IN connection with my comments on Nebrija, consult for further readings on the history of taught mother tongue:
HEISING, Karl, Muttersprache, ein romanistischer Beitrag zur Genesis eines deutschen Wortes und zur Erstehung der deutsch-franzoesischen Sprachgrenze, in: Mundartforschung, XXIII, 3, pp. 144–174.
DAUBE, Anna, Der Aufstieg der Muttersprache im deutschen Denken des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts, Deutsche Forschungen, Vol. 34, Verlag Diesterweg, 1940. A mediocre doctoral thesis, but a repository of quotations.
BOSSONG, Georg, Probleme der Uebersetzung wissenschaftlicher Werke aus dem Arabischen in das Altspanische zur Zeit Alfonsos des Weisen, Niemeyer Verlag, Tuebingen, 1979.
AUERBACH, Erich, Literatursprache und Publikum in der lateinischen Spaetantike und im Mittelalter, Francke Verlag, Berlin. Especially Chapter IV.
TANLA-KISHANI, Bongasu, African Cultural Identity through Western Philosophies and Languages, in: Présence Africanie 98, second trimester 1967, p. 127. “The ordinary man on the streets of Africa can at times be led to think that one is only bilingual when one can manipulate two European languages, since African languages are graded as dialects, vernacular, patois.”
JOSTEN, Dirk, Sprachvorbild und Sprachnorm im Urteil des 16, und 17. Jahrhunderts. Sprachlandschaftliche Prioritaeten, Sprachautoritaeten, Sprachimmanente Argumentation, in: Europaeische Hochschulschriften, R 1, 152, Bern/Frankfurt, Lang, 1976. Gives the contemporary opinions of German thinkers.
BAHNER, W., Beitraege zum Sprachbewusstsein in der spanischen Literatur des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, Ruettner Verlag, 1956.
THIS essay is based on one of twelve lectures offered at Kassel, Germany, during the 1979–80 winter semester. The purpose of the lectures was to sharpen the students’ awareness of the limitations in contemporary thought and feeling which make a real understanding of subsistence-oriented cultures well-nigh impossible. The method used was to confront students with medieval texts selected principally from the second quarter of the twelfth century.
The essay was then written for a totally different purpose, to appear in a reader edited by Valentina Borremans. There it will be printed with essays by Karl Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, André Gorz, and others, all concerned with the radical criticism of tools. As an appendix to this volume, Borremans’ Guide to Convivial Tools will be reprinted. This work includes more than 450 modern reference tools dealing with science or technology by people.
The following guide to the study of Hugh of St. Victor and the mechanical arts in the Middle Ages is not provided to back up the statements of my essay. Rather, it is an invitation extended to some unknown reader, possessing a general knowledge of medieval history, who wishes to explore those of my remarks which strike him or her as worthwhile.
| Biography: | J. TAYLOR, The Origin and Early Life of Hugh of St. Victor: an evaluation of the tradition. Notre Dame (Indiana) 1957. 70 pp. (Texts and Studies in the History of Medieval Education vol. 5). |
| Texts: | Opera Omnia. Vol. 1–3. Paris 1854–79 (Migne, Patrologia Latina vol. 175–77). |
| Opera propaedeutic a. Practica geometriae. De grammatica, Epitome Dindimi in philosophiam. Ed. R. BARON. Notre Dame (Indiana) 1966. 247 pp. (University of Notre Dame Publications in Medieval Studies 20). Note: pp. 167–207 give the Latin critical text of the Dialogue with Dindimus, pp. 209–47 fifty explanatory notes by the editor. | |
| Didascalicon de studio legendi. A critical text. Ed. by C. H. BUTTIMER. Washington 1939. 160 pp. (The Catholic University Press, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Latin vol. 10.) The English edition of this text brings the critical apparatus and the notes added in the introduction up to a later date: The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor. A medieval guide to the arts. Translated from the Latin with an introduction and Notes by J. TAYLOR, New York, London (1961) (Records of civilization, sources and studies.) | |
| His thought: | R. BARON, since his doctoral thesis in 1957 has written a dozen contributions through which Hugh of St. Victor can be understood in an entirely new way. His doctoral thesis deals with Science and Wisdom in Hugh: Science et sagesse chez H. de S.V. Paris, Lethielleu 1957 (complete bibliography pp. 231–63) is the best introduction. M. GRABMANN, Hugo von St. Victor und Peter Abelard. Ein Gedenkblatt zum 800 jaehr. Todestag zweier Denkergestalten des Mittelalters, in: Theologie und Glaube 34 (1942) pp. 241–9. |
| E. LICCARO, L’Uomo e la natura nel pensiero di Ugo di S.V. in Atti del 3. Congresso internazionale di filosofia medievale, Milano 1966 pp. 305–13. B. Lacroix, H. de S.V. et les conditions du savoir au moyen age, in: An E. Gilson Tribute, Milwaukee 1959 (Marquette University Studies) pp. 118–34. | |
| Dictionary art: | Both excellent for a first orientation: DICTIONNAIRE DE SPIRITUALITE, Beauchesne Paris 1969, art H. de St. V. by R. BARON and DICTIONNAIRE DE THEOLOGIE CATHOLIQUE, Lethouzey, 1930, art: H. de S.-V. by F. VERNET. |
Originality of Hugh’s Concept of Remedy: L. M. DE RIJK, Some Notes on the Twelfth Century Topic of the Three (Four) Human Evils and of Science, Virtue and Techniques as their Remedies, in: VIVARIUM, Leiden, 5 (1967) pp. 8–15. Collates the known twelfth-century texts and compares them.
Originality of Hugh’s Division of the Sciences: Bernard BISCHOFF, Eine verschollene Einteilung der Wissenschaften in: Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age 25 (1959) pp. 5–20. & D. Luigi CALONGHI, La scienza e la classificazione delle scienze in Ugo di S. Vitore. Estratto della dissertazione di Laurea. Pontificium Athenaeum Salesianum. Facultas philosophica. Theses ad Lauream Nr 41, Torino 1956 (1957).
On the Place of the Mechanical Arts in Medieval Thought the two major monographs are: Peter STERNAGEL, Die artes mechanicae im Mittelalter: Begriffs- und Bedeutungsgeschichte bis zum Ende des 13. Jahrhunderts. Lassleben, Kallmuetz 1966 (Muenchner Historische Studien, Abteilung Mittelalterliche Geschichte, Vol. 2) on Hugh pp. 67–77; on his influence pp. 85–102. Franco ALESSIO, La filosofia e le artes mechanicae nel secolo 12, in Studi Medievali 3rd series v 6 (1965) pp. 71–161. On the Relation to Servile Work: M. D. CHENU, Arts mecaniques et oeuvres serviles in: Revue des sciences philosophiques et theologiques 29 (1940) pp. 313–15.
Hugo and the History of the Engineering Curriculum: WHITE, Lynn Jr. Medieval Engineering and the Sociology of Knowledge in: Pacific Historical Review 44 (1975) pp. 1–21. This article led me to read Hugh, with whom I was mainly acquainted as an analyst of mystical experience, to find out about his teachings on mechanical science. Like every article of White I know, this too was a sure guide to the secondary literature on its subject. White stresses the fact that for centuries after Hugh, the teaching of mechanics within the University Curriculum was never again seriously envisaged. I tried to stress the complementary point: never again, until this decade, was the teaching of mechanical science envisaged as a remedium of human weakness, as one of the roads that lead their student to comodum, ease in face of physical reality, as theorica lead him to science in the sense of wisdom, and practica to virtue.
The text of shadow work was written for delivery as a speech. Several people have begun to use it as an outline for their studies. At their request I here publish extracts from my own working bibliography. I arranged my comments under headings which roughly correspond to the successive arguments developed in the speech.
