Worthy Efforts—Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe

Lis and Soly (history, Vrije U., Amsterdam) present an ambitious social history of European attitudes toward work and workers in the two thousand years prior to the industrial revolution. Their main questions are: who in pre-industrial Europe counted what as work and how did that affect those who had to perform it in terms of political power and social identity? They observe that a polyphony rather than cacophony of definitions and attitudes defined how work and workers were valorized and devalorized. Two major periods define their study, classical antiquity and from roughly 1300 to 1800, and they limit themselves to farmers, merchants, craftsmen and wage-workers in Western and Southern Europe. Key to their method is distinguishing attitudes toward work and attitudes toward workers. They consider how ancients viewed work and workers differently from the early Church Fathers and the role Christian ideologies of work played in revolutionizing ancient elite attitudes toward work, the merging of occupation and identity, how debates over knowledge vs. manual work go back centuries, aristocratic resistance to the legal emancipation of peasants and rise of market society, collective worker-action, the ideal of a commercial society, the patriarchal household and rural work, women artists, and worker autonomy. The absence/presence of a work-ethic in the distant past is also at times reviewed in light of the possibility of a low-work society advocated by the likes of Andre Gorz and Paul LeFargue. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Catharina Lis (1945) is Emeritus Professor of History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and currently Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp. She has authored and co-authored many books, and has recently co-edited The Idea of Work (Ashgate, 2009). Hugo Soly (1945) is Emeritus Professor of History at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and currently Guest Professor at the University of Antwerp. He has authored and co-authored many books and articles on the social history of pre-industial Europe.