A particularity about the literature on the meaning of work is that the concept of meaning is discussed extensively and deeply, while the concept of work is hardly debated at all. Tackling this shortcoming, we start out by taking up contradictions in the social science debate on definitions of the concept of work. Four such contradictions stand out: (1) Subjective vs. objective definitions; (2) a single vs. several work concepts; (3) certain activities in themselves vs. any activity within specific social relations are to be regarded as work; and (4) empirical vs. ontological basis of the concept. In investigating them, we take help from what are often said to be the three most important classics of social science: How have Émile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx handled the concept of work? Specifically, can we get inspiration from them to take stands concerning the contradictions? The answers to these questions lead us to suggest this definition: Work is any activity performed in internal social relations that structure the sphere of necessity. Finally, we discuss the three suggested explicit conceptualisations of ‘work’ that we have found in the meaningful work literature.

The first section of this chapter explores Nietzsche’s attempt to explain the origins and continued prominence of metaphysical philosophy in terms of the utility it produces. It argues that Nietzsche takes seriously Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of ‘humanity’s metaphysical need’, but explains this more precisely as a form of narcissistic impulse. The second section of the chapter aims to address Nietzsche’s seeming ambivalence over whether ‘humanity’s metaphysical need’ is a fundamental and static feature of the human condition, or whether it is acquired and, therefore, in principle eradicable via a new naturalistic and ‘historical’ philosophy. The final section of the chapter situates Nietzsche’s views on science, suffering, and progress in the context of the ‘social question’, arguing that the Nietzsche of the late 1870s is closer to the likes of Marx and Dühring in taking suffering to be capable of being significantly reduced, thus ejecting the need for art and religion to endow it with meaning.

This chapter expands on the material underpinning of popular sovereignty and self-and-other-determination by theorizing racialized alienation from nature and manual labor as allowing for environmental destruction, a process mediated by technology. Diagnostically, Du Bois’s essays on development and economic value first connect the intensification of racism to western technological needs, turning upside down techno-racist claims that equated whiteness and technological superiority. Instead, he argues that racism and colonialism are necessary to procure raw materials on the cheap to secure industrial profits. Racist ideologies operate within this context to confine nonwhite bodies to strenuous manual labor close to nature. Relatedly, Du Bois contests the inferior value assigned to manual labor that follows, showing both the centrality of raw materials and manual labor to high-tech societies and clarifying its political origins. On the critical side, Du Bois first contests the desirability of speedy “development” and forced integration into the global economy, which curtails racialized peoples’ orientation toward their wellbeing. Second, Du Bois claims the technological mindset and orientation toward profit are poor standards of progress because they obscure the cooperative character of production and prevent the political imagination from envisioning new worlds.

In his work of 1844, Marx claims that human beings realize their nature through the joint activity of labor in a true communist society. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls calls the joint maintenance of a just society “the preeminent form of human flourishing. He says that “persons best express their nature” by maintaining just institutions. For both writers, what makes these joint activities central to the human good is the relationships they maintain among individuals who do not know of one another’s existence, relationships among distant unknowns. A necessary condition for these relationships to obtain is, in each case, a particular social ethos. If a standard left-wing critique of the market is cogent, and if the well-ordered society of Theory involves a widespread market, then the several elements in the desired social ethos of justice as fairness might be in tension with one another, might not be capable of being satisfied simultaneously. Rawls’s desired relationships might not obtain.

“What now? Enough is enough. Now we have to begin. Into our hands, life has been given.” With these exasperated words, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia begins like no other work of philosophy. In anger and aspiration, it does not begin with a pedantic preface or scholarly introduction. It begins in situ with a catastrophe that has thrown human existence back upon itself, from which no deliverance seems to be at hand. What is to be done? How can one survive? Caught in the condition of pitching “senselessly back and forth,” something nonetheless endures, we know not what, we know not how, but with nothing in our hands save our own obscurity, life still darkly speaks, for which, in this end of days, we want to be its initiative as well as its end.

