Pathologies of WorkAuthor(s): Rahel Jaeggi

Source: Women's Studies Quarterly , Vol. 45, No. 3/4, PRECARIOUS WORK
(FALL/WINTER 2017), pp. 59-76
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York

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Pathologies of Work

Rahel Jaeggi

Abstract: Considering “pathologies of work” in the context of a historico-

normative reconstruction of the meaning of work as social cooperation,
the paper intends to establish a connection between a number of different
problems. These include the continued existence of exploitation and alien-
ation as well as the precariousness of work and long-term unemployment.
Borrowing a phrase from Hegel, work is conceived as “sharing, participat-
ing or partaking in the universal resources of society,” where “resources”
include wealth as well as competencies. The above-mentioned pathologies
of work can then be understood as different ways of refusing or preventing
participation in these “universal resources.” Keywords: work, meaningful
work, alienation, precariousness, social cooperation

This essay proposes to consider what I call “pathologies of work” in the

context of a historico-normative reconstruction of the meaning of work as
social cooperation. In adopting this diagnostic approach, I have two aims:
on the one hand, my consideration of aberrant societal developments as
pathologies of work intends to illuminate, through an analysis of negative
phenomena, the positive content of the worth and meaning of work in
modern societies.
On the other hand, I wish to bring together, under one roof, a number
of different problems. These include the continued existence of exploita-
tion and alienation, the precariousness of work and long-term structural
unemployment, and the threat posed to contemporary working condi-
tions by what one could call the “de-dignifying” of work (to invert a notion
of Robert Castel’s) (2012, S. 68, my translation). The title of this article,
“Pathologies of Work,” is intended to indicate and establish a connection

WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 45: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2017) © 2017 by Rahel Jaeggi. All rights reserved.

59

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60 Rahel Jaeggi

between these different problems by conceiving them as different kinds

of deficits in a (labor-mediated) form of social cooperation. Borrowing a
phrase from Hegel, we can say that work amounts to sharing, participating,
or partaking in the universal resources of society. I understand the word re-
sources here to mean that which a given society has achieved and that which
it is further capable of, in terms of wealth as well as competencies. Work
thus allows one to share in the resources of society, not simply insofar as it
constitutes a means of acquiring wealth or entry into the sphere of inter-
subjective relations, but also insofar as it enables one to share in the evolv-
ing knowledge and know-how of a society. If this is what work means, then
the above-mentioned pathologies of work can be understood as different
ways of refusing or preventing participation in these universal resources.

The Meaning of Work

It would of course be superfluous to note that work is a highly sociopoliti-

cally charged topic. In order to see that, one only has to take a quick glance
at the news. But from a more long-term perspective as well, it would be
difficult for anyone to remain oblivious to the urgency of the problems
that we might group under the umbrella term of the crisis of the work-
oriented society.
Nevertheless, in recent decades, there seems to have been a narrowing
of the sociopolitical treatment of the question of work. At the tail end of
the 1968 movement and in the labor union debates of the seventies, the
question of the humanization of work was very widely discussed, partic-
ularly with a view to the forms of alienation with which work (and espe-
cially industrial labor) is bound up. For most people today, however, the
scarcity of work, underpayment, and the precarization of working condi-
tions, which in certain respects undermines the historical compromise
solution of a legally “dignified” labor market (to use Castel’s term) (2012,
S. 68, my translation) that is held in check by the welfare state, have taken
center stage in political debates (Castel 2000, 18). Questions concerning
the quality of work and the demand for meaningful, good, or nonalienat-
ing work seem to have been put on ice, as it were, for less trying times.
In my view, however, this change in the conversation around work does
not correspond to the subjective experience of those who do or do not
work. Beyond the mere facts of insecurity and insufficient remuneration,
even those working in the most casual and worst-paid jobs also undergo

