Postlapsarian Meditations: Labor and Political Participation in Socrates and Aristotle, with a Kantian Footnote

Labor occupies an interesting and important position in the history of critical theory. At the same time, it is difficult even to describe its role in the broad terms of an introduction without controversy. It is possible to begin with Hegel, where labor serves an important epistemic purpose in challenging dualism. As so often happens, what is of theoretical interest for Hegel takes on concrete dimensions for Marx, whether in his concern for relations of production or ever-increasing use of economic analysis. The first generation of the Frankfurt School is certainly indebted to Marx, but the indebtedness coincides with a renewed interest in subjectivity and cultural theoretical questions. Here, it is useful to mention issues of technology as addressed by the early critical theorists, treatments that led Marcuse towards a distrust of technology and Habermas to recover the Hegelian distinction between labor and interaction, eventually recasting it in terms of instrumental and communicative action. Recent years have seen a renewed interest by critical theorists in questions of work, sometimes led by Axel Honneth, sometimes going beyond his work. His deployment of the paradigm of recognition—particularly with respect to esteem—reincorporates at least some version of labor into critical theoretical discussion.1 Some critical theorists have returned to Hegel or Marx to recover notions of labor,2 while others—including Honneth—have begun to incorporate the insights of care work research into the paradigmata of critical theory.3 David A. Borman characterizes the relationship betweenMarx and the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists in the claim that, while Marx identified the objective conditions of revolution, critical theory set out to identify its subjective conditions.4 I do not want to evaluate that claim here, but I do want to undertake a small part of the project it describes. This is not undertaken by returning to the usual source texts of the critical theoretical tradition, but by reaching further back into the tradition of philosophy. I do not want to investigate contemporary notions of labor by looking at them or their modern antecedents, but rather their ancient ones. Socrates andAristotle are examined to articulate a range of possible positions on how labor shapes identity. Kant is turned to next for a picture of the preservation of these ancient convictions in modernity. I conclude, finally, by arguing that these positions are with us still. More than perhaps any other social phenomenon, the significance of labor for social belonging and political participation has been fundamentally reconfigured over the course of the development of political philosophy. Given its origins in the Greek and Hebrew traditions as punishment or a sign of divine disfavor,5 this is quite a remarkable rehabilitation, effected in Europe, in great measure, over the centuries of Christian domination. This is, at least, one side of the story. It is the side that underlies Rawls’s formulations concerning “fully participating members of society,” a side that provides the grounding for a certain range of arguments for the regularization of the status of undocumented immigrants. At the same time, however, we continue to practice politics in the shadow of a Greek tradition for which some form of independence or self-sufficiency is often viewed as a prerequisite for political participation. If labor is a mark of dependence, then, laboring risks becoming a barrier to political participation. One way to address this tension is to interrogate the concept of independence, particularly with an eye to separating economic or material independence from moral or political autonomy. A particularly helpful example of this strategy is that carried out by Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon, in “A Genealogy of Dependency.”6 While that treatment is exemplary in its historical and material perspicacity, it gives short shrift to the plausibility of the claim that some aspects of the connection between independent political participation and economic existence ought not to be simply consigned to the dustbin of egalitarian critique. If denying that connection seems to open the way for broader political participation, retaining it seems to hold out the possibility of understanding political participation in a richer, more meaningful way. I hope to address that shortcoming here, in four stages. I begin with Socrates, whose several comments on labor and its effects on laborers provide an outline for a position I call an ‘ontologically essentialist,’ claiming that the worker is a fundamentally distinct sort of human from the leisured. Leisure is connected to politics in the second, Aristotelian stage. Aristotle reserves the ontological distinction for women and so-called ‘natural slaves,’ assessing free labor as a merely existential barrier to the development of the excellences of the citizen, thus making the worker unfit for citizenship under the best constitution. My