Economics always implies the assumption of scarcity. What is not scarce cannot be subjected to economic control. This is as true of goods and services, as it is of work. The assumption of scarcity has penetrated all modern institutions. Education is built on the assumption that desirable knowledge is scarce. Medicine assumes the same about health, transportation about time, and unions about work. The modern family itself is built on the assumption that productive activities are scarce. This assumption of scarcity, rather than the nuclear, conjugal organization of the household, distinguishes the modern family from that of other times. The identification of that which is desirable with that which is scarce has deeply shaped our thinking, our feeling, our perception of reality itself. Scarcity that in other societies colored a few well defined values – such as foodstuffs in spring and war-time, arable land, pepper or slaves – now seems to affect all values of public concern. Being thus immersed in it, we have become blind to the paradox that scarcity increases in a society with the rise of the GNP. This kind of scarcity which we take for granted was – and largely still is – unknown outside of commodity-intensive societies. The history of this sense of scarcity, however, still remains to be written.
A major step toward such a history has been made in 1979 by Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy in the two separate essays they published under the joint title L’enfer des choses. Both authors start with an insight to which they were helped by René Girard. Girard, a Frenchman, demonstrated in 1961 that the great novelists of the nineteenth century had made a discovery that consistently has eluded the social scientists. These novelists describe a radical mutation of human desire and of envy. This transformation can be observed already in Don Quixote of Cervantes, but it becomes pervasive in the time of Dostoyevsky. In Girard’s words, these bourgeois novelists were aware of the fact that desire, that in other previous literature had a direct object, becomes in the nineteenth century triangular, mimetic. The protagonists of the great novelists live in a society that has made it almost impossible to desire, except what others, whom one envies, either have or want. And when these protagonists pursue their desires in this fashion, they transmogrify their envy into virtue. When they imitate their model, they believe that they do so to distinguish themselves from it. Guided by Girard, the two authors, Dumouchel and Dupuy, locate the uniqueness of modern institutions in the institutional arrangements that foster mimetic desire and, with it, scarcity of an unprecedented kind. Instead of using Marx, Freud or Lévi-Strauss to demystify Dostoyevsky, they demystify the great political economists, psychoanalists and structuralists who, each in different ways, spin their yarn out of a historical scarcity. They expose scarcity that is defined by mimetic desire as the foregone conclusion on which the entire edifice of commodity-intensive economics is built.
The thesis is stated in GIRARD, René, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Paris: Grasset, 1961. (Engl. ed. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Transl. by Yvonne Freccero, Johns Hopkins, 1976). The later book: GIRARD, René, La violence et le sacré, Paris: Grasset, 1972. (Engl. Violence and the Sacred. Transl. by Patrick Gregory, Johns Hopkins, 1977) is crucial for understanding DUMOUCHEL, Paul and DUPUY, Jean-Pierre, L’enfer des choses, Paris: Seuil, 1979. Some readers will find it easier to begin this book with the second essay by Dumouchel, and then read the first by Dupuy. The latter, Dupuy, begins his argument with a commentary on FOSTER, George M., ‘The Anatomy of Envy: A Study in Symbolic Behavior’, in: Current Anthropology, Vol. 13, no. 2, April 1972, pp. 165–202. This essay contains an excellent bibliography and short comments by three dozen social scientists to whom it was sent before publication.
For the history of the perception of envy in classical antiquity, the following can be recommended: RANULF, Svend, The Jealousy of the Gods and Criminal Law in Athens, transl. Annie J. Fausböll, 2 vols. Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1933–34. On Hybris calling for Nemesis: GRENE, David, Greek Political Theory: The Image of Man in Thucydides and Plato, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, Phoenix Books, 1965. (orig. Man in His Pride), and DODDS, E. R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1951, especially chap. 2. For an orientation of the medieval understanding of envy, see: RANWEZ, Edouard, ‘Envie’, in: Dictionnaire de Spriritualité, cols. 774–85; VINCENT-CASSY, Mireille, Quelques réflexions sur l’envie et la jalousie en France au XIV° siècle, in: MOLLAT, Etudes, II, pp. 487–504; and LITTLE, Lester, ‘Pride goes Before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom’, in: The American Historical Review, no. 76, 1971, pp. 16–49.
Since Freud first postulated an inborn female envy for what standard English, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century called ‘the tool’ (see OED), discussion about envy has turned psychoanalytic. KLEIN, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude, Delacorte Press, 1975, especially pp. 176–235. See also: SCHOECK, Helmut, A Theory of Social Behavior, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970. Orig. Der Neid und die Gesellschaft, Freiburg: Herder, 4th ed. 1974.
For a medieval understanding of envy, its opposite would have to be understood: GAUTHIER, R.-A., Magmanimité: L’idéal de la grandeur dans la philosophie païenne et dans la théologie chrétienne, Paris: Vrin, 1951, amply studies the transition from classical to Christian magnanimity. See also LADNER, Gerhard, ‘Greatness in Medieval History’, in: The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. L, no. 1, April 1964, pp. 1–26. MCCAWLEY, J. D., ‘Verbs of Bitching’, in: HOCKNEY, D. ed., Contemporary Research in Philosophical Logic and Linguistic Semantics, pp. 313–32, has whetted my appetite for semantic studies on the history of envy in contemporary languages.
I have adopted the term ‘commodity-intensive society’ from LEISS, William, The Limits to Satisfaction, London: Boyars, 1978. In the introduction to this British edition the author defines his own position relative to five other recent books that deal with the same subject in different ways: “… Robert Heilbroner, Business Civilisation in Decline; Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture; Tibor Scitovsky, The Joyless Economy: An Inquiry into Human Satisfaction and Consumer Dissatisfaction; Fred Hirsch, Social Limits to Growth; and Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason.” LEISS, William, The Domination of Nature, New York: Braziller, 1972, is fundamental.
To prepare for a discussion of the historical uniqueness of a disembedded economy typical for industrial society, consult POLANYI, Karl, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon, 1957 and Trade and Markets in the Early Empires, New York: Free Press, 1957. SMELSER, Neil J., ‘A Comparative View of Exchange Systems’, in: Economic Development and Cultural Change, 7, 1959, pp. 173–82, though now dated, remains an excellent introduction to the influence which Polanyi has had. Notice that HUMPHREYS, S. C., ‘History, Economics and Anthropology: The Work of Karl Polanyi’, in: History and Theory, Vol. 8, pp. 165–212, contrary to Polanyi maintains that mastery over scarce means is one of the necessary ingredients in defining the economy in a way which can be compared from society to society. A special issue of Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, no. 6, Nov.-Dec. 1974, tries to evaluate Polanyi. See: MEILLASSOUX, C., ‘Essai d’interprétation du phénomène économique dans les sociétés traditionelles d’auto-subsistence’, in: Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, Vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 38–67, for a frustrating attempt to combine Polanyi’s understanding with French Marxism.
DUMONT, Louis, Homo Equalis, Paris: Gallimard, 1977. (Engl.: From Mandeville to Marx: Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology, Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1977), is my preferred guide to the ideological redefinition of human nature that happened parallel to the transformation of human desire. Complement with MACPHERSON, C. B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1962; and Democratic Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973. On utilitarianism, HALEVY, Elie, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, Clifton: Kelley Publ. 1972 (Transl. and abr. from the French).
One of my major problems became the restrictions and qualifications that had to be attached to most terms of formal economics whenever these are used to describe non-monetized social reality. The reality that deals with applicability of formal economic concepts in anthropology can be found in DALTON, G., ‘Theoretical Issues in Economic Anthropology’, in: Current Anthropology, Vol. 10, no. 7, pp. 63–102, 1969. With the critical evaluation of the New Economists who expand economic analysis to the informal sector of contemporary societies, Dupuy will be dealing in a forthcoming book. My main concern is the difference in the qualification that must be attached to economic terms, ex. gr., ‘scarcity’, when this term is applied to describe first the lack of food during a famine among the Barotse, and then to the lack of time of a nervous housewife.
In a society that aims at full employment, most people who do unpaid work are not counted as ‘unemployed’. If “the concept of unemployment was beyond the scope of any idea which early Victorian reformers had at their command, largely because they had no word for it … (G. M. YOUNG, Victorian England) or if … (Victorians by their avoidance of the term) … proved their lack of understanding (of crowd feelings) as E. P. THOMPSON (Making of the English Working Class) would claim”, consult WILLIAMS, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976, pp. 273–5.
