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Meda, Dominique,
Le travail. Une valeur en voie de disparation.
Paris, Aubier, 1995. 358 pp.
ISBN 2-7007-3695-1.
From the outset the author warns her readers that this book does not aim to present some new theory on labour to resolve all current problems. What she proposes to do is to take a retrospective look at philosophical thinking on the subject in order to develop a critical approach to the concept of work. The issues she raises relate to its status, meaning and future. She argues for an in-depth analysis both of the values it should be understood to embody and of the consequences of the various options for the future of society.
Hers is an ambitious goal. But the book meets the challenge with erudition and conviction. It undeniably introduces novel and -- in many respects -- refreshing ideas into current debates on employment and work. For a change -- and a pleasant one, too -- the author is a professor of philosophy. She is a graduate of France's prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure and of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration and lectures at the Paris Institut des Sciences Politiques.
Her starting-point is what she considers to be the paradoxical reaction of the industrialized countries (she does not say much about the developing countries) to the huge productivity gains achieved since the 1950s. The resulting decline of the need for human labour was perceived not the lessening of a burden but as a major social problem; Resources were mobilized to create jobs at any cost. In her view, this drive points to a common denominator in the various doctrinal currents that have shaped this century's thinking, namely, the belief that work is in the nature of every human being because it meets basic needs of self-fulfilment and social integration.
The author then embarks upon a historical retrospective, showing how work was dissociated from those functions in the distant past. She goes on to explain how the modern concept of work was...