Much of this book is a history of classical economic thought. Since the classical era, economists have developed more sophisticated analytical and empirical tools than anything deployed by the classical economists. Might contemporary economics therefore rightly claim to have left behind the assumptions of the work ethic, which were so deeply embedded in classical economic thought?

Marx’s conception of human flourishing is broadly Aristotelian: it consists in the exercise of essential human powers. The good life for humans thus includes the following components. It consists in activities that exercise a wide range of human capabilities. Such activity should be free, both voluntary and autonomous – self-directed, according to one’s own ideas. It is social, in the sense of promoting others’ welfare, and being motivated by that end. This activity is recognized by the agent and others as having this social character, such that it is common knowledge between the agent and beneficiaries that the agent acted for the beneficiaries’ sakes, and that the beneficiaries appreciate that fact.

Would you quit working if you won a lottery big enough to enable you to live comfortably off the annual payout? Numerous surveys of Americans since 1980 find that a majority say they would keep working. Of those Americans who have won huge lotteries, 85–90 percent do continue working. While the numbers are lower for people in low-paying unskilled jobs, these results reflect the continuing power of the Protestant work ethic in American life. Most Americans view work as something more than just a meal ticket. They view it as fulfilling a duty to contribute to society, as a source of pride, and as a locus of meaning.

The work ethic split into conservative and progressive versions in the late eighteenth century (see Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I argued that the conservative version triumphed through the mid-nineteenth century, an era characterized by rapidly rising productivity and stagnant wages, and hence by an increasing share of income taken by capital owners. This is what I call the hijacking of the work ethic by capital owners. The next three chapters examine the secularized progressive work ethic, developed by thinkers who sympathized with workers – not just in the sense of proposing policies they thought would help them, but also in taking seriously workers’ experiences, perspectives, and aspirations. In the liberal tradition such thinkers include Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marquis de Condorcet and Thomas Paine. In the socialist tradition they include the Ricardian socialists – (a group of thinkers loosely connected to David Ricardo), Karl Marx, and Eduard Bernstein, the unjustly neglected pioneer of social democracy. Mill and Bernstein belonged to both traditions.

Since the late eighteenth century, European thinkers viewed history as a story of progress toward “civilization,” in which stages of progress are defined in terms of distinct modes of production. Societies progress by moving from hunter-gatherer subsistence, to herding, to settled agriculture, to civilized states with cities, manufacturing, commerce, arts, sciences, and law. These thinkers regarded Europe as ahead of “savage,” “barbarian,” and “semi-barbarian” societies in the rest of the world. This idea of European superiority in progress was reinforced in the nineteenth century by the spectacular economic growth spurred by astonishing technological innovations in manufacturing, transportation, and communication during the Industrial Revolution. European thinkers asked: what accounted for Europe’s rapid economic and technological progress, far ahead of the rest of the world?

The progressive work ethic culminated in social democracy, a political program devised by the social democratic political parties that formed in many countries of Western Europe in the late nineteenth century. These parties began as the political arm of various national trade union movements, and aimed to represent the working classes more broadly. Sweden’s SAP was the first to take power, in 1932. Most established their key programs after the Second World War.

In Chapter 3, I argued that in late eighteenth-century Britain, lazy and predatory capital owners – the original targets of Puritan critique – hijacked the work ethic and turned it against workers. These were the great landlords, rentiers, crony capitalists (including the shareholders and managers of the piratical East India Company, colonial slaveholders, and other state-sponsored imperialist ventures), schemers, and monopolists. These were people who got rich not from hard work, saving, and prudent investment in the real economy, but from merely passive ownership of property, state favoritism, market manipulation, financial speculation, and oppression of the less advantaged, especially of workers, tenants, and needy borrowers. One measure of its economic effects is the gap between productivity growth and wage growth. During Engels’s Pause, from the turn of the nineteenth century to mid-century, British wages stagnated even as productivity galloped ahead.

A century after Locke’s mature political writings, controversy over policy toward the working classes came roaring back. This was the occasion for thinkers to develop both sides of the work ethic in light of changing economic and cultural conditions. One side, represented by Adam Smith and more radical thinkers including assorted Ricardian socialists, Marquis de Condorcet, Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and Marx, advanced the progressive, pro-worker dimensions of the work ethic that Locke had so skillfully promoted in most of his mature writing. The other side, led by Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, Edmund Burke, William Paley, Richard Whately, and Nassau Senior, followed the spirit of Locke’s suspicious and stinting poor-law reform proposal. This split reflected two large changes in British society near the turn of the nineteenth century: a much sharper division between workers and capitalists caused by the Industrial Revolution, and increasing secularization.

Conservative discourse about the Poor Laws at the turn of the nineteenth century was not purely theoretical. British policies toward the poor in the nineteenth century were deeply informed by the conservative work ethic. This chapter will consider the New Poor Law of 1834, a welfare reform for England and Wales, the Irish Poor Law Act of 1838, and British policy toward famine relief in Ireland during the potato blight and its aftermath, from 1845 to 1852. In each case, the results were disastrous for the poor. These consequences, which were known and welcomed by proponents of the conservative work ethic, illuminate how this ethic functioned ideologically, rationalizing systematic suffering behind masks of progress and paternalistic beneficence.

Let us now begin to trace the influence of the Protestant work ethic on the history of political economy and public policy in Britain. This influence is largely unacknowledged, although it continues into the present. As a result, we don’t fully understand what we are doing, or why, in disputes about property rights, economic regulation, taxation, labor law, and welfare policy. Making the assumptions underlying our practices explicit affords opportunities to subject them to critical examination. In addition, excavating the history of the long-lost progressive work ethic will help us to consider whether the resources there are worth reviving and adapting to current conditions.

Critics of Rawls’s principles of justice complain that they ignore considerations of merit or desert. As meritocracy is the chief justification for the extremely wide inequalities between workers at the top and bottom today, we need to examine this complaint. I argue that ideas of desert or merit are inherently unsuited to informing principles of justice for the basic structure of society. Moreover, attempts to raise the principle of desert to the systemic level have historically formed the ideological grounds for irresolvable class warfare. Rawls’s principles of justice supply a normative perspective that wisely aims to transcend class warfare. Rawls’s conception of property-owning democracy, culturally shaped by public affirmation of the difference principle, offers a plausible vision of how society may achieve such transcendence.