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 Pathologies of Work  61

painful experiences that one would be quite justified in calling experiences

of alienation. This is because in our work-oriented society, work plays a
preeminent role. We do not only maintain a livelihood through our (gain-
ful) employment. As Hegel writes, not only the individual’s subsistence
but also her worth and dignity are mediated by work. (Hegel 1991, § 199)
Work structures our lives, our self-consciousness, our sense of self, and our
social relations.
A great deal of what we do (and not only if we are workaholics) is direct-
ly or indirectly connected to the role that we occupy or wish to occupy in
the social sphere of work.1 Likewise, the perceived success of our lives and
our social relationships depends to a great extent not just on whether we
have work, but also on what kind of work this is.
What does it tell us, then, when employees at Berlin’s National Library
complain of their contemptuous treatment by both library users and their
superiors, and of a decreasing sense of responsibility resulting from the
greater use of contracted labor (a situation also reflected in the increas-
ing casualization and outsourcing of labor in hospitals); when teachers
complain that they do not have time to meet the ever more diverse de-
mands of their jobs; and when the pressures of contemporary academic
life make professors feel as though they are stuck “on a hamster wheel” (a
direct quote from a colleague)?2 It tells us that individuals have complex
and rich expectations regarding their working conditions and that these
expectations can be disappointed. What is especially interesting here,
however, is that when faced with such inappropriate working conditions
people not only feel insulted as a person, but also feel disdained in their
work and as workers.
Unlike the sociologist Heinz Bude, who claims that many so-called
“low-skilled jobs”3 involve work that one cannot do well and that one thus
could not possibly identify with, it seems to me that one can observe—to
borrow a familiar motif—a desperate desire for identification even under the
most unlikely of circumstances. Even in what may seem at first glance to
be the most nondescript jobs, people still seek out and (sometimes) find
a certain scope for appropriation and self-determination. This scope for
making one’s work one’s own is established, made use of, and vehemently
defended not only in supposedly creative or explicitly social professions,
but also in other areas (and at the other end of the pay scale).4
This is not to say that meaningful work only depends on us and our
ability to identify with or to appropriate it. To the contrary. But to the ex-

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62 Rahel Jaeggi

tent that this is the case, it explains why it is possible for individuals to
be hurt when their need to identify with their work is blocked. And it is
precisely because we expect to find meaning in our work and attempt to
carve out a nonalienating space within objectively alienating working con-
ditions that we are vulnerable to exploitation (or this at least contributes
to our vulnerability). Work is thus clearly enmeshed in a dense network of
ethical relations, normative expectations, and normatively charged func-
tional conditions, which may or may not be fulfilled. In other words, what
is important is not simply work as such, but the quality and standing of
one’s work—or, in more traditional terms, what is important is not simply
labor without exploitation, but labor without alienation.

Pathologies of Work

To indicate the phenomena that interest me in connection with the social

conditions of work, and to give a sense of the diversity of the scenarios
that a philosophical diagnosis and critique of contemporary working con-
ditions must address, I would like to begin by sketching some of today’s
paradigmatic pathological working conditions.
Let us begin with labor conditions in the service sector, and with what
have been described in sociological terms as roles performed by a (new or
old) service sector proletariat. These roles typically consist of unskilled
services, a lot of them performed by women, such as cleaning, building
maintenance, cloakroom services, front desk and cashier duties, and so on.
Most of the services in question are now performed by agency workers—
they are systematically outsourced.
The problems accompanying these developments are well known:
they include not only the lower remuneration that such workers often
receive in comparison with permanent members of staff, but above all
the increased precarization of their work, the negligible legal protection
they are offered, and the loss of the accomplishments tied to the “digni-
fying of work” that Castel remarked upon (2012, S. 68, my translation).
These working conditions are characterized by systematic underpay-
ment, systematic understaffing, and poor timetabling, sometimes due
to long commutes not even allowing for a good night’s sleep. This not
only makes one think of the overexploitation known from earlier times
of capitalism; there is also a further respect in which these conditions
are instances of what I have termed pathologies of work. Deregulation

