Foreigner: Two Essays on Exile

Richard Sennett has spent an intellectual lifetime exploring how humans live in cities. In this pair of essays he visits two of the world`s greatest cities at crucial moments in their history to meditate on the condition of exile in both geographical and psychic space: the Jewish Ghetto of Renaissance Venice, where state-imposed outsiderdom was translated into a rich community identity; and nineteenth-century Paris, a magnet for political exiles, where the experience of displacement seeped into the city`s culture at large.