See also GARRATY, John A., Unemployment in History: Economic Thought and Public Policy, New York: Harper & Row, 1978. In his introduction the author says: “… no one has ever before written a general history of unemployment … I call this book Unemployment in History instead of a History of Unemployment … It does not attempt to describe why there was unemployment, but how the condition of being without work has been perceived and dealt with in different societies from the beginning of recorded history …” The book exemplifies the futility of using modern concepts for historical research.
I argue that the activity, which in ordinary modern language is called ‘housework’, must be understood as substantially distinct from that which outside industrial society takes place within the framework of a ‘house’. For the common Indo-Germanic attitudes towards the house, see BENVENISTE, Emile, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Vol. 1, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1969, p. 295ff. A synthetic and clear introduction to the place of the house in old European subsistence in BRUNNER, Otto, ‘Das ganze Haus und die altereuropäische Oekonomie’, in: BRUNNER, Otto, Neue Wege zur Verfassungs und Sozialgeschichte, Göttingen, 1968. FLANDRIN, Jean-Louis, Familles: parenté, maison, sexualité dans l’ancienne société, Paris: Hachette, 1976. RYKWERT, Joseph, On Adam’s House in Paradise, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972, and RYKWERT, Joseph, The Idea of a Town: The Anthropology of Urban Form in Rome, Italy and the Ancient World, Princeton Univ. Press, 1976, are introductions to the theoretical background of modern architecture. See also: ELIAS, Norbert, Die höfische Gesellschaft, Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 1977. My reading of these leads me to believe that just as health has been ‘medicalized’ in contemporary societies, so the perception of space has been professionalized. Modern space is arranged for a human being as it is perceived by the architect at the service of his colleagues from the medical, paedagogical and economic professions.
After finishing Medical Nemesis, I decided to elaborate on the key chapter of that book: chap. 3 in the draft version, Boyars, London 1974 and in Némésis médicale, Seuil 1975; chap. 6 in Medical Nemesis as definitively published by Pantheon, New York, 1976, and simultaneously as Limits to Medicine by Boyars. Under the guidance of J. P. Dupuy I began to read into the history of economic analysis. I became increasingly fascinated with those aspects of commodity-intensive society that economists tend to relegate to the ‘informal sector’; I became interested in them precisely from that point of view under which the economic searchlight envelops them in a deep shadow. The common characteristics of these shadow-transactions I began to call the ‘shadow economy’. Phenomenologically this shadow economy revealed characteristics which distinguished it from ‘embedded’ subsistence activities as well as from formally economic transactions. Having studied for almost a decade the student, the computer, the patient, I found their behavior as actors in the shadow economy, as collaborators in disciplined frustration, thoroughly comparable. To clarify this issue I wrote a paper on Taught Mother Tongue, see: CoEvolution Quart. Then I came across two papers that oriented my further readings, both, according to their authors, are only ‘drafts’: WERLHOF, Claudia von, Frauenarbeit: Der blinde Fleck in der Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, Bielefeld 1978. (Engl. Women’s Work: The Blindspot in the Critique of Political Economy.) Both versions are available from: Universität Bielefeld, Soziologische Fakultät. Postfach 8640, 4800 Bielefeld 1.; and BOCK, G. und DUDEN, B., ‘Zur Entstehung der Hausarbeit im Kapitalismus’, in: Frauen und Wissenschaft, Berlin: Courage Verlag, July 1977, pp. 118–99, contains up to 1975 the most stimulating bibliography on the activities typical for enclosed women. The study of these two papers led me to the conviction that the activity for which the modern housewife is the prototype has no parallel outside of industrial society; that this activity is fundamental for the existence of such a society; that contemporary wage labor could come into existence only thanks to the simultaneous structuring of this new kind of activity. I discovered, therefore, in the work that women do in the domestic sphere of a modern economy, the prototype for transactions by students, patients, commuters, and other captive consumers whom I had been studying.
In female housework I began to see the expression of two distinct degradations: an unprecedented degradation of women, and an unprecedented degradation of work, be this kind of work done by women, men, or in-betweens such as children and patients. It seemed to me that the full importance of the unique industrial-age degradation of women will never be adequately understood unless the bifurcation between ‘work’ and ‘shadow work’ has first been clearly established. Housework is the key example for shadow work.
If we want to reduce shadow work, we must first clarify what it is. The shady housework of modern women, for instance, is not what women always did. This two French books just published prove by refined indirection: SEGALEN, Martine, Mari et femme dans la société paysanne, Paris: Flammarion, 1980, and VERDIER, Yvonne, Façons de dire, façons de faire: la laveuse, la courturière, la cuisinière, Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Both express on every page the happy surprise of the authors, modern women, as they reconstruct from the living traces it has left in rural France, the vernacular life of the last century. Housewives are, however, only one category that is currently resisting shadow work. All around the world thousands of movements try to unplug their communities from both wage and shadow work through the choice of an alternative use-value oriented life style. BORREMANS, Valentina, Reference Guide to Convivial Tools, New York: The Library Journal, Special Report no. 13. (1180 Avenue of the Americas, New York 10036.) identifies at least 400 reference books to this enormous though almost unnoticed universe, reviewed by Michel BOSQUET, ‘L’Archipel de la convivialité’, in: Le Nouvel Observateur, 31 Dec. 1979, p. 43, “… révèlera à des centaines de milliers d’individus qui se croyaient marginaux qu’ils forment en réalité un archipel immense dont, pour la première fois, un livre d’exploration commence de recenser les îles et d’indiquer les contours.”
Some forms of work in contemporary society that, at first, seem to be unpaid, are ultimately highly rewarded in monetary terms. University studies are often a good example. The numerus clausus obligates a student to embark on a career that he does not like and to acquire competences and notions that are in no provable way related to the performance of his future functions. It is socially inevitable, frustrating and often exacting work. Typically, however, the life-time income of a college graduate will be very much higher than of his non-graduate brothers and sisters. His non-monetary perquisites will also be much higher. Pro-rating this extra income per hour of cramming for exams in a school of accounting makes these hours into some of the best paid in society. Unlike the first twelve years of schooling that are made obligatory by life-long social sanctions against the dropout, ‘work’ done in college could be considered part of a well paid life-time job. The fact that everywhere in the world university students organize for higher scholarships can perhaps be interpreted as evidence for the fact that they do feel themselves already as ‘workers’.
This is obviously not so for authentic shadow workers: full-time housewives, middle-school pupils, part-time commuters. Their claim to compensation is of a different kind. When they succeed to transform an activity that, in 1970, was exacted as unpaid shadow work into paid labor by 1980, they have redefined their type of activity. In Sweden, for instance, some housewives are now paid wages, and some factory workers have negotiated through their unions a bonus for each hour spent commuting to the job. Their employers recognize that their workday begins when they leave their homes.
I am therefore not arguing that some unpaid work, now performed in view of a future recompense, could not be paid in advance; nor am I arguing that some shadow work cannot be transformed into wage labor. What I argue is something else: the creation of new wage labor inevitably also generates new shadow work. New social services inevitably increase the disciplined acquiescence of clients. What is worse: shadow workers can be used to create shadow work of others. In fact, Sweden might now be leading the world in the attempt to employ disciplined shadow workers (volunteers) in its social services. See: ‘Working Life in the Future – Programme for a Future Study’, and ‘Care in Society – A Project Presentation’, published by the Secretariat for Future Studies, Box 7502, S-103 92 Stockholm. This is a plan to make shadow work in the social sector increase much faster than wage labor. Philanthropy was used in this way since the evangelical campaigns in England in the 1810s.
Should I use the term? Until a few years ago in English it was monopolized by ‘subsistence agriculture’; this meant billions living on ‘bare survival’, the lot from which development agencies were to save them. Or it meant the lowest level to which a bum could sink on skid-row. Or, finally, it was identified with wages. To avoid these confusions, in the essay The Three Dimensions of Public Choice (pp. 9–26), I have proposed the use of the term ‘vernacular’. This is a technical term used by Roman lawyers for the inverse of a commodity. ‘Vernaculum, Quidquid domi nascitur, domestici fructus, res, quae alicui nata est, et quam non emit. Ita hanc vocem interpretatur Anianus in leg. 3. Cod. Th. de lustrali collatione, ubi Jacob. Gothofredus.” DU CANGE, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, Vol. VIII, p. 283.
