Le Travail: anthropologie et politique. Essai sur Rousseau (review)

This essay on the role of human labour in Rousseau's thought provides a useful mapping of the complexities of Rousseau's engagement with this fundamental human and social activity. Faïck establishes with care the development of Rousseau's thinking about the state of nature, mankind as a general category, and mankind as a social being. He focuses particularly on Rousseau's accounts of the causes and effects of inequality, and explores the apparent antagonisms between work as oppressive necessity and work as the condition of human freedom. Faïck begins with an account of Rousseau's understanding of the fundamental nature of mankind, constituted by a drive towards self-preservation and a basic capacity to sympathize with suffering, in which the activity of human labour seems to play a very small part. Having established this starting point for Rousseau's anthropology, however, Faïck quickly moves to introduce what he describes as the 'necessity' of labour for Rousseau. Labour is necessary, Faïck argues, first of all as a response to the material dangers and threats of the natural world. But the activity of human labour leads quickly to a risk of loss of autonomy and to dependence on others: 'en sortant de lui pour chercher le secours d'autrui, l'homme sort de la jeunesse du monde' (pp. 84–85). This risk is not generated by labour as a general category, far less by any sense of labour as a divine curse, but rather is produced by a social organization of labour that reduces individual autonomy and creates inequalities: 'la division du travail rompt cet ordre individuel […] c'est ce labeur assidu que Rousseau condamne, conséquence directe de la division du travail' (p. 87). Faïck argues forcefully that Rousseau's critique of a certain organization of human labour should not be read as a condemnation of human labour as such. Drawing particularly on Émile, Faïck demonstrates the importance that Rousseau ascribes to human labour: 'le travail, nous l'avons vu, fait d'Émile un être libre, indépendant' (p. 130). Faïck then moves his argument finally towards a claim that Rousseau did not reject or denounce human labour, but rather criticized the human consequences of its organization within capitalist social relations. Faïck's argument in this essay is that Rousseau's importance as a theorist of labour has been underestimated or, worse, overlooked. He is keen to demonstrate both that the notion of human labour is a key unifying principle within Rousseau's texts, and also that Rousseau was raising fundamental questions about labour before Hegel or Marx. This aspect of the book's polemic is, finally, the least persuasive. Faïck does not really demonstrate how his reading of Rousseau leads to a new or different understanding of the work of later thinkers, or show why Rousseau's earlier tackling of these issue is philosophically or politically important, and indeed Faïck's treatment of other philosophers or theorists of labour is generally rather brief. Faïck presents a clear and interesting account of aspects of Rousseau's thought, but he does not stage the major reappraisal of philosophies of labour that his essay seems to promise.