The Craftsman By Richard Sennett (Yale University Press, 326 pages, $27.50)

In "The Human Condition," Hannah Arendt distinguished between Animal laborens and Homo faber -- between man as a worker, thoughtlessly and amorally lost in his labor's object, and man as a maker of society and its institutions, a builder of life in common. For Arendt, the maker had it all over the worker, who was, in her view, basically a drudge. Richard Sennett, Arendt's former student, thinks that his mentor's division is too sharply drawn, too contemptuous...