an endangered virtues es say

The Work Ethic

task force on virtues of a free society

by Russell Muirhead

Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of a Free Society

www.endangeredvirtuesessays.com

Americans are often contrasted with Europeans by the way we take work seriously.
We identify with our jobs, not our inheritances or our noble ancestry. Often the first
question we are asked when we meet somebody is What do you do? which is shorthand for Who are you? We connect the working life to human dignity. We have to
do this because we are democrats, and we want to do this because we are not snobs.
Others may envy the aristocrats leisure. Not us: we admire those who have something
to do. For us, as Tocqueville noted long ago, jobs may be easy or hard, well paid or
poorly paid, but every kind of honest work is honorable. As much as anything, this is
what we are: a country that honors work.
But it was not always so. And perhapswe fearit might not always be so.
The first century of our existence was marked by slavery, which cast a dark shadow
over many things, including the dignity of labor. Among its many wrongs, slavery made
work dishonorable, something for respectable people of advantage to avoid.
To the defenders of slavery, it seemed obvious that society was inevitably oppressive
and work essentially degrading. As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond
told the Senate on the eve of the Civil War, all societies require a class to do the
menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . Such a class you must have, or you
would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement. To
Hammond, it did not matter much whether laborers were bought as slaves or hired as
wage earners, as long as they created more value than they consumed. No oppression,
no progress.
Hammond, more honest and more cutting than most defenders of slavery, freely
admitted that slavery was oppressive. But he challenged slaverys opponents to find
any social system that was not. The mill-workers of Lowell, Massachusetts, awakened
by the factory whistle at the dawn of every fifteen-hour day and living at the mercy of
the foreman on one hand and faceless mill-owners on the other, could at any moment
be deprived of their homes, their beds, their meals, and their jobs. Was this freedom,
Senator Hammond might have asked?

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

The American Civil War soaked the ground in blood, and like all fights, it was a war
not only of strategy and physical strength, but of ideas. The ideal of union, though
powerful, was not enough. It was also necessary to say what the union was for, which
in the fullness of time required rejecting slavery. The rejection of slavery, in turn,
required another idea: the affirmation of work.
The most obvious point in favor of free labor is that it is freeit is chosen. But this
argument would not satisfy the likes of Senator Hammond. Hammond thought that
wage-work was oppressive very much like slavery was oppressive because it was
assented to against a background of poverty and desperation. A real choice requires
real options, and options are exactly what most workers lack.
In the years just preceding his ascent to the presidency and the countrys descent
into civil war, Abraham Lincoln tried to work out an answer to this problem. Against
Hammonds image of the American economyone filled with impoverished wage
laborers sweating to make a subsistence living in the North, and oppressed slaves in
the SouthLincoln emphasized that it is wrong to think all workers are either hired
laborers or slaves and either way are oppressed. Most are neither hired laborers nor
slaves: rather, they work for themselves. Nor do they necessarily end up where they
start. Many workers, starting as penniless beginner[s], labor for others for a while.
But eventually they come to buy their own tools, own their own land, and work for
themselves.
This opportunity to advance to a condition of independence, where people rely only
on their own arms to prosper, is what could fund, in Lincolns view, a true work ethic.
Opportunity makes work compelling. For the independent farmer, every blade of grass
is a study, Lincoln said. In other words, the farmer who works for himself is stimulated
to thinkabout what makes things grow best and most bountifully, what might save
time or sweat, and what, in general, works. When a person works for himself, no work
can be simply physical or thoughtless.
The right kind of work activates a vast collection of human powers. It concentrates
the mind, engages the heart, and directs the body. The self-made man or woman
makes himself or herself; it is through our work that we make a name for ourselves.
In this way, work is worthy of people who see themselves as dignified, free, and equal.
n n n

In Lincolns day, it might have made sense to imagine an economy of farmers and
artisans filled with the hope of becoming their own bosses. The Homestead Act,
passed after the Civil War, was meant to give hope and opportunity a realistic footing.
A century and a half later, this image remains compelling yet less realistic. In the
modern economy, most people depend on employers, not only for their livelihoods,

