Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Labour of Spirit

The Labour of Spirit

Cacciari, Massimo
Mandarini, Matteo

Paperback

Series: Italian List

Philosophy

ISBN10: 1803095148
ISBN13: 9781803095141
Publisher: Seagull Books
Published: Oct 30 2025
Pages: 130
Weight: 0.39
Height: 0.10 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.80
Language: English
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?

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