No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea by James Livingston

Author:James Livingston [Livingston, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2016-10-28T06:00:00+00:00

III

But the real trustees of this system, the ones who keep us comfortable in the prison house of work, are the people who have written most passionately, eloquently, and convincingly on behalf of craftsmanship. It’s a distinguished company. There’s no point in exhuming the entire intellectual genealogy, from Aristotle to Arendt, but we do need to see how political philosophers and professional historians have shaped our thinking about work. I’m not suggesting that everybody has read their books—of course we haven’t, I’m claiming instead that we take their ideas for granted, treating them as self-evident truths, just common sense. I’m also claiming that we need to free ourselves from their grip.

Some of these writers are almost household names—Hannah Arendt, Richard Sennett, Christopher Lasch, Jackson Lears. Some of them have been fugitives from academic respectability—Lewis Mumford comes to mind—and some of them, like Alain de Botton and Matthew B. Crawford, still are. All of them are brilliant defenders of the ancient ideal of poiesis (although, to be fair, de Botton is more ambiguous than the others about the meanings of work).

Arendt is the key figure. When she wrote The Human Condition (1958), a book originally funded by the Rockefeller Foundation as a critique of Marx, she spanned all the continents that mattered in western philosophy—she had been Martin Heidegger’s student in the late 1920s, but, unlike most other refugees in flight from Hitler’s Germany, she admired the intellectual energies of her new home in the United States. (Her best book was On Revolution [1962], which claimed that the American Revolution was far more successful and significant than the French version.) She was Sennett’s Ph.D. adviser at the New School for Social Research in New York, and she inspired Lasch and Crawford, among many other writers, to defend an ancient work ethic against its modern alternatives.

So conceived, the great irony and the real value of The Human Condition reside in the same split: Arendt wrote an impassioned defense of meaningful work at the very moment socially necessary labor had become subject to technological erasure through automation. She knew it, and she said it:

The modern age has carried with it a theoretical glorification of labor and has resulted in a factual transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society. The fulfillment of the wish, therefore, like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating. It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. . . . [Even] among the intellectuals, only solitary individuals are left who consider what they are doing in terms of work and not in terms of making a living. What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society without labor, that is, without the only activity left to [us]. Surely, nothing could be worse.

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