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 Pathologies of Work  63

often goes hand in hand with the monotonization and impoverishment

of tasks and thus of the skills required to perform them. These working
conditions cause suffering because they make it increasingly difficult for
workers to identify with their work. Thus, this sector (in particular) has
seen developments that have drastically changed the subjective experi-
ence of the quality of such work and individuals’ relation to it, as well
as the relation between such workers and their immediate superiors.
Whereas in the past (without wishing to romanticize), the school jan-
itor was a member of the school staff—and was feared, annoyed, and
respected in equal measure—today he is often an employee of a private
security company on a temporary contract with carefully measured
working hours. This doesn’t only lead to a loss of social standing. We also
have to consider the frustration that goes along with the impossibility
of doing one’s work well. Consider, for example, nurses who don’t find
enough time to care for their patients under the strict regimen of a mar-
ketized hospital system. Nurses complain about working conditions that
are not only precarious and potentially exploitative, but also frustrating.
And there is yet another dimension: bad working conditions (related to
outsourcing and precariousness) then are obstacles to fulfilling what the
workers have taken on as some kind of work ethics related to the tasks
to be performed. Or to put it simply: these conditions make work, as
work, bad.
Artists, journalists, writers, and other freelancers also tend to be in
precarious positions. The members of this professional group can even
be regarded as pioneers in precariousness, insofar as the latter goes hand
in hand with what Ulrich Bröckling has called the “entrepreneurialism of
the self ” (2016). This form of self-cultivation, marked by an identification
with the projects one works on, was initially associated with a bohemian
conception of freedom and creativity. Yet those who celebrated such pre-
carious, project-based work years ago as an alternative to normal working
conditions and restrictive nine-to-five jobs are increasingly coming to see
the flipside of such “doubly free” work (to use Marx’s expression) (1991,
154, my translation). Here, too, the problem is not limited to the hard-
ships attendant on the precariousness of such workers (which may man-
ifest themselves very differently in the different segments of this part of
the labor market). In addition, the permanent pressure to cultivate and
interpret oneself on the basis of criteria of employability promotes an
instrumental relation to oneself and one’s occupation—which then be-

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64 Rahel Jaeggi

comes a pathology of an alienating kind. Likewise, the pressure to take

responsibility for oneself and for the continual threat of failure tends to
reduce solidarity. For the artist, precarious work is only ever a transitional
phase, whatever kind of job she may do to pursue her brilliant intuitions,
and in any such transitional phase it is difficult to build alliances. This leads
to a situation that is desired by no one and yet jointly produced by every-
one—a phenomenon that one could call a collective incapacity to act. If
this new kind of work has been interpreted as the abolition of alienation,
it now turns out that this seems to be instead a somehow paradoxical de-
velopment in which the end of one type of alienation (the classical one
related to monotony and fragmentation) is followed by the introduction
of another kind.
Let me finally mention a pathology of work which is in fact not a pa-
thology of work at all, but of nonwork, namely unemployment, which rep-
resents the long-term loss of the possibility of sharing in the work-oriented
society. In a work-oriented society in which individuals are integrated into
legally protected jobs, the unemployed are superfluous. They are those
who have no use for their time. Their experience is like that of the partic-
ipants in Marie Jahoda, Paul Felix Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel’s ground-
breaking study on the unemployed residents of Marienthal (1975). “At
some point, midday comes,” says one of their participants, after being
asked to describe his daily routine—a routine marked by a continually
expanding time of waiting, resignation, devaluation, and apathy ( Jahoda,
Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel 1975, 84, my translation).
Now, even a brief glance at the contemporary pathologies of work I
have sketched above (without any claim to completeness) shows us that
we are dealing with a rather complicated picture.
We are confronted with a divided labor market that presents very dif-
ferent problems depending on one’s position within it: too much work on
the one hand; too little on the other; too much identification and expecta-
tion of (or even compulsion toward) identification on the one hand; too
few opportunities for identification on the other.
What we see, then, are very classical phenomena of the devaluation
and down-skilling of work due to working conditions that make workers
interchangeable with respect to their skills and personalities. Alternatively,
we are confronted with the universally flexible worker, whose free time is
turned into work time and whose creative potential can only be developed
at the cost of investing her whole personality in it. Whereas in classical in-

