Why does affluence generate so much day-to-day misery? Richard Sennett, a New York sociologist who lives in London, believes that the working practices that generate our wealth have stripped away our self-esteem.

What is to be done? However undervalued we are as workers, we still have to work. Sennett has been asking difficult questions about affluence since as long ago as 1972, in The Hidden Injuries of Class (written with Jonathan Cobb).

He argues that our sense of wellbeing is rooted in our craftsmanship. It is craftsmanship - rather than the promise of gain - that gets us out of bed in the morning. The world of work is hostile to craft. Fordism rules. For all that, craft practices persist. Authority and knowledge, obedience and learning, repetition and skill: these values pair off in the average office much as they did in a medieval workshop. Sennett argues that craft does not need to be reinvented. It needs to be recognised. (Seen through his eyes, the BBC sitcom The Office reveals its timeless appeal: a glimpse into the Guild from Hell.)

Sennett's chief strength is his willingness to criticise the craft mentality, enumerating all the many ways in which life as a craftsman can spoil your day, not to mention your life. Craft is not a panacea for modern ills.

By one common measure, it takes 10,000 hours to become accomplished at something. Little of the learning acquired in that time can be written down. Much is literally inexpressible. This is as true for surgeons and parents as it is for potters and cellists. Craft is something that is learnt by doing; it is essentially an adult extension of child's play. So how is Sennett to write about “the thousand little everyday moves that add up in sum to a practice” in a way that won't make him sound like a besotted father anatomising the eating habits of his children?

The pleasures of craft, like the pleasures of parenting, are as dull to relate as they are a joy to experience. You may as well tell people your dreams.

Much of The Craftsman is taken up with this problem, and a related, more intractable difficulty: how do you abstract craft into a political philosophy? At least one contemporary reckons that you should not even try. The Montana-based philosopher Albert Borgmann, surveying craft literature, has written that its failures usually “arise from attempts to gain some distance from the immediacy of nature; and from a desire to refer instead to some general value”.

Sennett sees - or he thinks he sees - an ethical lesson in craft. But he cannot grasp it. Ironically for a craftsman (an accomplished musician as well as a good writer) Sennett blames his tools. He says that the inability of language to express accurately the supple eloquence of a cellist's fingers, say, or a glass-blower's hips and lower back, may represent “a fundamental human limit”.

He may be right. Philosophy, however pragmatic and politically engaged, proceeds through language. Much else that we are, and can be, and should be, has nothing to do with words. If anyone could create a political philosophy around craft, it would be Sennett.

His failure (if that is what it is - The Craftsman is only the first of three volumes) is worrying. It suggests that, were we to reach for the good life through craft, we might have to do things in silence.

The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett
Allen Lane, £25

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