Author: Bruce Robbins

Paul Jorion asks, “what is Livingston’s argument? Does he say that work is an abomination and if we had an ounce of reason, we would never have learned to love it? Or does he say that there is no more work and that we should mourn it? These are, of course, different conclusions and their assumptions are different. In the first case, if we should never have learned to love work, then our present era doesn’t differ at all from those that preceded it, and our own stupidity – of which our love of work would be the confirmation – is a constant.” From the point of view of abstract reason, these two arguments do indeed look like logical alternatives. From the perspective of a historian, however, and in particular a historian who has taken Hegelian dialectics as seriously as James Livingston has, there is no real choice between them. Smart and stupid are historically relative, as is reason itself. History, which as Livingston argues has been slowly pushing toward the abolition of work—that is, work in the sense that Hegel himself celebrated, as a mixing of oneself with the world and therefore as a means of self-transcendence– has thereby made it possible and then increasingly likely that we will find work an abomination and will castigate ourselves for our stupidity in loving it. From a Hegelian viewpoint, the...