Marx adopts a triadic model of the concept of property and emphasizes how this concept assumes different historical forms, including private property. I seek to explain why Marx must be thought to commit himself to the complete abolition of private property by beginning with how he speaks of property, equality and freedom as forming a constellation of concepts within capitalist society. This approach enables me to show how, for Marx, private property functions within a social world structured by contractual relations established between allegedly free and equal rights-bearing persons, whose self-conception and relations to one another are determined by an abstract exchange value that finds legal and political expression in a purely formal notion of equality. I argue that there are two key elements in Marx’s critique of private property. The first concerns how individuals are unable to relate to themselves and to others as genuine individuals in an economic and social system governed by exchange value. The second concerns how a system of exchange governed by this form of value dominates individuals and is thus incompatible with ‘free’ individuality.

As literary scholars have become increasingly concerned with the cultural significance of warfare, the concept of revolution has lost much of the authority it has traditionally enjoyed in discussions of aesthetics and politics. This chapter argues that literary studies have much to learn from the accounts of language and violence found in both military and revolutionary discourses. The first part of the chapter focuses on the maverick status of the word “revolution” in post-Enlightenment thought and describes the emergence of a theory of revolutionary language in Marx and his inheritors. The second part concentrates on Clausewitz’s understanding of state violence, asking why his conception of war should prove so attractive to revolutionaries. The final section of the chapter considers whether the attention paid to war and revolution has led to the neglect of a potentially more fundamental form of conflict: civil war. In closing, it is suggested that as nation-states lose their monopoly on large-scale organized violence, literary and cultural studies will have to embrace new paradigms of transnational and subnational strife.

This introduction presents the main challenges raised by the economic analysis of the long period, as well as the most recent economic approach called Unified Growth Theory. The introduction also presents the goal of this textbook - to allow all students from economics and the social sciences to have access to Unified Growth Theory, as well as the different parts and chapters of the textbook.

This chapter demonstrates the critical synonymy of horror and capitalism in American literary narrative. Beginning with colonization before accelerating into the period of exponential growth from around the Civil War through the Great Depression, the chapter looks to scenes of indigenous dispossession, resource extraction, urban industrialization, unemployed immiseration, and finally to the reactionary suppression with which capital protects its interests. The guiding hypothesis is that horror obtains into all of these crucial areas of the economy because capitalist accumulation is, in all of its forms, a catastrophically exploitative relationship between humans that depends on sensuous creation and so requires the productive grist of blood, brains, and bodies.

Kant and Schiller each take up one side of Rousseau so as to heal the rift between nature and freedom: Kant stressing our capacity to repress our natural passions, Schiller stressing Rousseau’s Romanticism and the harmony of freedom and sentiment in aesthetic education. Yet the free self and the natural self remained divided within each individual. Hegel healed this division through a synthesis of Kantian moral rigor and Schillerian love of beauty in which the concept of human nature was jettisoned altogether in favor of a totally historicized understanding of human existence. Hegel also resolved the Rousseauan conflict between our lost natural happiness and the alienating qualities of civilization by relocating Rousseau’s Golden Age of the remote past to the final outcome of civilizational progress, redeeming its alienating aspects as necessary for our fulfillment today. Hegel’s dialectic of Spirit includes his understanding of the ancient Greek polis, his critique of the Rousseau-inspired Jacobin Terror, his defense of passionate political ambition against Kantian moral purity, and his claim to have reconciled reason and revelation as the “self-actualization of God” as history. Hegel’s account of historical progress ignited an intense debate among his successors.

This chapter explores Engels’s engagement with apocalyptic thought. Some reduce Marxism to a secularized version of Christian eschatology, a claim that functions as a rhetorical weapon against Marxism’s originality. I reject this simplistic view but take seriously the textual evidence showing Engels’s interest in the apocalyptic figure Thomas Müntzer and the book of Revelation. He praises Müntzer, going so far as to argue that the coming kingdom of God preached by Müntzer was actually a Marxist ideal marked by radical equality. Though Engels rejects Christian apocalyptic doctrines, he shares with them the belief that things must worsen and reach a crisis before a utopian future is possible. Whereas Machiavelli rejects apocalyptic hope and Hobbes tempers it, Engels embraces it.

