Work

Early Christianity turned away from Roman and Greek elite arrogance toward work. Jesus and the Apostles were peasant-craftsmen, and though early Christianity spread among wealthier urban populaces, there was in its communalism little room for denigration of merchants, slaves, and workers. St. Paul, a tentmaker, used the expression, "my fellow workers." St. Augustine (354–430) extolled work as a means of moral perfection and saw it as an expression of human genius, thereby glorifying God. This line of thought found practical expression in Christian monasticism, which prized hard, focused work—forest clearing, agriculture, manuscript illumination, and so forth. Monks did not value labor in itself, but insofar as it offered dedication and discipline to God, and supported the more important role of prayer. The church viewed non-monastic human work as being in the image of God's work, a generally favorable attitude to labor that would continue in Catholic thought to the present.

The medieval concept of "estates," much like the castes of India, organized society by collective work functions, duties, and rights—nobility, church, and peasantry/laborers—but relegated the direct producers of society to the lowest order. However, towns were different. They had merchants and moneylenders, the antecedents of capitalism, and also the craft guilds. Guilds embodied an ideal of gradually accumulated knowledge and dexterity, culminating in personal mastery of the entire production process, including control of the materials, tools, and markets for finished goods. This concept of control and mastery was manifested in group rules and rituals that marked guild members off from nonmembers.

The rise of Protestantism, in conjunction with growing commercialization in cities, transformed Western ideas about work. Martin Luther's (1483–1546) concepts reflected medieval social orders, in which everyone worked according to the trade in which they were born. However, he rejected the Catholic doctrine of higher and lower "callings" in favor of a singular, individualistic notion of "calling," a strong incentive to action. More importantly, John Calvin (1509–1564) forged a radically new vision of work. He saw success in life as a sign of God's predestined favor to the person. In a curious, but profound way, this doctrine that denied free will ended up strongly motivating labor and profit-making, since the individual cherished hard work and success as signs of heavenly election. Consistent with its roots in rising commercial centers, Calvinism also considered trade, profits, and finance as of equal value with direct production. This represents a distinct break with a long previous tradition of disdain for money-making in favor of farming.

Surveying this history, the great German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) argued that Protestantism stimulated the rise of European capitalism during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but significant criticisms have emerged. First, Weber overstated the asceticism of early capitalists and underestimated the role of consumption as a stimulus to work and economic growth. Second, mercantile capitalism arose first in Catholic regions of northern Italy and southern Germany. Weber focused on a somewhat later period in its development. Likewise, a distinctive east Asian form of capitalism has taken hold in the twentieth century in a world region without deep Christian traditions (Japan, China, and Korea). It is debatably linked to Confucian and other east Asian worldviews that emphasize group orientation and profound feelings of duty (as opposed to Western individualism). Weber did, however, seem to catch a broadly applicable aspect of the thinking of rising capitalists, their breaking with agrarian traditionalism concerned with protecting inherited class privileges and old-fashioned luxuries. For intellectual history more generally, his work pioneered the exploration of ideas as causes and not just reflections of social change.

The concept that labor was the singular source of value in goods, the ultimate basis of wealth, now emerged in a context of rising landowner-capitalists dedicated to transforming traditional means of production. Unlike in later eras when this "labor theory of value" would serve to highlight conflict between workers and capitalists, the early version emphasized the new landlord's role, taking private property out of the shared state of nature by adding the specific element of organized effort. This also conformed to the European expropriation of world resources after Columbus—putting the assumed "state of nature" to work, including human populations in the slave trade, land in the plantation colonies, and silver and gold in the mines of the Americas. John Locke's (1632–1704) Two Treatises on Government epitomize this line of argument. It offered a truly radical turn of thought by finding value in secular human action rather than, as in the Middle Ages, from fixed social rank combined with God's awesome majesty. Instead, the image of God became like that of man: God the maker. This fascination with making was the inspiration of eighteenth-century French and British Enlightenment attention to mechanisms of all kinds, natural and artificial. Denis Diderot (1713–1784), the son of a prosperous knifemaker, included the mechanical arts in his encyclopedia of natural and philosophical knowledge and insisted on the worth of artisans and artisanry. With these ideas, and with the concurrent rise of global trade, putting out manufacturing of cloth, improved agriculture, and the like, we have set the stage for modern wage labor and capitalism.