which was that the whole rhetoric of class conflict had to end, and he was depressed to see somebody from the new left speaking it again; it was typical of the reaction I got from older people; although Britain must be the extreme of class, since living here in the last twelve years have not found the working-class cringe, deference, that you do find in the States; in France and Germany, class counts but not so strongly as in Britain

22:25:18 'The Fall of Public Man'; ideas of Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas; own idea of a public realm that is dramaturgically based on behaviour between strangers, where people act out in front of others; argument of the book was that the ability of people to communicate with strangers has decreased in the course of modernization, with a reign of intimacy of like speaking to like; has an effect on public space but is also a consequence of how space is organized; the book is looking at stage as street and has a lot of architecture in it because I think spatial relations and conditions play an enormous role in the way in which strangers deal with each other; I had a tremendous response to that book which continues; subject has always interested me; I knew Hannah Arendt who told me I was probably wrong, but to do it; she was an amazing person and so was her husband; I got to know her when she had just finished 'Eichmann and Jerusalem' where she had hard things to say about the Jewish councils in the organization of the death camps; she was being condemned as a self-hating Jew; what impressed me about her was her absolute courage; she loathed psycho-analysis, didn't like anthropology much, but I enjoyed intellectual arguments with her; she loathed people who worshipped her, she had terrible relations with people like Isaiah Berlin - partly because of Zionism, partly because of his prudence; all her life she remained a German exile, Isaiah Berlin was a member of the establishment in Britain

33:22:00 'Flesh and Stone' is a book that is close to me but nobody knows, a history of the material culture of cities from Ancient Greeks to the present; 'The Craftsman' is a whole new intellectual chapter of my life and will be part of a set of three books about practise, or 'performativity' - example of the problem that we get into language codes and do ourselves terrible harm with it; what treating sociology as literature forces people to think about whether a sentence has signification; Foucault, even Derrida, and Elias write, as in 'The Civilizing Process', scintillating prose which reflects an excitement and energy; find the coterie language now used very worrying; find that so long as we speak in code we have no idea of the connotations or import of what we say or hear; by writing simply, something we may understand deeply can be made comprehensible to someone who doesn't understand it

41:08:04 Thought Lewis Mumford was a dreadful romantic about cities; I only met him once when his mind was going; he was a believer in garden cities and loathed the work of Jane Jacobs; the unplanned was anathema to him; the urbanism that I have studied is about unforeseen encounter, uncontrollable relationships in the city; I never believed that relations between blacks and whites in American cities were bound to follow a certain form; that is what interests me, so Mumford and I couldn't be more different; he set himself up as a defender of the Fabian city idea against the anarchists, Jane Jacobs, David Harvey and myself; there was no need to do that but he had a kind of Fabian condescension that you feel in that you feel in that generation of socialists; the person that he was most like was Peter Mandelson; urbanism is a problematic enterprise because it either tends to collapse into regulatory practise or it gets wild and practical; the latter gives much more life; because I had written 'The Fall of Public Man' through which I developed a satisfying engagement with architecture, in the 1980s I was asked by UNESCO to start a committee of urban studies to look at how some of the issues of public space play out internationally; we ran this committee for many years and basically it was a forum for people in Latin America, Asia and Western Europe to exchange ideas; as a result of that, when there was a change of regime at the LSE, John Ashworth set up an urban studies programme and asked me to run it; I have been doing so for the last twelve years; I am no longer concerned with the teaching aspect but I am chairman of Urban Age, a chat shop where people engaged in practical projects get a chance to talk with and criticise each other; for me it has been a great pleasure because I am interested in craftsmanship and material culture