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 Pathologies of Work  65

dustrial work it was a certain inflexibility (in the Fordist division of labor)
that led to the fragmentation of tasks and the suffering of employees, to-
day’s employees suffer on account of the shifting skill sets demanded by
their work and a corresponding vagueness over whether they meet these
requirements. Here the idea of the “whole person” and the realization of
their potential itself becomes a problem.
But there are not simply two kinds of problems. We have seen that
under the working conditions sketched above, different pathologies
come together in different ways. There is typically a mixture of precar-
iousness, deprivation, material deficiency, and social exclusion, though
not all of these factors have to appear together. There is also, for exam-
ple, a precarious but not materially poor middle class, or a middle class
that is precarious and relatively poor but not necessarily excluded from
that label. And the vulnerability caused by casualization and the threat
of long-term joblessness of course opens the door to exploitation, but it
also goes hand in hand with the painful down-skilling and impoverish-
ment of work and the instrumentalization and self-instrumentalization
of the worker. Thus, when front desk services at the national library lose
their institutional anchoring within the library and employees’ areas of
expertise (and thus the diversity of their work and the authority they ac-
quire through it) come to be circumscribed, this may be directly linked
to the fact that work has been subcontracted through a drive to econ-
omize, so that some shifts are now taken on by employees of outside
agencies, who have no direct contact with the library institution.5 What
the front-desk staff complains about is that there is “nothing for us to do
here anymore” (pers. comm.). In other words, it is no longer possible for
them to act in a way that they feel is important. What keeps them up at
night and causes them to develop psychosomatic symptoms is that the
relations they have developed with library users over many years and
the authority they have thereby gained risks being lost. And when the
cleaning company employee complains that due to the limited hours
they are given per week they cannot even remove the worst dust in the
school classrooms, they also indicate that their expectations concern-
ing the meaning and the (objective, rather than subjective) quality of
the work they do, and their possibility of identifying with it, have been
disappointed.
What this reveals, however, is not only that alienation still exists and is
linked in various ways to other problems, but also that the classical diagno-

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66 Rahel Jaeggi

sis of alienation (as a paradigmatic diagnosis of a social pathology of work)

does not take us much further by itself. Though I have suggested that many
of the pathologies discussed above can indeed be regarded as experiences
of alienation, one nonetheless has to conceive alienation here in a broader
and different manner to those who (like Marx’s contemporaries, though
not Marx himself) oriented themselves exclusively by Adam Smith’s ex-
ample of the division of labor in the pin factory or by the fear, dominant in
Goethe’s time, of the loss of the “whole person.” (Smith 2007, 8 ff.) There
are then (at the phenomenal level) new forms of alienation that call for
new interpretations. These new interpretations also serve to show that the
old interpretations were (even in their own time) unsatisfactory, insofar
as they rested on (Romantic-) essentialist definitions of the human being
and its activities.
We are now getting closer to what the concept of “pathologies of work”
refers to. By pathologies of work, I understand, first of all, forms of work
that do not meet the expectations and demands of those who perform
them and which, in light of these expectations, cause workers to suffer. Yet
in order to speak of pathologies of work here, one has to show that such
forms of work are objectively pathological—that is, that the suffering that
is subjectively experienced is caused by the institutional setting of work,
by the conditions of labor. And there is a further criterion that needs to
be developed: that these conditions contradict the intrinsic character of
work.
To speak of pathologies of work is then both to speak of individuals’
subjective experience of suffering as a result their work, and of the objective
conditions that contradict the demands and practical conditions of fulfill-
ment associated with particular forms of work—and then again to speak
of individuals’ suffering as a result of these objective conditions. The pa-
thology of work thus refers to subjective suffering as a result of objectively
bad work—and here a sociophilosophical diagnosis of such pathologies
needs to consider the normative characteristics of good work. This implies
an account of the features that make work good work beyond the worker’s
own contentment—that is, in an objective sense related to the task that is
performed through work.

What Is Work?

If we are dealing here with pathologies of work as work (and not with the
effects or the material reward that we get out of work), then it would seem