I want to speak about vernacular activity and vernacular domain. Nevertheless, here, I am avoiding these expressions because I cannot expect my readers of this essay alone to be acquainted with ‘Vernacular Values’ (but see Part I of this book). Use-value oriented activities, non-monetary transactions, embedded economic activities, substantive economics, these all are terms which have been tried. I stick to ‘subsistence’ in this paper. I will oppose subsistence-oriented activities to those which are at the service of a formal economy, no matter if these economic activities are paid or not. And, within the realm of economic activities, I will distinguish a formal and an informal sector, to which wage and shadow work correspond.
SACHS, Ignacy et SCHIRAY, M., Styles de vie et de développement dans le monde occidental: expériences et expérimentations. Regional Seminar on Alternative Patterns of Development and Life Styles for the African Region, December 1978. CIRED, 54 Boul. Raspail, Paris 6., attempts a similar distinction between true and phoney use-values: “… le hors-marché recouvre deux réalités fort différentes, les prestations de services gratuits par l’Etat et la production autonome de valeurs d’usage … Les pseudo-valeurs d’usage n’apportent aucune satisfaction positive de besoin autre que la satisfaction de posséder plus.” For background on this: SACHS, Ignacy, “La notion du surplus et son application aux économies primitives’, in: L’Homme, Vol. VI, no. 3, July–Sept. 1966, pp. 5–18; and EGNER, Erich, Hauswirtschaft und Lebenshaltung, Berlin: Duncker & Humbolt, 1974. An interesting international seminar on subsistence has been held at Bielefeld University, Soziologische Fakultät.
On the comparative semantics of the key-word ‘work’ in the main languages of Europe, consult: KNOBLOCH, J. et al., Europaeische Schluesselwoerter, Vol. II. Kurzmonographien, Muenchen: Max Hueber, 1964, especially the contributions by KRUPP, Meta. ‘Wortfeld “Arbeit”’, pp. 258–6; GRAACH, Harmut, ‘Labor and Work’, pp. 287–316; and MEURERS, Walter, ‘Job’, pp. 317–54. R. Williams, op cit. in a few pages, 282ff., describes vividly the shift of ‘work’ from the productive effort of individual people to the predominant social relationship. For a broad, well-documented study, consult: BRUNNER, O.; CONZE, W.; und KOSELLECK, R., eds. Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the articles by Werner CONZE, on ‘Arbeit’ and ‘Arbeiter’, Vol. 1, pp. 154–243. This monumental Lexikon (subtitled Historisches Lexikon zur Politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland) will be completed in the late 1980s in 7 volumes. About 130 keywords that have undergone a major semantic change with the coming of industrial society, have been selected. On each term, the history of its political and social use is given. Though each monograph focuses on the use of a German term, the bibliography mentions important parallel studies for other European languages. Though dated, an excellent guide to the historical semantics of socialist terminology, mainly concerned with work is BESTOR, Arthur E. Jr., ‘The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary’, in: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 9, no. 3, June 1948, pp. 259–302. See also FEBVRE, Lucien, ‘Travail, évolution d’un mot et d’une idée’, in: Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. 41, no. 1, 1948, pp. 19–28; and TOURAINE, A., ‘La quantification du travail: histoire d’une notion’, in: Le Travail, les Métiers, l’Emploi, special number of Journal de Psychologie, 1955, pp. 97–112. For the Middle Ages: WILPERT, Paul, ed. Beitraege zum Berufsbewusstsein des mittelalterlichen Menschen, Miscelanea Medievalis, Vol. III, Berlin 1964; DELARUELLE, Etienne, ‘Le travail dans les règles monastiques occidentales du IV° au IX° siècles’, in: Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. XVI, no. 1, 1948, pp. 51–62; STAHLEDER, Helmuth, Arbeit in der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft, Muenchen: Neue Schriftenreihe des Stadtarchivs Muenchen, 1972. For the relationship between the meaning of work and technology in the Middle Ages: WHITE, Lynn, Jr., ‘Medieval Engineering and the Sociology of Knowledge’, in: Pacific Historical Review, no. 44, 1975, pp. 1–21. The impact of Luther on the meaning of work is well dealt with in GEIST, Hildburg, ‘Arbeit: die Entscheidung eines Wortwertes durch Luther’, in Luther Jahrbuch, 1931, pp. 83–113. Notice MENCKEN, H. L., A Mencken Chrestomancy, New York 1953, p. 107: “It remains for the heretic Martin Luther to discover that the thing was laudable in itself. He was the true inventor of the modern doctrine that there is something inherently dignified and praiseworthy about labor, that the man who bears the burden in the heart of the day is somehow more pleasing to God than the man who takes his ease in the shade.” For the nineteenth century see also AMBROS, D. und SPECHT, K. G., ‘Zur Ideologisierung der Arbeit’, in: Studium Generale, Heft 4, 14.Jahrgang, 1961, pp. 199–207.
See LECLERC, J., ‘Vocabulaire social et répression politique: un exemple indonésien’, in: Annales ESC., no. 28, 1973, pp. 407–82. For background consult also ANDERSON, Ben, ‘The language of Indonesian Politics’, in: Indonesia, Cornell Univ., April 1966, pp. 89–116; and HINLOOPEN-LABBERTON, D. van, Dictionnaire de termes de droit coutumier indonésien, Nijhof, Den Haag, 1934. See also ILLICH, Ivan, ‘El derecho al desempleo creador’, in: Tecno-Politica, Doc. 78/11, Cuernavaca.
ARENDT, Hannah, The Human Condition, New York: Anchor Book, 1959, has beautiful chapters on labor and work that are frequently referred to. They are valuable insofar as they sum up a Western, civilized consensus on a distinction between the reign of necessity and that of freedom, a distinction that was repeated frequently from Plato to Marx. But the unexamined acceptance of Arendt’s philosophical interpretation as an history of work tends to veil the discontinuity in the status of work during the transition to industrial society. I argue that in the classical sense of Hannah Arendt, the social conditions for both labor and work have been destroyed. On servile work, see also: VERNANT, J. P., ‘Travail et nature dans la Grèce ancienne’, in: Journal de Psychologie normale et pathologique, Vol. 52, no. 1, 1955, pp. 18–38; NEURATH, Otto, ‘Beitraege zur Geschichte der Opera Servilia’, in: Archiv fuer Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitik, Vol. 51, no. 2, 1915, pp. 438–65; and BRAUN, Pierre, ‘Le tabou des Feriae’, in: L’ Année sociologique, 3rd series, 1959, pp. 49–125.
The place of work as a keyword in Catholic thinking can be gauged from the following observations: the single most encyclopedic reference on Catholicism is the 25 volume Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique. When, after forty years of publication, the last but one fascicule of the index was published in 1971, the editors added in the midst of the subject index a 6000-word essay to ‘travail’ which begins with the sentence: “the absence of such an article in this encyclopedia is the symptom of a lacuna in theology …”. I intend to prepare a study guide to the contribution of the major churches in the nineteenth century to the evolution of shadow work – mainly under the form of social and housework – and to the parallel evolution of a ‘Christian’ ideology that ascribes dignity to wage labor.
The best guide to bibliography seems to be the series of articles on “Arbeit” in: Theologische Realenzyklopädie. On the violence done in the name of gender by American disestablished religion during the mid-nineteenth century, I was impressed by the analysis made by DOUGLAS, Ann, The Feminization of American Culture, New York: Avon Books, 1978.
See also HALL, Catherine, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in: BURMAN, S., Fit Work for Women, London: Croom Helm, 1979, pp. 15–32. As productive work moved from the home to the factory, evangelical campaigns (1780–1820), parallel to Wesley’s Methodism in the U.S., led to the consolidation of a domestic sphere in which women did their duties while men went out to work. Women not working became the only proper way for them to live. As Elie HALEVY, op. cit., first noticed, in the late eighteenth century the religious became linked with the domestic and thus the private world of morality could be opposed to the a-moral, a-theological world of economics.
