Review of The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship by Axel Honneth, translated by Daniel Steuer (Polity Press, 2024).
As the United States faces a serious rising economic competitor in China, some Americans are concerned the country isn’t working hard enough, while plenty of others think everyone is already working too much. These anxieties about work appear as ever to be driving both popular and more theoretical debates. In her recent book, Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back, philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, for example, contends that a conservative version of the work ethic has been used as a cudgel to chastise the lazy poor while valorizing the hard-working rich — while arguing for the value of a progressive, nonideological variant of the work ethic. Erik Baker has criticized America’s entrepreneurial work ethic for the exhausting demands it imposes on workers without any accompanying rewards. By contrast, right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro and Thomas Sowell unsurprisingly tout the economic, psychological, and moral virtues of hard work — with Shapiro going so far as to argue unironically that people ought to give up retirement and work until they die.
Axel Honneth makes a welcome, thoughtful contribution to discussions of work with his latest book, The Working Sovereign: Labour and Democratic Citizenship. Honneth is a third-generation Frankfurt School philosopher and critical theorist; though little-known outside the academy, he is widely respected for his pioneering left-Hegelian scholarship that culminated in his magnum opus, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life in…
Auteur: Matt McManus