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 Pathologies of Work  67

sensible to seek to diagnose such pathologies on the basis of a conception

of successful or meaningful or appropriate work. What is work, then, if it
can be pathological? Or, in other words, what is successful work, or what
are the normative implications of the concept of work? Is there a concept
of work that could serve as a criterion for a sociophilosophical evaluation
of working conditions?
In setting out from the problems noted at the outset, we would seem
on the one hand to already associate something quite definite with the re-
source that is work. It must then be possible to infer from the role, func-
tion, and “value” of work what its good and bad instantiations are, and thus
what constitutes good or inadequate working conditions. This is at least
what I have to assume in speaking of pathologies of work.
On the other hand, however, we are confronted here with a (well-
known) problem. Though we seem to assume that we have some sense of
what work is when we speak of it, this confidence proves to be misplaced
as soon as we attempt to define work as a specific form of activity, by elab-
orating various characteristics of the activity as such. The German philos-
opher Friedrich Kambartel (1993) demonstrated this in an article entitled
“Arbeit und praxis,” in which he also undertook a necessary conceptual
clarification with which I shall engage in what follows. In the following,
I would first like to elaborate briefly on this difficulty, before proposing a
historico-normative, conceptual method of isolating the normative con-
tent of the concept of work.
Is work, then, to be conceived as a specific kind of activity? I first want
to briefly run through a few more or less plausible candidates for such a
definition, drawn from our everyday understanding of work.
First, work is sometimes understood as a strenuous activity; yet having
children is also strenuous, without thereby constituting work. Not every
strenuous activity, then, counts as work. And inversely, some people seem
to work without any physical effort, though we would not wish to deny
that they are in fact working.
Second, defining work as something that requires particular skills and
qualifications does not take us much further. In order to play a Beethoven
sonata or build a Star Wars LEGO spaceship, one certainly has to have de-
veloped certain skills, but such activities cannot be straightforwardly un-
derstood as work, especially in cases where the pianist is a hobby musician
and the Star Wars fan is a hobby engineer.
Third, were we then to conceive work as an instrumental or productive
activity (someone making a table, for example, is working), we would fail

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68 Rahel Jaeggi

to account for many activities that we are used to thinking of as work. In

addition, and inversely, not every such productive activity counts as work.
(On this conception, then, academic work, educational work, service pro-
vision, and even ploughing a field would not amount to work, whereas
constructing a mobile with a fretsaw would).
Fourth, even a broader conception of work as a purposeful, goal-oriented
activity, as opposed to a playful engagement with thoughts and things, still
fails to capture the specific character of work. You need only to observe the
seriousness and the disciplined, planning-oriented attitude that children
bring to their construction projects to question the wisdom of drawing the
distinction along these lines. In other words, one can of course distinguish
between goal-oriented and planned activities and unplanned and aimless
activities, but this distinction cannot be mapped onto one we might make
between the playful LEGO builder and the working engineer.
What we can take away from these failures is that work cannot be in-
dividuated as a specific kind of activity over and against other activities,
at least not in a way that could bring some order or lend plausibility to
our everyday understanding of it, nor in a way that would allow us to
easily draw any normative conclusions about good or desirable or even
decent work.
Now there is an obvious alternative to such an activity-based defini-
tion. Perhaps our inquiry into the content of the concept of work should
go by way of an inquiry into the role and function of work in society, i.e.,
we should consider work as an economic concept. The simplest (and in
our society, most obvious) approach here would be to define work as
paid work. Everything for which one receives (legitimate) payment on
the basis of a contractually regulated relationship (everything, then, for
which one receives a wage or salary) would then be work. The problem
with such a conventional conception of work, however, is that it doesn’t
really tell us anything in terms of a normative stance. It only states that
all those activities that have the possibility of being remunerated on the
labor market count as work, while those that don’t have this possibility
do not count as work. From a normative perspective this is an unsatis-
fying conventional definition because it infers from the mere fact of a
certain societal consensus, the legitimacy of this consensus, and from
the actual state of working conditions, the conceptual content of work.
This does not help us, however, if we are looking for normative criteria of
what should count as work; if we wish to argue, for example, that house-