SCHUMPETER, Joseph A., History of Economic Analysis, London: Allen & Unwin, 1954, p. 270: “In principle, medieval society provided a berth for everyone whom it recognized as a member: its structural design excluded unemployment and destitution”.
HOBSBAWN, E. J., ‘Poverty’, in: Encyclopedia of Social Science. Pauperism arose historically beyond the border of the functioning primary social group … a man’s wife and children were not ipso facto paupers, but widows and orphans, who stood in danger of losing their berth were perhaps the earliest clearly-defined category of persons with a call upon public assistance.
The attitude that people had towards the weak, hungry, sick, homeless, landless, mad, imprisoned, enslaved, fugitive, orphaned, exiled, crippled, beggars, ascetics, streetvendors, soldiers, foundlings and others who were relatively deprived has changed throughout history. For every epoch, specific attitudes to each of these categories are in a unique constellation. Economic history, when it studies poverty, tends to neglect these attitudes. Economic history tends to focus on measurements of average and median calory intake, group-specific mortality rates, the polarisation in the use of resources, etc….
During the last decade, the historical study of attitudes toward poverty has made considerable progress. For late antiquity and the Middle Ages, see: MOLLAT, Michel, Etudes sur l’histoire de la pauvreté, Série ‘Etudes’, Vol. 8, Publications de la Sorbonne, Paris, collects a selection of three dozen studies submitted to his seminar. POLICA, Gabriella Severina, ‘Storia della poverta e storia dei poveri’, in: Studi Medievali, Vol. 17, 1976, pp. 363–91, surveys the recent literature. On the cyclical experience of poverty in the Middle Ages, see: DUBY, Georges, “Les pauvres des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval jusqu’au XIII° siècle’, in: Revue d’Histoire de l’Eglise de France, Vol. 52, 1966, pp. 25–33. Some of the most valuable contributions have been made by a Polish historian: GEREMEK, Bronislav, ‘Criminalité, vagabondage, pauperisme: la marginalité à l’aube des temps modernes’, in: Revue d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine, Vol. 21, 1974, pp. 337–75, and, by the same author, Les marginaux parisiens aux XIV° et XV° siècles, Paris: Flammarion, 1976. Translated from the Russian, a delightful book is BAKHTINE, Mikkaïl, Rabelais and his World, Transl. by Hélène Iswolsky, M.I.T. Press, 1971. In French: L’oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, transl. by Andrée Robel, Gallimard, 1970. He describes how the poor projected their self-image in carnivals, festivals, farces.
GEREMEK, B., Le salariat dans l’artisanat parisien au XII° siècle, Paris, Mouton, 1968, indicates clearly that legitimate wage earners were only those who derived most of their subsistence from participation in the household of their employers. See also STAHLEDER, Helmuth, op. cit.
The comparative study of attitudes toward poverty in the Eastern and the Western Middle Ages sheds light on this point. PATLAGEAN, Evelyne, ‘La pauvreté à Byzance au temps de Justinien: les origines d’un modèle politique’, in: MOLLAT, M., op. cit., Vol. 1, pp. 59–81, argues that in urbanized Byzantium the law recognized poverty as a primarily economic condition long before such recognition became possible in continental Europe.
BOSL, Karl, ‘“Potens” und “Pauper”: Begriffsgeschichtliche Studien zur Gesellschaftlichen Differenzierung im fruehen Mittelalter und zum Pauperismus des Hochmittelalters’, in: Festschrift O. Brunner, Göttingen, 1963, pp. 601–87.
LADNER, G., ‘Homo Viator: medieval Ideas on Alienation and Order’, in: Speculum, Vol. 42, 1967, pp. 233–59, masterfully describes this attitude: the pilgrim, homo viator, placed between ‘ordo’ and ‘abalienatio’ was a fundamental ideal for the Middle Ages. CONVENGNI DEL CENTRO DI STUDI SULLA SPIRITUALITA MEDIEVALE, Vol. III, Poverta e richezza nella spiritualitá del secolo XI° e XII°, Italia, Todi, 1969, gathers a dozen contributions about the attitudes toward ‘poverty’ which complete the collection of Michel Mollat.
COUVREUR, G., Les pauvres ont-ils des droits? Récherches sur le vol en cas d’ extrème nécessité depuis la ‘Concordia’ de Gratien, 1140, jusqu’ á Guillaume d’Auxerre, mort en 1231, Rome-Paris: Thèse, 1961, is a full study of the legal recognition of rights that derive from poverty during the High Middle Ages. On the legal, canonical expressions given to these rights, consult: TIERNEY, B., Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and its Applications in England, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1959.
On Ratger see: ADAM, August, Arbeit und Besitz nach Ratherus von Verona, Freiburg, 1927.
Enclosure is one way of describing the process by which a popular culture is deprived of its means for subsistence. See POLANYI, Karl, The Great Transformation, Boston, Beacon Paperback, 1957, especially chap. 7 ‘Speenhamland 1795’ and chap. 8 ‘Antecedences and Consequences’, pp. 77–102. A particularly sensitive monograph on the process by which the poor were transformed, I found in GUITTON, Jean Pierre, La société et les pauvres: l’example de la généralité de Lyon, 1534–1789. Bibliothèque de la Faculté des Lettres, Lyon. No. 26, 1971, “… la société au XVIII° siècle, pour reconnaître sa responsbilité dans le paupérisme, condamne à l’extinction les mendiants et les vagabonds comme ‘ordre’ social…. la société marginalise le fond médiéval qui faisait de la pauvreté un signe d’élection, et de l’aumone, … le signe de la soldairité organisée.”
HALEVY, Elie, op. cit. described the attitude towards the poor as this is reflected in those who write about them in England. In England, ever since the time when the advent of protestantism had brought about the disappearance of the monasteries, the law had recognized the right of the indigent, the infirm, the beggars, but also the laborers whose wages did not keep them from want to assistance offered by the nation. The right to sustenance was written into the law in 1562, 1572 and 1601. In every parish, Justices of the Peace were empowered to levy a poor rate on the inhabitants. Only in the early eighteenth century, the tax-payers began to protest effectively against this imposition, and by 1722, the workhouse received the seal of the law. The newer formula of the right to work superseded the traditional guaranteed right to existence.
The modern age can be understood as that of an unrelenting 500-year war waged to destroy the environmental conditions for subsistence and to replace them by commodities produced within the frame of the new nation state. In this war against popular cultures and their framework, the State was at first assisted by the clergies of the various churches, and later by the professionals and their institutional procedures. During this war, popular cultures and vernacular domains – areas of subsistence – were devastated on all levels. Modern history, from the point of view of the losers in this war, still remains to be written. The report on this war has so far reflected the belief that it helped ‘the poor’ toward progress. It was written from the point of view of the winners. Marxist historians are usually not less blinded to the values that were destroyed than their bourgeois, liberal or Christian colleagues. Economic historians tend to start their research with categories that reflect the foregone conclusion that scarcity, defined by mimetic desire, is the human condition par excellence.
The single most encouraging exception to this historiographic tradition is a group of French historians formed mostly around and by the journal Les Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Editorial Office: 54 Boulevard Raspail, Paris 6. Subscriptions: Libraririe Armand Colin, 103 Boulevard Saint Michel, Paris 5. For more than a generation they have refined and tested methods and hypotheses that make the historical study of popular subsistence cultures feasible. They have hunted for documents that preserve the actual words of the illiterate which they could use to interpret the few archeological remains of the poor that have not rotted away. On gravestones and in songs, in streetsellers’ cries, in farce and riddles, and above all in the testimonies taken down by courts from rogues, adulterers and witches, they have found the faint traces of the mentality, the sensibility, the mythology of that majority in every past age that has usually been illiterate, which concretely means: deprived of the services of a scribe.
