Gene Callahan

John Locke’s discussion of labor in Two Treatises of Government has been one of the most analyzed pieces of writing since it first appeared, to the point that it is regarded as the standard justification of property within the liberal tradition. Regardless of whether one approves or disapproves of his view, the familiarity of what he says has led to a loss of appreciation regarding just how novel, and controversial, his argument actually is. In this chapter I will attempt to reconstruct not only Locke’s argument, but the historical context within which he wrote, to highlight how radical his view was. Then I will recount the reception of his work by later scholars, to clarify what his contribution to political and economic thought has been. My goal will be to specify what is—and what remains—innovative about Locke’s discussion, so as to capture the distinctive traits of an argument that continue to warrant our attention.

This chapter utilizes Raymond Geuss’ recent book A Philosopher Looks at Work as an entry point to sketch some contemporary issues and directions of research in the philosophy of work. It discusses the fundamental features that make up our traditional conception of work, including its definition, organization, and value for individuals and society; delineates some of the anomalies and ideological features of the conception; pinpoints contemporary trends in our organization of work; and considers its future. Along the way, it comments on other recent popular books on work, in particular, David Graber’s Bullshit Jobs and Axel Honneth’s The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship, putting them in conversation with Raymond Geuss’.

This chapter takes Pieper’s concept of leisure (Musse) as a response to the work-ethic of Max Weber. While Weber tried to rely on the Protestant idea of the virtue of diligence and perseverance, in accordance with the Protestant teachings of social life, Pieper, as a Catholic theorist, goes back to medieval Christian notions of contemplation. Of course, this idea was closely connected to ancient ideas of what was called the contemplative way of life, as opposed to the vita activa. Pieper is able to show that this concept is surviving in the Christian context, and in fact it is enriched by the Christian teaching. Medieval Christianity showed that the human being can achieve much more than simply work to provide for existential needs. According to the Christian teaching, as understood by Aquinas and others, we can reach a higher realm of our life if we are able to withdraw (Arbeitspause) for some time from the world of work (Arbeitswelt), and allow our spirit and mind (Geist) to work (arbeit), instead of our hands and body.Beside this internal Christian debate with a Protestant idea of work-ethic, Pieper also intends to show us that the modern ideologies of work (both of the left- and of the right-wing Totalitarian regimes) in fact lead to a simplified form of existence, that he calls “Entproletarisierung”. In this respect, he seems to agree with Ortega’s criticism of the revolt of the masses. Finally, the chapter looks at the positive content of leisure, including an analysis of the ideas of play (Spiel) and culture (Kult).

Overheard on a commuter train: “You say you’re in a rut? A rut is just a grave with the ends kicked out.”This chapter explores the meaning of a phrase by the twentieth-century philosophic essayist, Michael Oakeshott, and its implications for the status of “labor” (physical and mental) in a human life. Oakeshott used the phrase “the deadliness of doing” on two occasions to denote the centrality and finality of practical human life, and suggest “escapes” from its attempted dominion in activities such as poetic imagining, philosophy, religious experience, friendship, and others. This chapter advances the view that the common denominator in all these “escapes” is the idea and practice of activity done for its own sake, rather than for some subsequent outcome or utility. It attempts to place Oakeshott in a large narrative running from Aristotle to Montaigne (one of Oakeshott’s heroes) concerning which human activities can be meaningfully done for their own sakes, and how these all escape, to greater and lesser degrees, the deadliness and endless Sisyphusian finality of practical human conduct, to include, saliently, labor, and its place in a human life. A related theme will be the idea of participating in salutary, established rituals done for their own sake, yet capable of providing in addition to psychic satisfaction, residual by-products of some utility as well.