This essay develops from the hypothesis that the relationship between Marx and cinema is mediated by a shared investment in the revolutionary subject, a collective being capable of abolishing capitalism, insofar as its liberation necessitates total demolition of the standing social order, from which an egalitarian organization of society might then develop. Beginning in Russia after 1917, when cinema was used as a material force to organize workers and peasants, the essay’s first half tracks the way that a cinematic emphasis on the industrial proletariat has been replaced, or superseded, by an emphasis on what Marx and Engels described as a relative surplus population. The essay’s second half illustrates this shift with reference to two popular films, released into the apparent fall of American economic hegemony, approaching them as ensigns of an economy in terminal crisis wherein revolutionary subjectivities might be forged out of the otherwise disaggregate members of the surplus population.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine Dylan’s and Lennon’s conspicuous and copious allusions to events, characters and literature from the past using a framework inspired by the Marxist historiography of Fredric Jameson (2011). Together they reveal the similarities and dissimilarities between Dylan’s and Lennon’s worldview, and show how each artist’s appreciation of history informed their work. Chapter 4 discusses how Lennon’s colonial nostalgia coincided with the Beatles’ propulsion to international stardom during the dissolution of the British Empire, and was further complicated by his predilection for transgressive humour – which included ironic Nazi salutes before vast open-air crowds and acts of grotesque mimicry while performing onstage. Both chapters explore the basis for their subject’s historical awareness and show how it found expression in their work.

Introduction to the research claims and objectives of the work as a whole, paying attention to the fraught relationship between psychoanalysis, race, and poverty. A historical outline of the Freudian free clinic movement is used to examine the viability of an adapted psychoanalysis, with its components of free or low-fee therapy, community outreach, lay counselors, etc.

This chapter continues the analysis of Dylan’s conspicuous and copious allusions to events, characters and literature from the past with reference to Fredric Jameson’s (2011) Marxist historiography. It explores the parallels between Dylan’s romantic attachment to nature and his cultural forebears in nineteenth-century New England transcendentalism, and argues that this was rooted in his Midwestern upbringing on the Minnesotan Iron Range. As with the analysis of Lennon in Chapter 4, it shows how Dylan’s historical awareness formed the basis for his acute response to cultural tensions that arose as the post-war Fordist economic boom shifted into the economic crises of the early 1970s.

John Rawls’s full publicity condition says that persons in the society the philosopher theorizes about must in some sense have access to everything the philosopher says in her theorizing. In other words, everyone living in Rawls’s perfectly just society must have access to A Theory of Justice and related works. This account of publicity is the most difficult to analyze because there are many different interpretations of what, precisely, it requires and also many different arguments in its favor. Not only this, but certain criticisms of Rawls that some deem fatal to his project depend on particular interpretations of this publicity condition that can quite reasonably be rejected. In the current chapter I show that, once again, we face deep trade-offs. Insisting on this account of publicity will change the way political philosophy must be done, but doing so will help achieve normatively worthwhile ends.

Chapter 10 is dedicated to Friedrich Engels, who studied in Berlin at the beginning of the 1840s. The chapter explores Engels’ short monograph entitled Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy. In this work he gives a critical evaluation of German philosophy and speaks with nostalgia of the important role of Hegel and Feuerbach for the development of his thought and that of his collaborator Karl Marx. Engels claims that the radical nature of Hegel’s philosophy lies in its dialectical methodology. While it might at first glance look like Hegel is attempting to glorify the actual, in fact his theory shows that everything that arises in history appears at a specific place and under specific circumstances, and in time everything grows old and decays, at which point it is replaced by something new that is better suited to the new situation. This is a recipe for criticism and revolution. It is argued that Marx and Engels also further develop Hegel’s idea of self-conscious and alienation into a theory of class consciousness.

Chapter 3 is dedicated to Hegel’s student, the poet Heinrich Heine. It provides an account of Heine’s life and his personal relations to figures such as Hegel and Marx. An analysis is given of Heine’s On the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, with specific attention paid to the role he ascribes to Hegel. Heine portrays Kant and Fichte as philosophers of the revolution and Schelling as the philosopher of the Restoration. If Schelling is the villain, then Hegel is the hero of the story of German philosophy that Heine wants to tell. Hegel is portrayed as the high point of the development of the revolution of German thought. Heine compares the revolution of the mind that took place in Germany with the French Revolution that took place in the real world. He predicts a great German revolution that will begin a new period in European history. An interpretation is given of Heine’s poem “Adam the First,” which takes up some of the motifs from Hegel’s analysis of the Fall. An account is also given of Heine’s “The Silesian Weavers,” a poem written on occasion of the rebellion of weavers in Silesia in Prussia in 1844.