Work in a Modern Society - The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective (review)

Kocka, arguably the doyen of social history in Germany, introduces this volume with a succinct overview of the changing meanings of work from European antiquity to the present. In ancient Greece, the upper classes had nothing but disdain for work, which Kocka defines as the "purposeful application of physical and mental forces to fulfill needs." (2) In their view, the world was split between inferiors who were barely good enough to perform manual work and superiors who engaged in more fulfilling activities. Enlightenment philosophy replaced this dualism with a universal praise of work that was increasingly seen as the source of all human wealth, but also as a commodity that could be bought and sold in the marketplace. Socialists, who began to voice their ideas in the second half of the 19th century, agreed with Enlightenment philosophers that work is the ultimate source of wealth but insisted that market exchange is a veil that covers up the exploitation of workers in the capitalist production process. In this regard they were closer, analytically that is, to antique ideas about a strict division between honourable upper classes and labouring lower classes or, as Marxists would say, wage slaves. Since they were at the heart of the labour process, socialists suggested that workers might as well take over the means of production and thus replace capitalist class rule and exploitation by a classless society of equals. Kocka doesn't raise the question of what happened to those ideas, though they inspired some of the strongest social movements in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Instead he leapfrogs to the late 20th century's thesis that work has become obsolete due to technological processes that, supposedly, relegated human labour power to the sidelines of economic development.

Subsequent chapters of the book pick up Kocka's narrative in the Middle Ages and follow it to present-day debates about globalization. Josef Ehmer demonstrates that, aristocrats' disdain for manual work notwithstanding, craftsmen and peasants took pride in their work and also found ways to express themselves. Yet, the chapter also shows the difficulties of writing social histories. While craftsmen were organized in guilds whose records are an important source for today's researchers, no such written records exist about medieval peasant life. Such problems are avoided by Gerd Splittler who carries Kocka's development of work narrative into the 19th century but, instead of looking for self-expressions of the labouring classes, focuses on intellectual discourse about work, notably the writings of Karl Marx and Max Weber. What is interesting about this discourse is that it developed, without using that term, ethnographies of work that reflect upon work experiences from outside of Europe. Thomas Welskopp looks at work as a key factor of self-identification for the German labour movement. It becomes obvious that the disdain of work that the European aristocracy had inherited from ancient Greek rulers was completely turned on its head within the labour movement whose activists regarded dismissively everyone who either really didn't work or whose work was considered unproductive. Notions of unproductive work are the link to Karin Hausen's chapter on gender and work in which she traces the origins of the male breadwinner model and its underlying division of labour between men and women. The development of this division, Hausen demonstrates, went hand in hand with an increasingly strict separation of a male-dominated public sphere and a private sphere in which women were performing allegedly unproductive work.

The next chapter, by Ute Frevert, analyzes trust as an indispensable resource of cohesion in modern society. Without trust, Frevert argues, costs of control are rampant and may still not suffice to guarantee cohesion. She also suggests that in modern societies with their constantly changing relations among individuals, trust needs to be actively constructed and that efforts in this regard should be considered as a kind of work. While her chapter is largely theoretical without addressing a specific historical...