ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Sean Sayers returns to Hegel and Marx to contest what he sees as the dominant understanding of work within our neoliberal, capitalist economies. This understanding rests on a hedonist vision of human nature that reduces work to a burdensome means for securing an income and conceives work relations in wholly instrumental, competitive terms. Hegel and Marx, in contrast, understand human beings as productive beings and work as an activity through which, when properly arranged, they can actualize uniquely human capacities and powers. Coupled with Marx’s concept of alienation, this alternative vision of human nature both rebuts the dominant hedonist vision and yields a vital standard for critiquing the degraded forms of work many currently endure and indeed capitalist society as a whole.
