For anyone who thinks that contracting and modern philosophy don’t go hand in hand, think again.
There is no philosopher more modern and more prepared to engage in the whys and wherefores of 21st-century life than the US thinker Richard Sennett, whose book The Craftsman has had a huge readership on both sides of the Atlantic.
The bad news is that Sennett talks at some length about contractors within the pages of The Craftsman. The good news is that you don’t have to plough through the whole book yourself – because we’re going to give you the relevant points here.
One of the principal ideas in Sennett’s theory around the idea of the craftsman is that craftsmanship enhances society immeasurably because of its emphasis on – indeed, its insistence upon – the attention to detail the work requires. This is the same for the concert cellist who has spent thousands of hours practising and for the expert brick-layer who has honed the skill over two decades of labour. The dedication, focus and ambition of these people, according to Sennett, means real added value to human society, because it’s all about taking pride in one’s output and in the level of skill involved.
Bringing the argument right into the modern world, Sennett then goes on to illustrate how 20th-century Linux programmers used exactly the same model of craftsmanship and teamwork that was employed by the stonemasons building the great French cathedrals of the Middle Ages. Each craftsman (or we could of course say ‘ IT contractor’) was essentially responsible for a small piece of work in a huge achievement of human construction where the whole was much greater than the sum of the parts. Why? Because the technical beauty of the great computer programmes, like the physical beauty of the great cathedrals, lies in the coming together of many contractors work into a harmonious whole.
Contractors have rarely been celebrated so greatly in philosophy, which is so often given to big ideas and big themes with scant attention to the on-the-ground detail of things. Richard Sennett has now given the same philosophical weight to the work of contracting as Hippocrates gave to the work of healing.
So next time you’re grabbing a cuppa tea, rather than engaging in a discussion about the last episode of The Voice, you could regale your fellow contractors about how they are in fact the rightful heirs of the builders of the great French cathedrals.
Contractor, applaud thyself!