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

but also their health insurance and pensions. Where the farmer of the nineteenth
century worked the earth, and the artisan of old worked materials into more useful
forms, today we are more likely to work each other, managing our reputations in
elaborate hierarchies that stack managers upon managers, and where no single person
can point to something at the end of the day and say, I did that. We curry the favor
of our superiors, flatter our customers, and badger our suppliers.
The dream of escaping the web of interdependence and becoming your own boss
survives, but mostly in fantasy form: it is mapped onto things like the lottery, which
invites us to take a chance on a pay-out so large that we would never have to work
again. This is freedom.
So we work, but perhaps without a work ethic. To be sure, many peoplepolls say
about 80 percentfeel their own work is meaningful and identify with it. At the same
time, recent evidence suggests that job satisfaction is declining, especially among
young workers in their 20s and 30s. This generation does not appear to reject the work
ethic as unhappy or pointless, as did the romantic rebels of the 1960s. Nor do they affirm
it. The result is an elusive sense of purpose that, for some, is not inconsistent with
attaining the marks of high achievement, like admission to college or landing a good
job. But it makes experiencing work as meaningful difficult.
n n n

The inability to locate purpose in the world of work may seem strange to some who see the
point of work so clearly that it would seem to require no interpretation, no argument.
The point of work is quite simple, in this view: to make us safe in an unsafe world.
Human beings are full of needs, and work answers these needs. This is why the habit of
workindustry, as Ben Franklin called itconstitutes almost the whole of prudence.
Someone who has a skill or a trade that answers the needs of others and who possesses
the disposition to practice this trade with regularity and honesty will never be entirely
without. For those who lack trust funds, connections, safety netswho, like Franklin, step
into life alone in the wide worldthe habit of work is the most practical virtue they can
possess. The disposition to work is the most practical virtue a person can possess.
And yet, if work is meant to keep us safe, it also points beyond safety to something
finer: luxury. Elemental needs can be satisfied, but wants never end. As soon as one
want is met, a new (and more expensive one) grows up to take its place. Even Ben
Franklin, that archetype of the work ethic, had a taste for luxury. As he notes proudly
in his Autobiography, after he experienced some success as a printer, Franklin traded
in his earthenware bowls for China dishes.
Luxury is attractive because it satisfies discriminating tastes. Driving a Porsche
is enjoyable even when no one can see you. And for those whose tastes cannot

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

discriminate, luxury is attractive because it distinguishes those who possess it from

those who cannot. Luxury creates a visible order of rank. That it is a false order of rank
only makes it better, since it is more openyou dont have to deserve your place, you
only need to afford it. Unlike natural excellence, luxury is open to anyone who works,
earns, and savesand finds a little luck. But luck comes most to those who work.
Because we might make our own luck, the work ethic possesses a hopeful and optimistic
cast. Free labor, as Lincoln said, opens the way for allgives hope to all, and energy, and
progress, and improvement of condition to all.
n n n

