The Labour of Spirit

Forthcoming in July 2025

A provocative examination of the fate of autonomous, creative labour 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 regulative idea, the project and hope that animated the world of great bourgeois culture from Kant to Goethe, from Romanticism to Schiller and from Fichte to Hegel, and would also later form the thread of revolutionary thought from Feuerbach to Marx.

The ‘labour of spirit’ is creative, autonomous labour, human labour understood in its fully effectual power. To press for its realization is to liberate all activity from the condition of commanded and dependent, which is to say alienated, work. But the dissolution of the labour 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’.

Is the ‘iron cage’ then fated also to imprison that ‘labour of spirit’ which is political praxis? Will the spirit of capitalism end up completely undermining the space of the political, reducing it merely to the form of the contract? 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 technico-economic system? These are the questions posed with dramatic clarity by Weber a century ago, which Massimo Cacciari takes up and confronts anew.