The Labour of Spirit (The Italian List)

A provocative examination of the fate of autonomous, creative labor under capitalism.

Between 1917 and 1919, Max Weber delivered two lectures titled Die geistige Arbeit als Beruf, which we might translate as The Labour of Spirit as Vocation. This weighty formula represented the hope that animated the world of bourgeois culture from the likes of Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Hegel and would later form the earliest threads of revolutionary thought from Feuerbach and Marx. The “labor of spirit” is creative, autonomous labor—human labor understood in its fully effectual power. To press for its realization is to liberate all activity from the condition of commanded or alienated work. But the dissolution of the labor of spirit into the capitalist form of production, into the universal machinism that swallows up that science which remains the true engine of development, also ends up delegitimating political authority, whose own foundation lies in the “promise of liberation.”

Massimo Cacciari takes up old questions and confronts them anew: Is the “iron cage” fated to imprison that “labor of spirit” that is political praxis? Will the spirit of capitalism end up completely undermining the space of the political? Or are relations between science and politics still thinkable that might free us from our “debt” as we proceed without means or ends within the techno-economic system?

Massimo Cacciari is one of Italy’s foremost philosophers. He has been a member of parliament for the Italian Communist Party as well as the mayor of Venice. A professor emeritus of aesthetics at the University of Venice, Cacciari is the author of numerous books, including Philosophy, Mysticism and the Political: Essays on Dante and Hamletics: Shakespeare, Kafka, Beckett. 

Matteo Mandarini is a senior lecturer in politics and organization at Queen Mary University of London. He is the translator of several books, including Hamletics by Massimo Cacciari, The Twilight of Politics by Mario Tronti, and The Writer and the People by Alberto Asor Rosa.