Work gets its reason from wants and desires that almost no one can escape. Seen this
way, work is natural: it is what we do because we are what we are. Does work really
need an ethic? Should we really need fancy purposes to experience work as meaningful?
The traditional purposes of worksecurity, comfort, and luxuryanyone can
appreciate. Yet these very purposes also threaten to undo the dignity of work: for
the traditional purposes of work ultimately suggest that the good life is an escape
from work.
They dont so much reveal the value of work itself, but of what work brings; they direct
our attention not to the importance of work, but of wealth. Since even in the best cases,
work is never free from disagreeableness, the traditional view is that it would be better
to skip work and go directly to the wealth. Win the lottery. Or scheme to have someone
else do your work for you. Against those whose riches come easy, workers look like
chumpsdoing what they need to do but would be smarter to avoid.
A true work ethic does not merely ratify the traditional approach to work, but transforms
it. The Protestant ethic overturned the traditional approach to work by connecting
work not with worldly goods like security and wealth, but with salvation. In the
Protestant ethic, work is commanded by God, andthis was the radical partGods
command touches all socially useful and honest labors, regardless of their social
status. The woman on the farm and the ruler of the nation each has work to do, and
each kind of work is equally important. Leveling distinctions, the Protestant ethic
establishes a democracy of work: all work has dignity. And all work has a point, which
is to create a community that exemplifies Gods teachings. Skills are not tools one
acquires to gain advantage over othersto get aheadbut are gifts that are meant to
be deployed for purposes larger than our own.
By connecting work to purposes larger than ourselves, the Protestant ethic invested
all useful and honest work with meaning. And this is what the work ethic in its
contemporary form still requires. To work from an ethic (rather than simply from
need or vanity) is to work with a view to excellence. It means cultivating our own gifts,

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

activating our full powers, and giving them focus. This focus comes from participating
in something larger than ourselves.
More concretely, we might point to two ingredients essential to the work ethic: devotion
to a practice and contribution to society. A practice is an activity with its own internal
standards of excellence (independent, for instance, of money-making) that supports the
instinct of craftsmanship, or pride in a job well done. Social contribution means, simply,
that we can point to how our work contributes to a decent society.
For some kinds of work these two ingredients will be hard to locate. Job roles that have
been stripped of their skills, their discretion, their variety, and their responsibility offer
little scope for developing excellence. Consider how fast-food check-out clerks now ask,
just as you are placing goods by the register, whether you might like a few choice items
with your order: Would you like some chips with that? Asking this question is not the
clerks idea or a manifestation of the clerks consideration for the customers comfort
and satisfaction. It is dictated by management in an effort to stimulate one last impulse
buy, and it is uttered by compulsion, without verve or genuine intention (like a
telemarketers script). When managers take control in this way of every word spoken
by clerk to customer, whatever small room there might be for individuality and
authenticity is foreclosed.
In addition to the de-skilling of jobs, bureaucratic structures that fragment jobs into
infinitely small pieces can make it difficult to detect how our own work contributes to
anything outside the organization in which it is nested. The comic strip Dilbert and the
sitcom The Office hardly exaggerate the pointlessness that work comes to possess
when it is disconnected from the larger world and takes its bearings only in response
to managerial whims.
It is not the case that a work ethic makes sense regardless of the way jobs are designed
and organized. By their sheer scale, advanced industrial economies threaten to make
the work ethic irrelevant in the worst wayby making it quaint.
n n n

But it is not quaint yet, and it would distort our experience to claim that work today is
wholly unworthy of a work ethic. The builder, the teacher, the counselor, the banker,
the nurse, and the engineeramong countless examples one could findcan all point
to what it means to be good at what they do and how what they do contributes to the
world around them. They can, in short, give an account of their work.
Even when we can give an account of our work, it may seem beside the pointwhich
is getting ones job done. A chemist does not need to explain why it is good to be a
chemist in order to do her job. A mechanic who has to figure out whats killing the
cars battery has a job to doand no one wants to pay the mechanic ninety dollars an

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

hour to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Giving an account requires
distance and time that are hard to find amid the pressures of daily life.
Yet ultimately, the preservation of the work ethic (and work worthy of an ethic) depends
on being able to give an account, not only as individuals but also as a society. Market
forces, left to their own, may sooner dissolve the work ethic than sustain it, especially
insofar as they teach that wealth is more important than work. At the moment, we are
witnessing a hollowing out of the job spectrumthe economy is producing more jobs at
the low end that require very little skill, and more jobs at the high end that require great
creativity and intelligence. Middle-class jobs are meanwhile eroding. These middle-class
jobs are not only valuable because they give security and social standing to the great
bulk of the citizenry. They are also valuable because they underwrote the connection
between work and dignity. Thus the challenge of our political economy is to maintain
the kind of work that makes sense of a work ethic. The honor of work and, more
fundamentally, the equal-respect characteristic of a democratic culture, depend on it.