For a reading of modern history as a war on subsistence, my preferred introduction is MUGHEMBLED, Robert, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne du XV° au XVIII° siecles, Paris: Flammarion, 1978, which can fruitfully be complemented by CASTAN, Y., Honnèteté et relations sociales en Languedoc, 1715–1780, Paris: Plon, 1974. LE ROY LADURIE, Emmanuel, Montaillou, village occitan de 1294 à 1324, Paris: Gallimard, 1975, shows how a master can reconstruct the life of a medieval village. I strongly recommend the reading of DELUMEAU, Jean, La peur en Occident, XIV°–XVII° siècles, Paris: Fayard, 1978. It is a major history of the experience of fear, and the various forms that fear has taken in, and since, the Middle Ages. Inevitably, contemporaries are frightened by the idea that survival could be based on subsistence. This personal fear might be one of the major obstacles because of which contemporaries are almost incapable of considering a world in which an alternative use of technology would put modern forms of subsistence at the center of public concern. With fear, attitudes towards death and childhood have also profoundly changed. ARIES, Philippe, L’homme devant la mort, Paris: Seuil, 1977; and L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, Paris: Pion, 1960. GINZBURG, C., Il formaggio e i vermi, Turin: Einaudi Paperbacks 65, 1976, introduces to Italian studies on the organization of local subsistence and its destruction. On the ‘sacrifice du patois sur l’autel de la patrie’, see CERTEAU, Michel de.
ADAMS, Thomas M., ‘Mendicity and Moral Alchemy: Work as Rehabilitation’, in: Studies on Voltaire and the XVIII° century, Vol. 151, 1976.
What Bertrand RUSSEL said in Praise of Ideleness, London: George Allen, 1960, about landowners (p. 17) can just as well be said about the learned. “… the gospel of work which has led the rich … to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect.”
FERBER, Christian von, Arbeitsfreude: Wirklichkeit und die Ideologie. Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der Arbeit in der industriellen Gesellschaft, Stuttgart: Enke, 1959.
The metaphors Marx uses all the time are far from being simple metaphors: the Substance Labor is cristalized in products; it is deposited, congealed in them; it exists as an amorphous gelatine, it is decanted from one product into another. Engels exposes explicity the dialectic of chemistry but, page after page, the alchemistry comes through that ‘reduces’ the social historical into physiology, and vice versa. For Marx, the epiphany of value lies in the materialization of the faculties that are originally sleeping in man, and awaken only through his transformation into an industrial producer. CASTORIADIS, Cornelius, “From Marx to Aristotle, from Aristotle to us”, in: Social Research, Vol. 45, no. 84, 1978, pp. 667–738 (translated from the French by Andrew Arato), pp. 672 ff.
HEILBRONER, R. L., Business Civilization in Decline, New York: Norton; London: Marion Boyars.
HUFTON, O., The Poor in XVIII° century France, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974.
TAWNEY, R. H., Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 1926, pp. 254 ff argues that in England a hardening of the attitude toward the poor can be noticed in the late seventeenth century when poverty is first identified with vice. MARSHALL, Dorothy, The English Poor in the XVIII° Century: A Study in Social and Administrative History, London: 1926, p. 20., finds this hardening of attitudes only at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but not earlier than R. H. Tawney. See also: MARSHALL, Dorothy, ‘The Old Poor Law, 1662–1795’, in: CARUS-WILSON, E. M., Essays in Economic History, Vol. 1, pp. 295–305.
GEREMEK, B., ‘Renfermement des pauvres en Italie, XIV– XVII° siècles’, in: Mélanges en l’honneur de F. Braudel, I, Toulouse 1973.
KRUEGER, Horst, Zur Geschichte der Manufakturen und Manufakturarbeiter in Preussen, Berlin, DBR: Ruetten und Loening, 1958, P. 598.
On the proto-industrial crowd: THOMPSON, Edward P., The Making of the English Working Class, New York, Random House, 1966, has become a classic. BREWER, John, and STYLES, John, An Ungovernable People: the English and their Law in the XVII° and XVIII° centuries, Rutgers Univ. Press, 1979, gather materials for the first major factual critique of Thompson. In England, at least, criminal rather than civil law was used by the élite to repress the crowd. Thompson’s basic insight about the existence of a moral economy is confirmed by the new study. See also MEDICK, Hans, ‘The proto-industrial Family Economy: the Structural Functions of Household and Family during the transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism’, in: Social History, 1, 1976, pp. 291–315, so far the clearest statement on this transition that I have seen. Complement this, especially for a new bibliography, with MEDICK, Hans and SABEAN, David, ‘Family and Kinship: Material Interest and Emotion’, in: Peasant Studies, Vol. 8, no. 2, 1979, pp. 139–60.
These four issues are intimately related, but cannot be clarified unless they are separately discussed.
1. It becomes increasingly obvious that there is no proven correlation between education for a specialized function and the technical competence for the performance of this function. Further, the basic assumptions on which a socialist critique of a capitalist division of labor were built have ceased to hold. See the introduction to GORZ, André, Critique de la division du travail, Paris: Seuil, 1973. In German: ‘Kritik der Arbeitsteilung’, in: Technologie und Politik, n° 8, pp. 137–47; and GORZ, André, Adieux au prolétariat: au delà du socialism, Paris: Galilée, 1980. “Les forces productives dévelopées par le capitalisme en portent à tel point l’empreinte, qu’elles ne peuvent être gérées ni mises en oeuvre selon une rationalité socialiste … Le capitalisme a fait naitre une classe ouvrière dont les intérêts, les capacités, les qualifications, sont fonction de forces productives, elles-mêmes fonctionnelles par rapport à la seule rationalité capitaliste. Le dépassement du capitalisme … ne peut dès lors provenir que de couches qui représentent ou préfigurent la dissolution de toutes les classes, y compris de la classe ouvrière elle-même … La division capitaliste du travail a détruit le double fondement du ‘socialisme scientifique’ – le travail ouvrier ne comporte plus de pouvoir et il n’est plus une activité propre du travailleur. L’ouvrier traditionnel n’est plus qu’une minorité privilégiée. La majorité de la population appartient à ce néo-prolétariat post-industriel des sans-statut et des sans-classe … surqualifiés…. Ils ne peuvent se reconnaitre dans l’appelation de ‘travailleur’, ni dans celle, symétrique, de ‘chomeur’ … la société produit pour faire du travail … le travail devient astreinte inutile pour laquelle la société cherche à masquer aux individus leur chomage … le travailleur assiste à son devenir comme à un processus étranger et à un spectacle.’
2. A new trend in the history of technology is represented by KUBY, Thomas, ‘Ueber den Gesellschaftlichen Ursprung der Maschine’, in: Technologie und Politik, n° 16, 1980, pp. 71–103 (English version in forthcoming The Convivial Archipelago, edited by Valentina BORREMANS, 1981). Summary of a forthcoming important study on Sir Richard Arkwright, the barber and wigmaker who in 1767 constructed the first spinning machine that could make cotton yarn suitable for warps. His invention is usually seen as a linear progress beyond Hargrave’s spinning jenny – at that time already power-driven – that could make yarn only for weft. Division of labor was not a necessary implication of technical improvement needed to increase production. Rather, increased productivity could not be exacted from workers without organizing technical processes in such manner that they also reduced workers to disciplined cogs attached to a machine. For a splendid introduciton to the history of thought on the relationship between freedom and techniques see ULRICH, Otto, Technik und Herrschaft, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977. Also MARGLIN, Stephen, ‘What do bosses do?’, in: Review of Radical Political Economics, VI, Summer 1974, pp. 60–112; VII, Spring 1975, pp. 20–37, argues that the nineteenth century factory system developed not due to a technological superiority over handicraft production, but due to its more effective control of the labor force that it gave to the employer.
3. A third aspect under which the division of labor is currently discussed is the culture-specific assignment of tasks between the sexes. See next note.
4. The economic division of labor into a productive and a non-productive kind is a fourth issue which must not be confused with any of the first three. BAULANT, M., ‘La famille en miettes’, in: Annales, no. X, 1972, p. 960ff. For the process see MEDICK, Hans, op. cit. previous note. It is the economic redefinition of sexes in the nineteenth century. I will show that this ‘sexual’ character has been veiled in the nineteenth century.
