Kory P. Schaff (editor) - Philosophy and the Problems of Work: A Reader

Philosophy and the
Problems of Work

Philosophy and the
Problems of Work

A Reader

Edited by
Kory Schaff

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

Published in the United States of America
by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
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Copyright 2001 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Philosophy and the problems of work : a reader / edited by Kory Schaff.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978-0-7425-0795-1

1. Work. I. Schaff, Kory, 1974

BJ1498.P495 2001

174dc21

00-054435

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

To the memory of my sister and friend,
Krista Kay Schaff Brown
2 June 19703 July 1997
who understood the problems of work.

Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretence and overreaching and anticipating others.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science

This project has a long and protracted history. It first began to germinate when I was an undergraduate, when I wrote a senior honors thesis on Marxs theory of exploitation and its normative dimensions. After graduating, I took one year off before going to graduate school, working at a job in which I had little interest. The job provided a wage, but it had little potential to develop my personal and professional talents. I began to think about the philosophical significance of work from the inside, so to speak. Even in the modern developed world, work remains the central activity for individuals. It was unfortunate, then, that so many of my coworkers thought little about the implications of the life of work, instead simply assuming that work was something one had to do. Getting people to reflect on the conditions of the possibility in their daily lives is a hard task, made all that much harder by work conditions in which one is asked not to think critically for oneself and where the institutional design of work forecloses asking certain questions about the relative importance of work to, say, leisure or the development of personal talents outside the workplace. In the world of work, no one understood my fascination with and philosophical interest in the subject of work: why we do it, how we go about it, and what it means that those things change.

Subsequently, I began to trace the historical discussions of work in philosophy, beginning with Platos Republic and working up to the great nineteenth-century philosophers of work, Hegel and Marx. This project was originally intended to capture the long-standing interest of philosophers on the subject of work. By organizing the contemporary discussions of these subjects, however, I hope to build upon this history and promote economic philosophy as an important and crucially overlooked area of investigation, in political and social theory specifically and philosophy generally. To this end, a reader on the philosophy of work fills a crucial gap in the present literature, already saturated with readers on justice, political theory, and ethics. No single anthology has been dedicated exclusively to the category of work, and I see this as an especially problematic absence on the part of current philosophical work in the area of social and political thought.

So many people have contributed to this project over the last few years that they must be acknowledged accordingly. First among these are my parents, Ronald and Terrie Schaff, who have supported unconditionally my educational pursuits, despite the relative absence of economic rewards. Without their unfailing generosity and patience, my ongoing education would not have been and still would not be possible.

In addition, many friends and interlocutors deserve my gratitude for discussing these ideas and more with me over the years. I am fortunate to have had such fine teachers and good friends. Tim Morris, David Frolick, Dan Lloyd, Fran Navakas, Pierre Lebeau, and George Karnezis; Allen Vander Meulen (for a course on the history of economic thought) of North Central College; and Jeffrey Reiman of American University deserve special mention as a set of superior undergraduate teachers with whom I made first contact, discovering a world of thought that is always exceeding its own limits. Much of this project was completed at Loyola University Chicago in the Department of Philosophy. It was there that I met many individuals whose concerns and research interests encouraged the development of my own. Special thanks go to David Ingram, Femi Taiwo, and Andrew Cutrofello for advice and assistance at all stages of the project, and especially to David Schweickart, who encouraged and commented upon the manuscript from its inception. Additional thanks are due to my close friends and fellow critics, Kristi Sweet, Jason Barrett, and Abe Schwab, for helping me push or pull. Thanks to Kristi and Jason for helping prepare the final manuscript, even when it meant ignoring their own work. Also, thanks to Tom Wren for correcting computer problems and helping with the scanning process for preparing the manuscipt. Finally, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Jeanne Hutchausen and Leslie Brisette, Loyola Philosophys administrators, whose daily work provides the real institutional support that makes scholarship possible.

I was the fortunate lone philosopher to receive a fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and German-American Academic Council to participate in a two-summer institute, The Economics and Politics of Labor in Advanced Societies, at MIT and the Wissenschaftzentrum fr Sozial-forschung in Berlin in 19992000. The institute brought together a small group of diverse social scientists from Germany and the United States to discuss and collaborate on the problems and prospects of contemporary labor markets. My thinking on the matters addressed in this volume have benefitted immensely as a result. I must thank these scholars, especially Toby Moore and Christina Stecker, with whom I worked closely on a project entitled Work and Citizenship, for allowing me the opportunity to make relevant many philosophical concerns for social research. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge Claus Offe of Humboldt Universitt and Martin Rein of MIT for conducting the seminars and providing enormous intellectual stimulation and encouragement in our work.

Thanks to Mary Carpenter, Steve Wrinn, Erica DeCosta, Christa Davis Acampora, and Dorothy Bradley of Rowman & Littlefield, as well as my anonymous reviewers, for bringing this project to completion.

This volume suffered many transitions, especially in the move from Chicago to San Diego, and several individuals contributed their time and attention to make that transition much smoother. Catherine Asmann of the UCSD Department of Philosophy deserves special thanks for her logistical help, Dick Arneson for encouragement and advice, and Chris Bignell and Stephen Yosifon for their help in preparing the index.