cover image JUST WORK

JUST WORK

Russell Muirhead, Muirhead, . . Harvard Univ., $24.95 (224pp) ISBN 978-0-674-01558-6

Offering much more of a practical survey than the sort of academic criticism that typifies manifestos on workers and labor, Harvard government professor Muirhead confronts often contradictory elements of the modern working life, from the frustration of slaving away in order to merely survive in a meaningless consumerist cycle to the questionable justice of outsourcing labor that pays foreign workers pennies. In focusing on a consideration of "fit," the author's uniquely comprehensive bit of moral vocabulary that encompasses a concern for "work that fits" and "fitting work," Muirhead reveals that the question of just work, even in our modern capitalist society, is still very much aligned with the ancient question of "the good." Much of the book shows that the debates throughout history over varieties of the social, material, intrinsic and personal good are mirrored in philosophical observations on labor. Drawing from a historical study of perspectives on work from Plato and Aristotle, Marx and Mill, and modern thinkers like Rawls and Friedan, the book lends a powerful perspective on how human history comes to define what is important about work. This relationship is revealed in the story of slavery, domestic servitude and women as unpaid household laborers within American history. Muirhead's deft sketch is as much a sort of therapeutic exploration of the working life as it is hopeful social theorizing. (Oct.)