Human Work

Man, to be such and such, requires such and such things, and evolves them as naturally as the sea-beast makes its shell. It grows from him—so do our manufactures grow from us. S...

This is a truism in military organisation, which is an old game with us, but we do not seem to understand it in industrial organisation, which is a new one. In the military body...

In these familiar facts see the real principle involved. Social progress has so differentiated labour as to make infinitely short, easy, and simple to a thousand co-workers what...

Taken generally, the confusion and irregularity of social progress furnish some ground, at least apparently, to those who assume it to be extra-natural, and who postulate direct...

When each man took care of himself, he had no interest in, or love for his neighbour; when their small “spheres of influence” touched, there was a combat. In such conditions no...

We have to do in this book with several of the basic errors in our common concepts as to economics. We shall see how different are the facts of our economic life to-day from tha...

With this mixed foundation the feeling remains in full force. It serves to check the normal activities of those who “do not have to work,” and to belittle the importance of thos...

The young human creature, as he begins to grow from the individual animal period into social life, feels this intense current of force, the vast and varied desires, the vaster e...

The builders of beautiful houses, working well, are necessarily benefited by their own working; but if they are forced to live in poor, ugly, unhealthy houses, they are not bene...

_Familiarity of Work confusing to true thoughts, our general attitude due to false concepts. Veblen’s theory. Theory of Hebrew religion. Occasional dim perception of value of wo...

Religion has not showed us the _naturalness_ of altruism. It has taught that it was natural for man to be selfish, and that to be unselfish was a continual struggle, needing the...

When a given social process, once useful, then useless, then increasingly injurious, continues to force itself upon a growing civilisation, there must be some strong agency to a...

And he has to have “amusement” and “recreation” also of an unnatural, morbid kind—heavy doses of social stimulus coarsened and concentrated to suit his exhausted nerves. All thi...

Here, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, arises the true law of ownership, and ownership as natural as that of the beast of his teeth and claws, a true social law. It ha...

Further yet: the beast, behind his little foot-power engine, with the force furnished by gobbled rabbit or patch of grass, had no governing scheme of life wherewith to direct hi...

Now see how our wrong ideas work against this advantage. The individual producer, shutting his eyes to the collectivity of the process, considers that he “owns” the wheat, and t...

Alone he might hunt, and “support himself” as a separate animal; as if, conceivably, the eye could return to a protoplasmic condition and soak up a living somehow; but as an eye...

The word “natural” is here used in contradistinction to “personal”; not as holding man’s personal conduct to be un-, anti-, or super-natural, but as distinguishing between the a...

As conspicuous an instance as can be given of this kind of sin is in the action of our misguided common carriers. Here is a function so glaringly social that one marvels at the...

This relation holds in the life of Society; but as that life is large, complex, enduring, and comprises within it not only the lives of its constituent individuals, but the live...

(_e_) The duty of the individual lies in his best service to Society in these vital processes; and the duty of Society lies in supplying to the child the best conditions for ful...

_Common facts hard to understand. Social phenomena most important to modern life, yet least understood. Complexity no obstacle if system is known. Practical knowledge of sociolo...

For Society to bestow the same care and provision on all its children that the wisest parent now seeks to bestow on his would develop the race faster than anything conceivable....