No two non-industrial societies assign tasks to men and to women in the same way, MEAD, Margaret, Male and Female: A Study of the Sexes in a Changing World, New York: Dell Publ., 1968, especially pp. 178ff. Clear, to the point, and with good bibliography are: ROBERTS, Michael, ‘Sickles and Scythes: Women’s Work and Men’s Work at Harvest Time’, in: History Workshop, 7, 1979, pp. 3–28, and BROWN, Judith, ‘A Note on the Division of Labor by Sex’, in: American Anthropologist, 72, 1970, PP. 1073–8. For illustrations from the recent English past see: KITTERINGHAM, Jennie, ‘Country Work Girls in XIX° century England’, in: SAMUEL, Raphael, ed., Village Life and Labor, London–Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp. 73–138. A survey: WHITE, Martin K., The Status of Women in Pre-Industrial Societies, Princeton Univ. Press, 1976. For bibliography, consult MILDEN, James, The Family in Past Time: A Guide to Literature, Garland, 1977; and ROGERS, S. C., ‘Woman’s Place: A Critical Review of Anthropological Theory’, in: Comparative Studies of Society and History, 20, 1978, pp. 123–67. This cultural division of labor by sex must not be confused with the economic division of labor into the primarily productive man and the primarily, or naturally, reproductive woman, that came into being during the nineteenth century.
The nuclear family is not new. What is without precedent is a society which elevates the subsistence-less family into the norm and thereby discriminates against all types of bonds between two people that do not take their model from this new family.
The new entity came into being as the wage earner’s family in the nineteneth century. Its purpose was that of coupling one principal wage earner and his shadow. The household became the place where the consumption of wages takes place. HAUSEN, Karin, ‘Die Polarisierung des Geschlechtscharakters: eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs und Familienleben’, in: Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, Neue Forschung. Edited by W. CONZE, Stuttgart, 1976, pp. 367–93. This remains true even today when in many cases all members of a household are both wage earners and active homebodies. It remains true even for the ‘single’s’ home equipped with ‘one-person-household-ice-box’.
This new economic function of the family is often veiled by discussion about ‘nuclear family’. Nuclear family, conjugally organized households, can exist and have existed throughout history as the norm in societies in which the coupling of subsistence-less people would not have been conceivable. VEYNE, Paul, ‘La famille et l’amour sous le Haut-Empire romain’, in: Annales, 33rd year, no. 1, Jan.–Feb. 1978, pp. 35–63, claims that between Augustus and the Antonines in Rome, independently from any Christian influence, the ideal of a nuclear, conjugal family had come into being. It was in the interest of the owners to make this kind of family obligatory for their slaves. In its aristocratic form, it was taken over by Christians. DUBY, Georges, La société aux XI° et XII° siècles dans la région maconnaise, Paris 1953, and HERLIHY, David, ‘Family Solidarity in Medieval Italian History’, in: Economy, Society and Government in Medieval Italy, Kent State Univ. Press, 1969, pp. 173–9, see the early European family typically reduced to a conjugal cell into well into the twelfth century. Then, a process of consolidation begins that is concerned mainly with land-holdings. Canon law has little influence on it. See also PELLEGRINI, Giovan Battista, ‘Terminologia matrimoniale’, in: Settimane di Studio del Centro Italiano per l’Alto Medioevo di Spoleto, 1977, pp. 43–102, which introduces the complex terminology, or set of terminologies, which are necessary to understand medieval marriage. See also METRAL, M. O., Le mariage: les hésitations de l’Occident. Foreword by Philippe Ariès, Paris: Aubier, 1977. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries I found useful ARIES, Philippe, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime, Plon, 1960, and LEBRUN, Francois, La vie conjugale sous l’ancien régime, Paris: Colin, 1975. LASLETT, Peter, Un monde que nous avons perdu: les structures sociales pré-industrielles, Flammarion, 1969. Engl.: The World we have lost, find conjugal families typical for England much before the industrial revolution. BERKNER and SHORTER, Edward. ‘La vie intime’: Beitraege zur Geschichte am Beispiel des kulturellen Wandels in der Bayrischen Unterschichte im 19. Jh.’, in: Koelner Zeitschrift fuer Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, special number 16, 1972, find nuclear families typical for South-Germanic peasants at a certain stage in the life-cycle when the old have died off. It seems probable that the extended family is primarily ‘the nostalgia of modern sociologists’.
What makes the modern family unique is the ‘social’ sphere in which it exists. The O.E.D. gives among nine meanings the third as: “group of persons consisting of the parents and their children, whether actually living together or not”, as a meaning that appears in the nineteenth century. Family quarrels, 1801; family life, 1845; unfit for family reading, 1853; family tickets for admission for half the price, 1859; family magazine, 1874.
HERLIHY, David, ‘Land, Family and Women in Continental Europe, 701–1200’, in: Traditio, 18, 1962, pp. 89–120 (Fordham Univ. N.Y.).
In the subsistent family, the members were tied together by the need of creating their livelihood. In the modern couple-centered family, the members are kept together for the sake of an economy to which they, themselves, are marginal. DONZELOT, Jacques, La police des familles, Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1977. Engl.: The Policing of Families, transl, by Robert Hurley, New York: Pantheon, 1979, follows and elaborates FOUCAULD, Michel, La volonté de savoir, Paris: Gallimard, 1976, by describing this as ‘policing’ by which the so-called social domain is created … the domain to which we refer when we speak of ‘social’ work, ‘social’ scourge, ‘social’ programs, ‘social’ advancement. According to J. Donzelot, the history of this domain, and the process by which it comes into being, namely ‘policing’, can neither be identified with traditional political history, nor with the history of popular culture. It represents a bio-political dimension that uses political techniques to invest the body, health, modes of living and housing, through activities which all were, originally, called policing. Donzelot’s attempt to describe the formation of the ‘social sphere’ will be better understood after reading DUMONT, Louis, ‘The Modern Conception of the Individual: Notes on its Genesis and that of Concomitant Institutions’, in: Contributions to Indian Sociology, no. VIII, October 1965; also Microfiches, Presses de la Fondation des Sciences Politiques. The French translation: “La conception moderne de l’individu: notes sur sa genèse en relation avec les conceptions de la politique et de l’Etat à partir du XIIIe siècle”, in: Esprit, February, 1978. Louis Dumont describes the simultaneous appearance of the political and the economic sphere. See also Paul Dumouchel’s, op. cit. comments on Louis Dumont.
C. LASCH (New York Review of Books, Nov. 24, 1977, p. 16). Recent studies of ‘profesionalization’ by historians have shown that professionalism did not emerge in the nineteenth century in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions and self-help as backward and unscientific. And, in this way, created or intensified – not without opposition – a rising demand for their services. An excellent introduction to this process, with good bibliography, is BLEDSTEIN, Burton J., The Culture of Professionalism, New York: Norton, 1976. EHRENREICH, Barbara and ENGLISH, Deirdre, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Expert’s Advice to Women, New York: Anchor, 1978, give the history of the professional control over women. Page 127: “The manufacture of housework … after mid-century … with less and less to make in the home, it seemed as if there would soon be nothing to do in the home. Educators, popular writers and leading social scientists fretted about the growing void in the home, that Veblen defined as the evidence of wasted efforts … i.e. conspicuous consumption…. Clergymen and physicians were particularly convincing in their effort to provide their services so as to make ‘home life the highest and finest product of civilization’”. On the medicalization of female nature, I found particularly useful: BARKER-BENFIELD, G. J., The Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in the XIX°-Century America, New York: Harper and Row, 1976; ROSENBERG, Rosalind, ‘In search of Woman’s Nature: 1850–1920’, in: Feminist Studies, 3, 1975; SMITH-ROSENBERG, Carroll, ‘The Histerical Woman: Sex-roles in XIX° Century America’, in: Social Research, 39, 1972, pp. 652–78; MCLAREN, Angus, ‘Doctor in the House: Medicine and Private Morality in France, 1800–1850’, in: Feminist Studies, 2, 1975, pp. 39–54; HALLER, John and HALLER, Robin, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America, Urbana, Ill.: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974; VICINUS, Marta, Suffer and be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1972; LEACH, E. R., Culture and Nature or ‘La femme sauvage’, The Stevenson Lecture, November 1968, Bedford College, The University of London; KNIBIEHLER, Y., ‘Les médecins et la “nature féminine” au temps du Code Civil’, in: Annales, 31st year, 4, July–August, 1976, pp. 824–45.