When discussing Thomas Aquinas’s views on work, one must distinguish two meanings of the word. In a more general sense, “work as activity” (in contrast to idleness) is treated by Aquinas as a virtuous undertaking that realizes the potential of the human creature as the image and likeness of God. Even if human beings—who are composed of potentiality and actuality—can never become exactly like God who is pure actuality (actus purus), it is to the extent they participate in God’s good works that they approach the divine. Work as activity is thus a necessary requirement to transcend mere potentiality which is unworthy of the human condition. At the same time, in a more restricted sense, “work as manual labor” is not an unconditional precept but should be considered by its goals: whether it maintains physical existence, helps to avoid evil, curbs concupiscence, or contributes to almsgiving. The gradual development of Aquinas’s argument nevertheless indicates that not even manual labor is without spiritual and social relevance, which is even more true of work as a “human occupation whereby the human being can lawfully gain a livelihood, whether by using his hands, his feet, or his tongue.” In other words, the analysis of manual labor leads back to the more overarching issue of work as human action, giving the concept of “work” a definition that remains embedded in a theological framework and impossible to understand without it.

This chapter explores Alasdair MacIntyre’s moral philosophy with a focus on its implications for understanding the nature and value of productive work. It centers on two key aspects of MacIntyre’s thought: the concept of practices and his account of practical reason. Drawing on this framework I examine how productive work, under certain conditions, can be conducive to moral development, especially when workers have discretion over their tasks and participate in shared deliberation about the ends of their labor. Finally, the chapter reflects on MacIntyre’s broader critique of managerial authority and the dominance of preference satisfaction in economic reasoning, concluding with an assessment of the challenges and prospects for cultivating meaningful work within contemporary economic structures.

Hegel’s thought on work is too often obscured by Marx’s influential critique. Work is central to Hegel’s accounts both of selfhood and of the intersubjective recognition enabled by market-based civil society and by political representation. This chapter seeks to harmonize the discussions of work in the Phenomenology of Spirit with those in the Philosophy of Right, devoting special attention to Hegel’s transformation of early modern political economists, to capture work’s essential two-sidedness: its ability both to liberate and enslave, and its simultaneously public and private character. This requires drawing a distinction between Hegel’s accounts of labor as such—that is, of labor as a universal condition of humankind—and of its historical determinations. For all individuals, work is constitutive of the self-conscious subject and not merely appended to a fully formed individual. Work develops in history, however, and reaches its highest social expression in modernity.

The genesis for this project was reading the material on work from Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche and being struck by how divergent the views of work were even on one continent (and mostly from one country!) during the course of one century. I gradually began collecting snippets of writings about work from over the centuries and thought it would be useful to explore however variously it has been conceived by different major thinkers. These conceptions run the gamut from viewing work as positively opposed to living the best life, to seeing it as the most essential part of living the best life.How did this almost schizophrenic view of work come about? And how did various thinkers defend their positive or negative evaluations of work?These questions are vital to contemporary liberalism, and to its critics, as a vital issue dividing liberals from their critics—Marxist, distributist, post-liberal, etc.—is the role of work in human life.

The New Natural Law (NNL) theory grounds practical deliberation in principles directing rational agents toward the pursuit of goods that are intrinsic dimensions of human flourishing, individually and in community. Work has consistently been identified as one such good, as an integral and constitutive aspect of human well-being worth engaging in for its own sake. Initially, NNL theorists distinguished the goods of work and play, but they have more recently sought to identify the core of the good of work in such a way as also to encompass the good of play, as “excellence in activity engaged in for its own sake.” This chapter investigates a number of questions addressed or raised by the NNL approach: what differentiates work from play? Whence come the standards of excellence that are essential to the goods of work and play? And what ethical norms should govern human engagement in work and play? Finally, the chapter will take up the question of work from a theistic standpoint: in what way are human and divine work related, both in this life and in relation to the Kingdom of Heaven?

There is no philosopher for whom a theory of work is more central than for Marx, and no philosopher whose unique contributions are more misunderstood. In this chapter, I will argue that much of what lies on the surface of Marx’s theory of labor is simply a straightforward and orthodox interpretation of Aristotle and of British political economy. What is new and radical in Marx’s theory of labor is its projection of Aristotelian economics into History, its discovery of the problem of technology, and its implicit reliance on eschatological thinking. Returning to a critical examination of Marx’s historical and materialist theory of labor yields re-invigorating insights into the problem confronting humanity when its unique status as homo faber is called into question by the dawn of machine intelligence and powerful robotics.

