RESPECT IN A WORLD OF INEQUALITY, by Richard Sennett. Norton. 288 pp.

Richard Sennett is sometimes called a public intellectual, but he isn't, really -- at least not in the sense that redundant term has come to imply: a vendor of sound-bites of the mind, turning high ideas and a plausible manner into the raw material of media performance. A public intellectual must address, above all, "the state of the debate." And the proffered ideas must fit the format, i.e. the presumed interests and attention span of the implied public (read: market segment).

It is hard to imagine a book less topical than Respect in a World of Inequality, in which Sennett proves himself to be the last of the Victorian sages -- the writers of shaggy pamphlets that chewed over the question of how we ought to live now, given that the unleashed forces of the Modern World have put Civilization into disarray. Like Matthew Arnold or John Ruskin, Sennett is preoccupied with a crisis in values; and, like them, he doesn't worry in a hurry, nor in the well-defined terms of the policy expert. As in several previous volume of social criticism, Sennett draws on fields normally guarded by specialists: urbanism, psychology, literature, architecture, the history of ideas. He resembles nobody so much as Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, the philosopher in Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, who held the title of Professor of Things in General.

If I have made Respect sound impossibly broad and diffuse, there is a good reason. But Sennett does in fact have a core emphasis here: the issue of welfare reform. In particular, he questions the blinkered and paradoxical idea that former recipients will earn the (otherwise unavailable) social and psychological good of self-respect by being marched, under orders from on high, into jobs that scarcely anyone in America actually wants to do. The fusion of liberal paternalism with a conservative work ethic only intensifies the more heartless aspects of each. Yet Sennett is not exactly criticizing welfare reform, as such, in the name of a fortified compassion. He has bigger, and more slippery, fish to fry.

An early chapter recounts growing up during the 1940s in Cabrini Green (the now all-but-demolished Chicago public-housing project that in its postwar heyday was always qualified as "notorious"). When Sennett's family lived there, the project embodied New Deal social engineering at its most optimistic. This memoiristic stretch of the book then recounts his progress, first as a young cello virtuoso (a career path that ended following some botched surgery on his left hand) and later as an urban sociologist trained at Harvard. This is, by any measure, a success story: the rise from welfare to unassailable status.

But for Sennett, the familiar American tendency to honor upward mobility (resting, in his case, on craftsmanship, first musical and then intellectual) is precisely the corrosive force undermining respect as the acknowledgment of an essential humanity that everyone possesses, regardless of immediate circumstances. We have inherited a set of values that began to emerge with the overthrow of feudalism: the notion that people do not inherit dignity just because they are born into an elite, but rather that there is a kind of nobility available to anyone who works hard to claim it. A bright and inspiring thought. Or it would be, were it not coupled with the fiction that everyone has, somewhere inside him or her, the ability to climb that ladder, and the obligation to do so. Those failing to ascend become contemptible, even (perhaps especially) in their own eyes.

It is clear that Sennett wishes that the culture were ordered in some way that does not implicitly define human worth in terms of a zero-sum game. That people are born with unequal abilities ought not to sanction contempt. Two old ways of looking at the human condition might offer alternatives to liberal meritocracy -- religious humanism and socialism. But Sennett is not exactly issuing a manifesto for either of them, and he certainly isn't writing a policy paper. Respect finally reads as a series of meditations on the exhaustion of available ideas rather than as a book with a sustained argument. (The latter conveys forward linear development, while Sennett travels over history and context with a crablike, zigzagging motion.)

In the final pages, he says that the "tarnish" on the capacity for mutual respect "could be removed, somewhat, by honoring differing practical achievements rather than privileging potential talent; by admitting the just claims of adult dependency; by permitting people to participate more actively in the conditions of their own care." This is the voice of a prophet, not a wonk. And the fate of a prophet in his own country is, famously, not so enviable. We have plenty of wonks already, though, offering more than enough simple answers -- so perhaps Sennett can play a useful role in retailoring the questions.