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 Pathologies of Work  69

hold or care work, which thus far has not been recognized in society as
work, should be regarded as such.
A more sophisticated and broader version of the economic concept of
work has been offered by Kambartel, who proposed to define work in re-
lation to the exchange of services within society. In societies marked by a
division of labor, we exchange goods and services. For Kambartel, work
can then be defined as an activity performed for others in the context of the
exchange of services within society (1993, 241). In contrast to the simpler
economic criterion of work, this definition offers a normatively more ro-
bust, if more interpretatively challenging, criterion for the determination
of the right relationship between work and nonwork (which is the prob-
lem that Kambartel himself is interested in solving). In a nutshell, from the
fact that something constitutes a functional and integral element of the ex-
change of services in society, Kambartel derives the normative claim that
it should be included in the sphere of paid work (1993, 246 f.). By means
of Kambertel’s criterion, one can then say of certain activities that they are
work if they had previously remained hidden and were performed for oth-
ers in the context of the exchange of services within society—in feminist
discussions, the expression shadow-work has been coined to describe such
activities (Caffentzis and Federici 1994, 144).
Nevertheless, the definition of work as an activity performed for others
in the context of the exchange of services within society is still not suffi-
cient for the diagnosis of pathologies of work. It serves to distinguish work
from nonwork and to bring to light the unfairness of excluding certain
kinds of work—mainly work done by women—from public recognition.
Yet it does not say anything about the quality of work. In order to draw a
normative distinction between work as it should be in order to be good
or nonpathological work, and work as it is in society, we need a concept of
work that is neither essentialist nor conventional and that is able to take
account of the quality of work.
In the following I shall attempt to combine my redescription of the
(new) pathologies of work with a response to this challenge. My solution
will be the following: if we define work in terms of sharing/partaking in
the universal resources of society, this yields criteria for determining the
nature of pathological work and a means of grasping the connection be-
tween different pathologies.
My thesis here is that the meaning of work cannot be adequately ex-
plained as a specific kind of activity nor with respect to its function within

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70 Rahel Jaeggi

a social system of cooperation alone, but only in terms of the historically

concrete instantiation of the resources of society. Work is a normatively
charged concept, one in which normative expectations and the current
form of a society’s relation to work have become sedimented. Understood
in this way, the concept (of work) does not simply refer to what a certain
structure has become over time and currently is, nor to what we might
arbitrarily read into it, nor to what an ahistorical anthropological defini-
tion takes it to be. Instead, it is necessary to understand work as a concept
in which a particular problem and a corresponding task have crystallized
over the course of time.
I would now like to propose an interpretation of work that I have hint-
ed at above: work, in the sense we are looking for here, means sharing in the
universal resources of society (to borrow a phrase from Hegel) (1991, 233).
These “universal resources” (in German: Vermögen) are to be under-
stood here—in line with the double meaning of the German term—as
both what a society has and what it is capable of doing. Work is thus a means
of participating in society—not only in its wealth (in a continually grow-
ing economic surplus product), but also in the intersubjective recognition
between its members and the knowledge and abilities that a certain so-
ciety has developed over the course of its history (i.e., that it has histor-
ically bequeathed in the form of resources and competencies). If this is
the meaning of work, then the pathologies of work discussed above can
be understood as different ways of refusing or preventing participation in
these universal resources.
In the following, I shall elaborate a little on these claims by going back
to Hegel’s account, before considering how this analysis allows for an inte-
grated interpretation of contemporary pathologies of work.

Work as Sharing in the Universal Resources of Society

In his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel conceives civil society as

a work-oriented society. In doing so, he gives what is both a descriptive
and a normative account of the dominant working conditions in such a
work-oriented civil society, which runs as follows:

In this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs,

subjective selfishness turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the
needs of everyone else . . . so that each individual, in earning, producing,

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 Pathologies of Work  71

and enjoying on his own account [für sich], thereby earns and produc-
es for the enjoyment of others. This necessity which is inherent in the
interlinked dependence of each on all now appears to each individual
in the form of universal and permanent resources . . . in which, through
his education and skill, he has an opportunity to share; he is thereby
assured of his livelihood, just as the universal resources are maintained
and augmented by the income which he earns through his work. (Hegel
1991, 233; emphasis in original)

