Nine books on the meaning of work
Another bonus feature to accompany my NYT essay on reading and the vibes economy
It’s been a pleasant surprise to see so many people read, share, comment on, and write to me about my recent New York Times opinion essay, “There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore.” It’s a short essay, and it’s easy to assume that short = insignificant, but that’s just negative self talk.
I’ve received several requests for the list of books on the meaning and value of work that I mentioned at the beginning of the essay. Here they are (and further down is the order in which students read them, along with some shorter works they read and the films they viewed):
Benedict of Nursia, Rule of Benedict (Liturgical, 1982)
Epictetus, The Handbook (Hackett, 1983)
Gordon Harvey, Writing with Sources: A Guide for Students (Hackett, 2e, 2008)
Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (FSG, 2005)
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics, 2002)
Plato, The Republic (Hackett, 1992)
Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience (Penguin Classics, 1983)
Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (Norton, 2e, 1995)
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (Penguin Classics, 2002)
Most of these books are pretty short. And one is a writing guide. Still a book!
People often let the aesthetics of book fetishism overtake reading itself; owning the book and photographing it in a beautiful location can, in some contexts (like Substack), count for more than reading. That’s bad.
But if you’re 20 years old and never thought of yourself as much of a reader, and if you made a decent effort at this stack, I think the physical books can stand as legitimate trophies — not to mention long-term sources of wisdom, provocation, and pleasure. That’s good.
The course was funded by a federal grant, and to win the grant and fulfill its requirements, I needed to make the reading list pretty ambitious and draw from sources across the centuries. The course also needed not to favor any single religious perspective. And yet the class was meant to fulfill a theology requirement for students at the college. I’m grateful to my department chair at the time for giving this experimental course the OK.
After the grant ended, I made the course more traditionally theological, swapping out Thoreau, Epictetus, and Marx for Leo XIII, John Paul II, and Josef Pieper, whose short and incisive Leisure, the Basis of Culture I have written about ad nauseam. I replaced some of the shorter sources, too — some essays, poems, and such.
BTW, Booker T. Washington is more theologically interesting than you might think (if you think about him at all, which most people don’t do). I wrote an academic paper making that argument a while back. I also wrote one about Thoreau’s surprising anti-work spirituality. So there was more theology in the original syllabus than it might seem at first glance.
Astute readers may notice that the authors on the list are all men. In later versions of the course, I assigned Miya Tokumitsu’s book, Do What You Love and Other Lies About Success and Happiness, as well as essays or excerpts by Arlie Russell Hochschild, Karen Ho, Adia Harvey Wingfield, Alison Pugh, Elizabeth Bruenig, and others.
If I were designing this course now? I have no idea what reading I would assign. I haven’t thought about it in a while.
Finally, here is the week-by-week reading schedule for the class. Please note: I think this material is worth reading, just not in a single three-credit undergraduate gen-ed course. I am not arguing that students should always be made to read nine books, or that the more books they read, the better. There was value in assigning as much as I did, but there are many values to consider when constructing a reading list — like, what can students reasonably make good sense of in the time they have? My class probably went too fast at many points.
I showed a few films outside of class time, and I took the students on a field trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where an educator showed them artworks to do with work. This was amazing. Of course, we viewed The Agnew Clinic, as well as John Singleton Copley’s Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, with Sarah Morris Mifflin working on a loom in support of a boycott on English products. The films and museum trip culminated in a paper students wrote on work and visual culture. I have no idea if I did a good job teaching this. But the students did really well. There they were, assiduously taking notes in the museum, while the educator spoke in front of Dr. Agnew, who was lecturing to his own students in the painting.
Perspectives on work from ancient Mediterranean cultures
T Aug. 30 Genesis 1-4 (selections, handout)
Th Sept 1 Ecclesiastes (OL)
T Sept. 6 Matthew (OL)
Th Sept. 8 Plato, The Republic, 1-31 (book I)
T Sept. 13 Plato, 32-59 (book II)
film, Office Space (Mike Judge, 1999), 7:00 pm
Th Sept. 15 Plato, 60-93 (book III)
T Sept. 20 Plato, 94-121 (book IV), 251-53, 123-31
Th Sept. 22 Epictetus, The Handbook
Work in medieval and early modern Europe
T Sept. 27 Rule of St. Benedict
Th Sept. 29 Geoffrey Chaucer, General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (OL)
M Oct. 3 film, The Parking Lot Movie (Meghan Eckman, 2010), 7:00 pm
T Oct. 4 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, selections (handout)
The Enlightenment and industrial capitalism
Th Oct. 6 John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ch. 5 (OL)
T Oct. 11 Benjamin Franklin, “The Way to Wealth” (OL); Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism, 1-36 + Weber’s notes
Th Oct. 13 no class, fall break
T Oct. 18 Weber, 67-105 + Weber’s notes
Th Oct. 20 Weber, 105-22 + Weber’s notes
F Oct. 21 Field trip to Philadelphia Museum of Art
T Oct. 25 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, 7-45 (ch. I-V)
Th Oct. 27 Washington, 45-81 (ch. VI-XI)
T Nov. 1 Washington, 81-121 (ch. XII-XV)
Th Nov. 3 Washington, 121-47 (ch. XVI-XVII); W.E.B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others,” in Washington, 175-85.
Post-Enlightenment suspicion of industrial capitalism
T Nov. 8 William Blake, selected poems and engravings (OL)
Th Nov. 10 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 218-58
film, Modern Times (Charles Chaplin, 1936), 7:00 pm
T Nov. 15 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 43-124
Th Nov. 17 Thoreau, 125-199
T Nov. 22 Thoreau, 200-284
Th Nov. 24 no class, Thanksgiving break
T Nov. 29 Thoreau, 285-382
Th Dec. 1 Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath, 1-48
T Dec. 6 Heschel, 49-101
Conclusion: Working on your soul in the post-industrial economy
Th Dec. 8 Matthew B. Crawford, “The Case for Working with Your Hands” (OL)