The New Testament of the Bible launched into the Western world an entirely new concept of ‘work’: it was no longer the arduous thing that the Hellenic philosophers had wanted to avoid, nor was it merely the Hebraic God’s creative act or the Jewish observance of the law; it was now God’s saving act. God’s work made man’s work of only secondary significance. Everyone is familiar with the Pauline and Lutheran doctrine of a distinction between ‘justification by faith’ and ‘justification by works’. But no such distinction is possible when we consider the full range of meanings of work in the New Testament. There are many words for ‘work’ in the New Testament: not only ergon, work in the sense of effective act, but also kopos, work in the sense of burdensome act, and ponos, work in the sense of painful act; and not only these still relatively straightforward terms, but also the related and importantly contrasted words praxis and poiesis (the origins of our words for ‘practice’ and ‘poetry’) and words for specific and significant works: healings, miracles, signs, even resurrection. Work is no simple category in the Bible and cannot be: because there is a continual leaping over of the levels from earthly to heavenly. Therefore, the New Testament contains much matter about ordinary work, in the sense of toil, but also discusses the messianic and apostolic work of healing and preaching, and, finally, it recognises the work of God the Father in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. By ‘faith’ the Christian tradition did not disparage work: on the contrary, it asked Christians to trust in work, the work of God.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) is renowned for grappling with grave themes throughout her opus, from the problem of evil to the conditions for revolution. Additionally, she developed a framework for thinking about something typically considered fairly quotidian and ordinary—the human experience of work. Posited in her famous treatise The Human Condition, her theoretical distinctions between labor, work, and action offer a compelling typology of the human effort we call work. This chapter provides an overview of Arendt’s categories of labor, work, and action, which together comprise the vita activa, before focusing on the category of work and its relationship to the possibility of human action in a free society. Given the political implications of Arendt’s argument about action and political life, this chapter necessarily explores the maintenance of free societies and the fragile position of the action in our modern era. Lastly, this chapter concludes by connecting these themes surfaced in Arendt’s exploration of the vita activa to some of the other major themes of her work, like totalitarianism, evil, and revolution.

Francis Bacon is associated with a move toward practical philosophy, repudiating what he took to be the ancients’ lack of concern for public utility. He conceived of natural philosophy as a practice oriented toward the task of mastering nature by directing its energies and tendencies toward ends chosen by human beings. Baconian natural philosophy (hereafter natural science) was thus a technological pursuit, laying the moral and epistemological foundations for the proliferation of labor-saving and pain-reducing devices. This chapter will elaborate on the following points in the context of a philosophical reflection on the meaning and role of work in human affairs.First: Natural science is a form of work, with standardized methods, expected results, and requisite modes of social organization. “We,” he writes, “conquer nature by work” (Great Instauration).Second: The purpose of natural science is to alleviate the toil and suffering associated with nature’s resistance to human concerns—that is, to reduce the amount of effort (or work) required to meet human needs. Bacon’s Great Instauration speaks of increasing man’s right over nature “so that (despite our humanity and subjection to death) the understanding may be raised and enlarged in its ability to overcome the difficult and dark things of nature.” Somewhat paradoxically, we could say that the work of natural science is to alleviate the burden of work.Third: Bacon explicitly conceived of the work of natural science as a remedy for the Fall of Man as described in Genesis 3. Part of the curse, as Bacon understands it, is that Man lost his kingdom, or dominion, over creation. Science, understood as a technological activity, restores Man’s kingdom over the natural world. Bacon thus ends The New Organon with these words: “man, by manifold labours…compels the creation, in time and in part, to provide him with bread, that is to serve the purposes of human life” (II.LII). It is by pursuing the work of natural science that the burden and toil previously associated with work can be reduced, thus restoring mankind’s rightful mastery and authority over the natural world.