With the notion of the “interlinked dependence of each on all,” Hegel is

clearly taking up Adam Smith’s description of the functioning of a society
based on a market-led division of labor. Hegel, however, offers an ethical
interpretation of this state of mutual interdependence.6
“This necessity” (which is at first a form of compulsion, a de facto inter-
dependence) becomes a rational necessity; no longer simply a condition
of the effective satisfaction of one’s own interests, it becomes the condition
of possibility of ethical, cooperative relations in general—thus transcend-
ing the instrumental relation.
If the individual has the opportunity, “through his education and skills”
to share in the “universal and permanent resources” of society, then the ne-
cessity of participating in this universal, market-mediated sphere becomes
the possibility of participation qua qualification, qua “Bildung,” a possi-
bility that would not be open to the individual outside of the cooperative
social sphere. The individual would thus not be who they are if they did
not to go through this educational process that is mediated by society’s
universal resources.
In order to take full stock of the content and interpretative force of this
conception of work, I would now like to spell out what is implied by the
idea of participating in the universal resources of society. We can first note
that what seems to be meant here is both participating in and sharing in the
universal resources of society. The individual who participates in the so-
cial sphere of work both does something—i.e., makes a contribution to the
universal resources—and obtains or receives something. Through his work,
the individual produces the universal resources of society, and at the same
time is also entitled to a part of them. This is then evidently a relation in
which individuals reciprocally contribute to the satisfaction of their needs.
The concept of resources (Vermögen) introduced by Hegel here also
has a wide range of implications. On the one hand, resources are what a

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72 Rahel Jaeggi

society has (e.g., its material resources); yet the term “resources” can also
refer to that which a society is capable of, to what it can do, and thus to the
knowledge and know-how (and their mode of organization) developed by
a society over the course of its history.
In this regard, the idea of the universal resources of society is tied to
what in his Philosophy of History Hegel calls the “legacy” (Erbschaft) of a
society, that in which its historical achievements are contained (1972, 21).
The universal resources of society are also the result of a developmental
process, and in them, the work of previous generations is “stored.” Sharing
in the universal cooperative sphere of work thus also means sharing in this
societal legacy.
But what does Hegel mean by calling these the universal resources of
society? These resources are universal not only because they are the result
of a common effort (on the part of all who are engaged in the cooperative
working process), but also because what is achieved through this effort ex-
presses the universal interest, insofar as the satisfaction of individual needs
also secures the universal well-being. But they are also universal because
the skills concerned both demand and transcend particularity. (Education
consists of working through or working off particularity.) The universal
resources are thus related to a particular form of cooperative activity.
As a description of a social relationship, the expression “participa-
tion in the universal resources of society” draws attention to the fact that
what is in question here is indeed a relationship between (already lib-
erated, independent) individuals and the universal. It is a relationship
(rather than a presupposed unity), and one that has to be actively main-
tained by the individuals involved. By working and contributing their
capacities and skills, the latter must (and can) make themselves part of
the universal sphere; on the other hand, however, this sphere only ex-
ists as the relationship between such (free) individuals. Work is thus not
simply a cooperative relationship; in civil society, it is a cooperative re-
lationship between (emancipated, liberated) free beings that only arises
as an ethical sphere through their cooperation. And this works the other
way around, too; the ethical dimension of work only arises because this
cooperation is free.
Finally, what the individual participates in through their education and
skills is both something that already exists (the sphere that is mediated
through the division of labor) and something that they coproduce and
coconstitute through their participation in it. Their relation to it is then
a relation of appropriation and constitution. One who participates in the

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 Pathologies of Work  73

universal sphere also helps to shape it—even where this formative power
is lost or cannot be given full expression due to the role of certain social
(power) structures in the organization of work.
Understanding work as sharing in the universal resources of society is
thus to understand it as sharing in the complex of skills and capacities (in-
cluding a certain mastery over nature) that humanity has acquired over the
course of its history, and in the associated social institutions that both rest
on and make these possible.
There remains much to say about certain parallels with Marx’s notion
of the appropriation of and alienation from one’s “species-being” (Gat-
tungswesen) (Marx 1968, 516 f., my translation). In concluding, however, I
will limit myself to a brief discussion of the different forms of disturbance
of participation in the universal resources of society.