Sources:
The classic account of the work ethic is from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott
Parsons trans. (London: Routledge, [original German publication 190405, first English translation 1930] 1992).
The classic example of the work ethic is Ben Franklins Autobiography [1791 in French, first English translation
1793], the good-natured irony of which Weber appears not to have noticed. A discerning exploration of Franklins
example can be found in Robert Wuthnow, Poor Richards Principle (Princeton University Press, 1996). Lincolns
defense of free labor is crystallized in his 1859 speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, which can be
found here: [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm]. The classic criticism of work
under conditions of capitalism is in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, The Marx-Engels
Reader, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). Excerpts from Senator James Henry Hammonds
1858 mud-sill speech can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3439t.html. In a more contemporary
vein, my own attempt to understand what makes work worthy of a true ethic can be found in Just Work (Harvard
University Press, 2004). An illuminating account of good work is in a book of that very title by Howard Gardener,
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damon (New York: Basic Books, 2001). William Damon has also explored how
young people today have difficulty locating purposes in work in The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find
their Calling in Life (New York: Free Press, 2008). On job satisfaction today, see: Lynn Franco, John Gibbons, and
Linda Barrington, I Cant Get No . . . Job Satisfaction: Americas Unhappy Workers, research report R-1459-09-RR,
The Conference Board Inc. New York, January 2010; A. Colby, L. Sippola, and E. Phelps, Social Responsibility and
Paid Work (in A. Rossi., ed., Caring and Doing for Others: Social Responsibility in the Domains of Family, Work, and
Community, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and the variety of poll data at gallup.com, which has been
tracking job satisfaction in America for decades.

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

Copyright 2011 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
This publication is for educational and private, non-commercial use only. No part of this publication may be reprinted,
reproduced, or transmitted in electronic, digital, mechanical, photostatic, recording, or other means without the written
permission of the copyright holder. For permission to reprint, reproduce, or transmit, contact Ms. Tin Tin Wisniewski
(tintinyw@stanford.edu)
The preferred citation for this publication is
Russell Muirhead, The Work Ethic (2011), in Endangered Virtues, an online volume edited by Peter Berkowitz,
http://www.endangeredvirtuesessays.com.

Russell Muirhead

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University

Boyd and Jill Smith Task Force on Virtues of

a Free Society

About the Author

The Virtues of a Free Society Task Force examines the

evolution of Americas core values, how they are threatened,
and what can be done to preserve them. The task forces
aims are to identify the enduring virtues and values on which
liberty depends; chart the changes in how Americans have
practiced virtues and values over the course of our nations
history; assess the ability of contemporary associations and
institutionsparticularly schools, family, and religionto
sustain the necessary virtues; and discuss how society might
nurture the virtues and values on which its liberty depends.
The core membership of this task force includes Peter Berkowitz
(cochair), David Brady (cochair), Gerard V. Bradley, James
W. Ceaser, William Damon, Robert P. George, Tod Lindberg,
Harvey C. Mansfield, Russell Muirhead, Clifford Orwin, and
Diana Schaub.

Russell Muirhead
Russell Muirhead is the
Robert Clements Associate
Professor of Democracy
and Politics at Dartmouth.
The author of Just Work
(Harvard University Press,
2004), he is currently at work
on a book on partisanship
titled A Defense of Party
Spirit. Previously, Muirhead
taught political theory at the
University of Texas at Austin,
Harvard University, and
Williams College. He was a
Radcliffe Institute Fellow
(20056) and a winner of the
Roselyn Abramson Teacher
Award at Harvard College.
He holds a PhD and AB from
Harvard University and a
BA from Balliol College at
Oxford University.

Russell Muirhead

For more information about this Hoover Institution Task Force

please visit us online at www.hoover.org/taskforces/virtues.

The Work Ethic

Hoover Institution

Stanford University