Love and work.

Abstract

There is a wide consensus that the rise of industrial capitalism in the West was accompanied by, or even accomplished through, a profound change in the concept of work. While the medieval ethos disdained mundane labour, considering it to be a badge of inferior status, and measured social worth by other criteria, the work of this world moved gradually to centre stage so that by the latter part of the eighteenth century, what a man could do had become the measure of what he was. The appearance of the 'spirit of capitalism', or the work ethic, has been examined by countless scholars of divers orientation and its significance for social organization has become an article of faith in much social scientific and historical writing. Leaving aside the issue of its causal import, there is hardly a source that would gainsay the centrality of labour to the modem era.' There is a second feature of industrial society that is about as widely recognized. Social critics of varied political perspectives have associated the rise of modem society with the gradual erosion of social cohesion. The lament for the solidarity and intimacy of the social bond thought to be characteristic of traditional society has been heard for at least two hundred years, variously described as alienation, anomie, bureaucratization, et cetera, and it has played a central role in modem social scientific thought. The implication has been that as man has tumed towards work he has renounced the more specifically social gratifications of pre-industrial society. Loneliness is the price modem man has paid for his historically unique effectiveness.̂ While it is widely believed that modernization has been associated with the work ethic and a concomitant decline in the quality and depth of social relations, the intimacy of the tie between these two features of modem society is not clearly stated. Nevertheless, an association is often implied. Generally, those thinkers who have pointed to the appearance of the individualistic achievement ethic in industrial society have also described a parallel erosion of social solidarity, and when social alienation is analyzed, its relation to the work ethic is implied. A wide range of theoretical writing and empirical