DUDEN, Barbara, ‘Das schoene Eigentum’, in: Kursbuch, 49, 1977, a commentary on Kant’s writings on women.
See op. cit. BOCK und DUDEN, ‘Zur Entstehung der Hausarbeit im Kapitalismus’. DAVIS, Natalie Z., Society and Culture in Early Modern France, Stanford Univ. Press, might be a good starting point for somebody unacquainted with the issue, or CONZE, Werner, Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, Stuttgart, 1976. DAVIS, Natalie Z. and CONWAY, Jill K., Society and the Sexes: A Bibliography of Women’s History in Early Modern Europe, Colonial America and the United States, Garland, 1976, is an indispensable working tool. As a complement, I found useful ROE, Jill, ‘Modernization and Sexism: Recent Writings on Victorian Women’, in: Victorian Studies, 20, 1976–77, pp. 179–92, and MUGHEMBLED, Robert, ‘Famille et histoire des mentalités, XVI°–XVIII° siècles: état présent des recherches’, in: Revue des Etudes Sud-Est Européen (Bucarest), XII, 3, 1974, PP. 349–69, and ROWBOTHAM, Sheila, Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women in History from the XVII° Century to the Present, New York: Vintage Books, 1976. The un-numbered page following p. 175 of this second edition, contains a valuable selected bibliography on the change of women’s roles in Britain during the early Victorian period. The following two articles question to which degree the traditional periodization, categorization and theories of social change can be applied to recent women’s history: BRANCA, Patricia, ‘A New Perspective of Women’s Work: A Comparative Typology’, in: Journal of Social History, 9, 1975, pp. 129–53, and KELLY-GADOL, Joan, ‘The Social Relations of the Sexes: Methodical Implications of Women’s History’, in: Signs, 11, 1978, pp. 217–23.
TILLY, Louise and SCOTT, Joan, Women, Work and Family, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978, provides good bibliographical tips for further study. On the new status of women due to the changes that occurred in America in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, LERNER, Gerda, ‘The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson’, in: American Studies, Vol. 10, no. 1, 1969, pp. 5–15, is concise and clear. The Oxford University Women’s Studies Committee has brought out two collections of seminar papers, valuable for the history of housework: ARDENER, Shirley, Editor Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society, London: Croom Helm, 1978; and BURMAN, Sandra, Editor Fit Work for Women, London: Croom Helm, 1979. Each contribution is well annotated.
Not only in the home did female work become, in a unique way, distinct from what men do. Also where women were employed for wages, new kinds of work were created and primarily reserved for women. HAUSEN, Karin, ‘Technischer Fortschritt und Frauenarbeit im 19. Jh.: zur Sozialgeschichte der Naehmaschine,’ in: Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Year 4, No. 4, 1978, pp. 148–69, describes how the sewing machine that could have made the household more independent from the market was, in fact, used to increase exploitative wage labor defined as female work. DAVIES, M., ‘Woman’s place is at the Typewriter: The feminization of the Clerical Labor Force’, in: Radical America, Vol. 8, no. 4, July–Aug. 1974, pp. 1–28, makes a similar analysis of the use of the typewriter around which an unprecedented army of secretaries was organized. On the reorganization of prostitution around the services of medicine and police, see: CORBIN, Alain, Les filles de noce: misère sexuelle et prostitution aux XIX° et XX° siècles, Paris: Aubier Coll. Historique, 1978. On the prehistory of the ideal of the houswife see HOOD, Sarah Jane R., The Impact of Protestantism on the Renaissance Ideal of Women in Tudor England, PhD Thesis, Lincoln, 1977. From abstract: “The feminine ideal of wife and mother appears for the first time among Northern humanists in the Renaissance. Studia Humanitis were the key to the successful fulfillment of the domestic role as learned wife to a companion husband, and intelligent guide to education of children. This upper class ideal replaced medieval ideal of virgin or courtly Lady. The protestant ideal of calling made the domestic ideal the vocation of all women in Tudor England. All women were now called to the married state, and could make no finer contribution than to bear children. The home maker replaced the Renaissance companion. The lowliest household tasks a worthy contribution to godly society. But when all were called to matrimony and motherhood, then women were called to nothing else. To choose other, was to deny their holy vocation. Thus the domestic ideal became dogmatized.”
One of the principal means by which society imposed recently defined work on women through its agents, the caring professions, is the ideal of ‘motherly care’. How mothering became an unpaid, professionally supervised kind of shadow work can be followed through: LOUX, Francoise, Le jeune enfant et son corps dans la médecine traditionnelle, Paris: Flammarion, 1978; BARDET, J. P., ‘Enfants abandonnés et enfants assistés à Rouen dans la seconde moitié du XVIII° siècle’, in: Hommage à Racel Reinhard, Paris 1973, pp. 19–48. Flandrin comments: “La seule étude permettant actuellement de mesurer les dangers de l’allaitement mercenaire pour les enfants de famille”; GELIS, J., LAGET, M. and MOREL, M. F., Entrer dans la vie: naissances et enfances dans la France traditionnelle, Paris, 1978; OTTMUELLER, Uta, ‘“Mutterpflichten”: Die Wandlungen ihrer inhaltlichen Ausformung durch die akademische Medizin’, pp. 1–47, MS 1979, with excellent selective bibliography; LALLEMENT, Suzanne and DELAISI DE PARSEVAL, Geneviève, ‘Les joies du maternage de 1950 à 1978, ou Les vicissitudes des brochures officielles de puériculture’, in: Les Temps Modernes, Oct. 1978, pp. 497–550; BADINTE, Elisabeth, L’amour en plus, Paris: Flammarion, 1980.
POULOT, Denis, Le sublime ou le travailleur comme il est en 1870, et ce qu’il peut être, Introduction by Alain Cottereau, Paris: Francois Maspero, 1980. A small factory owner of Paris, himself a former worker, tries in 1869 to develop a typology of ‘workers’ and how each type behaves toward his boss and his wife.
OAKLEY, Ann, Woman’s Work: The Housewife, Past and Present, New York: Vintage Book, 1976, deals in the 7th chapter extensively with these three myths.
Clifford GEERTZ, in a review of D. SYMON, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, Oxford University Press, 1980, published in The New York Review of Books, 24 Jan. 1980. See also HUBBARD, R. et al. Women look at Biology, Boston: Hall, 1979.
NAG, Moni, ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Study of the Economic Values of Children in Java and Nepal’, in: Current Anthropology, 19, 2, 1978, pp. 293–306, gives also general bibliography on the economic imputation of value to family members.
BECKER, Gary S., ‘A Theory of Marriage’, in: Journal of Political Economy, 81, 1973, pp. 813–46, and The Economic Approach to human behavior, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976. LEPAGE, H., Autogestion et capitalisme, Paris: Masson, 1978.
SKOLKA, Jiti V., ‘The Substitution of Self-Service activities for Marketed Services’, in: Review of Income and Wealth, Ser. 22, 4, 1976, p. 297ff., argues as follows: self-service activities are defined as activities carried out outside the market, having as inputs consumer time, industrial products (mainly durables) and often energy. Increasingly these self-service activities are substituted for marketed services. Thus an increasing part of activities in industrialized countries are productive, yet cannot be recorded by conventional economic measures, since they neither appear on the market nor have market value. Unless the value of self-service, substituted for marketed values, is included in the measurement of the nation’s welfare, this measurement becomes meaningless. Yet, any recording of self-service activities implies large-scale imputations, a procedure disliked by statisticians.