Pathologies as Loss or Obstacles to the Participation in the Universal

Resources of Society

In what way can participation in the universal resources of society be

pathologically disturbed? And how might the notion of the universal
resources of society help us to give an integrated interpretation of
the above-mentioned pathologies, as different forms or dimensions of the
obstruction or disturbance of participation in the universal and perma-
nent resources of society (Hegel 1991, 233, § 199; emphasis in original)?
The idea that work should be understood as participation in the universal
resources of society should give us greater insight into the nature and
quality of problematic working conditions; the manner in which these
manifest themselves as precarious, alienating, and exploitative dimen-
sions of existing working conditions; and the way in which we might
understand the connection between these pathologies as instances of
a general pathology of work. Furthermore, it should provide us with
resources to develop criteria for the critique of deficient working condi-
tions. In other words, successful participation in societal resources (and
not simply self-realization through work) is the paradigm on the basis of
which pathological aberrations need to be thought.
In closing, I would like to very briefly elaborate on this with regard to
the above-mentioned pathologies. According to the thoughts I have devel-
oped above, one is excluded from the universal resources of society under
the following working (or, as the case may be, nonworking) conditions.
First, unemployment clearly constitutes an exclusion from the univer-

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74 Rahel Jaeggi

sal resources of society insofar as it prevents the individual from acquiring

“honor and a livelihood” (Hegel 1991, § 199, 233) through their partic-
ipation in the cooperative societal sphere. Yet insofar as unemployment
goes together with an inability to acquire or maintain skills, it does not
constitute just any withdrawal of social recognition (nor one that could be
compensated for in just any way), but is also an exclusion from the aggre-
gate of a society’s abilities.
Second, underpayment is an aspect of the casualized labor market
that prevents individuals from maintaining a livelihood through regular
work, leading to a partial exclusion from honor and subsistence. Likewise,
an existence determined by casualization and flexibility only allows one
to share in a society’s know-how, or in the honor that is procured through
work, to a limited extent. Here, the contingency of such sharing becomes
apparent, and know-how risks becoming unspecific.
Third, classical symptoms of alienation such as fragmentation and re-
petitive, impoverished, or senseless activities also represent reduced or
deficient participation in societal know-how. Furthermore, the absence of
any scope for shaping these activities can be seen as a deficit where the
appropriation of the universal resources of society is concerned.
In sum, the pathological character of work is to be determined in rela-
tion to the “achievements of the species,” or to what is necessary in order to
be able to relate to the cooperative, ethical, work-mediated sphere.
The different forms of “preventing” or “making impossible” this pro-
cess of appropriating the universal resources of society constitute different
pathologies. Whether these can not only be assessed on the basis of a com-
mon criterion, but also exhibit an internal connection to one another is one
of the many open questions that the approach outlined here will need to
address.

Rahel Jaeggi has been a professor of practical philosophy/social philosophy at the

Humboldt University of Berlin since 2009. Her areas of specialization include social
philosophy and critical theory. Recent publications include Alienation and Kritik von
Lebensformen (English translation forthcoming). She can be reached at rahel.jaeggi@
staff.hu-berlin.de.

Notes

1. This is increasingly the case even where education and university studies are
concerned, which (though this may not be obvious on beginning a philoso-

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 Pathologies of Work  75

phy degree) serve as preparation for entry into the social sphere of work—
and even where this is supposed to be expressly not the case, the relation to
the labor market is still negatively determined by the distance taken from it.
2. Here and below I mainly refer to conversations I have had over years with
people working in various fields. If this is not empirical research, proper, it at
least indicates some of the pressing problems related to work.
3. This stems from personal notes from the talk Heinz Bude gave under the title
of Die Wiederkehr der Gesellschaftstheorie nach ihrer Abdankung at the con-
ference Herbsttagung Politische Theorie und Gesellschaftstheorie – Zwischen Er-
neuerung und Ernüchterung on the 26th of September 2013.
4. One could think here of the various attempts that might be made to enrich
one’s work in the so-called “low-skilled” service sector. Knowing one’s regu-
lar customers, having a sense of when to allow exceptions; taking responsi-
bility for areas outside of one’s own; the cloak room attendant who reserves
certain numbers for regular customers; or the cleaner who, to my great sur-
prise, placed on my desk a copy of a newspaper in which he had seen an arti-
cle about me.
5. To give a brief example here: As an agency employee, one is not invited to
the work outing, and this has certain consequences. One doesn’t find out,
for example, that the librarian at the issue desk plays in a punk band, nor
does one see the department head trying to make a pass at the trainees while
drunk—these are aspects that have an influence on one’s ability to situate
oneself within the institution and on the potential solidarity between em-
ployees, etc.
6. How this interpretation relates to Smith himself will have to remain an open
question here.

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