In 1530, in Wittenberg, Luther held a mid-week sermon series (lectio continua) on the Sermon on the Mount, including the Beatitudes, the sixth statement of which reads as follows: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8). But who are the pure in heart who will see God? Luther’s commentary confused his audience just as much as it does today’s readers because it goes against the natural way of thinking; according to which, a person with a pure heart is one who can keep himself away from the world’s filth and can live a contemplative life, during which only divine things occupy his attention. Contrasting the filthy world and pure spirituality was as natural in the sixteenth century as it is in the early twenty-first century—even if for partly different reasons. Contrary to it, Luther tells the citizens of Wittenberg the following: the only thing that can be achieved with a contemplative life away from the world is that the heart becomes impure; the person falls into ungodliness because he is driven by his own—as Luther explains it—imaginations and dreams. If someone wants to be pure in heart, he can achieve it not by turning away from, but by turning toward the world, by living in it. Luther takes this so seriously that the blacksmith and the cobbler who reek of tar and pitch, and the servant who walks in filth up to his neck and even shovels dung become the paradigm of a pure-hearted person for him. Does the smell of these manual laborers repel us? As it turns out, they are the pure-hearted ones. In my study, I investigate this surprise and ask: How can the dung-shovelling maid become the paradigm of a believer for Luther?

Though sometimes overlooked, the distinct category of the work of women is essential to a thorough intellectual history of the idea of work. This chapter hopes to highlight the oftentimes minimized or neglected types of work, historically considered to belong to the realm of women or the “private sphere,” as relevant to the history of the idea of work. To do so, this chapter explores the writings of philosopher and saint Edith Stein. Mentored by Edmund Husserl and martyred in Auschwitz, Edith Stein was one of the most interesting thinkers of the twentieth century. First, Stein’s writings on the work of women and women’s particular “vocations” are interrogated, offering an overview of one important perspective on the feminine experience of work and work historically labelled as feminine. This includes work in the areas of care, spirituality, and education. Second, this chapter establishes links between Stein on the theme of women’s work and one of her other major intellectual interests—the phenomenology of empathy.

Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), considered by some to be the most influential Italian philosopher of the twentieth century as well as the leading exponent of Italian idealism, matured his convictions about the critical role that labor would have to play in the economy of the twentieth century in the years immediately following World War I. This vision was carried forward with coherence throughout his intellectual production, and it is organically fulfilled in his work-testament, Genesis and Structure of Society (published posthumously in 1946). Gentile conceived the modern world as having realized the spiritual significance of labor, just as he recognized the spiritual significance of culture. He saw a methodological and critical value in the “sense” of manual and intellectual activity, in its inextricable relationship to the “Absolute Spirit” which allows one to comprehend the formative value of working action. Gentile’s doctrine of “humanism of labor” affirms the importance of the encounter between “workers” and “intellectuals” in the context of human values, discovering a fusion of labor and culture.

The puzzle at the heart of Plato and Aristotle’s appraisal of work is that they both combine high praise for craftsmanship with frequent denigration of craftsmen. W.B. Yeats wondered, “[H]ow can we know the dancer from the dance?” We might ask how Plato and Aristotle distinguish craftsmanship from craftsmen and why they honor the first and disparage the second. Both thinkers exclude craftsmen from citizenship, and yet Plato calls his philosophical rulers “the best possible craftsmen” and he calls ruling “the royal craft.”

The most straight-forward answer to the question of what Kierkegaard thought about labor is that he didn’t. Though he worked hard on his writings, he lived off of his inheritance. His writings do not contain a systematic theory of labor or economics, and attempting to piece one together from various passages in his work is complicated by the polyphonous nature of his authorship.Kierkegaard’s contributions on the subject are not about labor itself, but about the person who labors, and on this he adds much to the discussion. The concepts and concerns he articulated in a Christian framework retain their importance today. As business boast of their values and corporate powers cover themselves in the language of family, community, and purpose, we can analyze and critique them using the work of Kierkegaard, who is a fierce critic of wealth and privilege posing as disinterested goodness. At the same time, as many of successful people genuinely seek meaning in their work, we can learn from Kierkegaard, the subtle analyst of man’s inward self and its relations to both the external and the eternal.

