ABSTRACT
The nature and scope of anti-work thinking and writing can be defined or understood by distilling from its the varied sources a set of premises, or tenets. This chapter discusses the 18 tenets first presented in the Introduction. The tenets, which are overlapping, together frame the discussion for this book. One tenet clearly central to anti-work is that work as it is encountered in the modern world demands submission and is damaging to the human psyche. This position can be found in varying forms in writers like Simone Weil and Frédéric Lordon. Another typical tenet is that “merit” does not function well in selecting employees and actually just propagates inequities.
In this chapter each of the 18 tenets is elucidated and implications raised. This serves as an overview of anti-work and prepares the reader for the rest of the book, where anti-work is addressed in some detail from the standpoint of work psychology.