Human action is a purposeful behavior conducted by humans to increase their utility. In praxeology (the science of human action), it is uncommon, if not impossible, for humans to engage in behaviors that lead to a loss of utility. However, if we look at a laborious job, people are engaging in an activity that is seen as unpleasant and uncomfortable by the actors. Humans suffer the negative utility of work to benefit from the positive value of leisure. Ludwig Von Mises recognized this conflicting relationship between labor and leisure and endeavored to illuminate what seems to be a significant conundrum. Mises observed that when people work, they seem to participate in a process that does not provide positive value; on the contrary, work is frequently uncomfortable for individuals and often ends up reducing their utility. Many employees do not like their jobs but rather see them as a means to an end. As a result, the act of working by itself, according to Mises, is an activity that causes disutility. The goal of this chapter is to traverse what Mises referred to as the “disutility of labor.”

Edmond Fawcett is a long-time journalist, chiefly for The Economist, but also for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Guardian. He has purportedly written a history of liberalism. But it is actually more a defense of Fawcett's particular brand of liberalism, employing the past to make his case. Nevertheless, it is a lively and useful introduction to the subject. However, it also has serious flaws. Fawcett tends to fawn over those with whom he agrees (such as John Rawls) and hastily dismiss those with whom he does not. He tries to cover so much in limited space, that even for thinkers he favors, the reader can only be given a brief sketch. As a nonspecialist, Fawcett would have been better off focusing on six or eight major figures that were representative of liberal thought at different times, rather than on the hundreds with which he showers his readers. (The name index itself runs 11 pages.)

Max Weber and Ludwig von Mises were two of the 20th century's foremost theorists of human action. Mises held Weber, his senior by some 17 years, in great esteem and often discussed his theories, even weaving some, such as Weber's model of ideal types, deeply into the fabric of his own social thought. However, at least at first glance, there seems to be a deep rift between the two men's conceptions about the rationality of action. Weber classified “social actions” into several distinct categories, some of which he saw as exhibiting little, if any, rationality. Mises, in contrast, held that all action is rational by conceptual necessity. Various writers have taken their views to be obviously incompatible, among them, Mises himself. This article suggests that the appearance of a conflict is produced by the failure to discern that Weber and Mises were addressing different sorts of questions and constructing frameworks to support different modes of analyzing social phenomena. I contend that, if that divergence of aim is properly understood, then the apparent contradiction will be seen as illusory.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the rationalist tide had reached its high mark in the arts, politics, and work. But the Holocaust, the Gulag, and other failures have dimmed the popularity of rationalism. However, the evidence of those practical failures would not have been as convincing as it was if not for the existence of a theoretical diagnosis of the malady. This book compares and contrasts the ideas of some of the leading twentieth-century critics of rationalism: Hans-Georg Gadamer, F.A. Hayek, Aurel Kolnai, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Oakeshott, Michael Polanyi, Gilbert Ryle, Eric Voegelin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. While each can be seen as a critic of rationalism, were they each attacking the same thing? In what senses did their analyses overlap, and in what senses did they differ? Clarifying these issues, this book will provide important insights into this major intellectual trend of the past century. By including these major thinkers, Tradition v. Rationalism, we see that that these thinkers believed that tradition should still have a place in the world as a repository of wisdom. As our lives becomes increasingly dominated by various forms of rationalisms—whether political, technological, economic, or cultural—we need to ask ourselves whether this is the type of world in which we want to live; and if not, how can we critique and propose an alternative to it? The thinkers in this book provide us a starting point on our journey towards thinking about how we can have a more hopeful, humane, and brighter future.

There were a number of well-known critiques of “rational- ism” penned in the mid-twentieth century by thinkers such as F. A. Hayek and Michael Oakeshott. But they were con- ducted on the level of “high theory,” with little in the way of detailed analysis. This paper aims to bring their analysis down to earth, or, more accurately, down to city pavement, by demonstrating how the work of urbanologist Jane Jacobs illustrates concrete applications of many of their ideas in the context of rationalist urban planning and its failures. She showed that the ideas driving city planning in the first six decades of the twentieth century were largely unmoored, abstract visions of the city, divorced from any detailed un- derstanding of what actually makes cities work, when they do so.