Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living

by John Kaag, Jonathan van Belle

Overview

What Thoreau can teach us about working—why we do it, what it does to us, and how we can make it more meaningful

Henry at Work invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked: Thoreau the worker. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle overturn the popular misconception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse who was scornful of work and other mundanities. In fact, Thoreau worked hard—surveying land, running his family’s pencil-making business, writing, lecturing, and building his cabin at Walden Pond—and thought intensely about work in its many dimensions. And his ideas about work have much to teach us in an age of remote work and automation, when many people are reconsidering what kind of working lives they want to have.

Through Thoreau, readers will discover a philosophy of work in the office, factory, lumber mill, and grocery store, and reflect on the rhythms of the workday, the joys and risks of resigning oneself to work, the dubious promises of labor-saving technology, and that most vital and eternal of philosophical questions, “How much do I get paid?” In ten chapters, including “Manual Work,” “Machine Work,” and “Meaningless Work,” this personal, urgent, practical, and compassionate book introduces readers to their new favorite coworker: Henry David Thoreau.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691244693
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Pages:	232
Sales rank:	417,786
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Kaag is the Donohue Professor of Ethics and the Arts at UMass Lowell and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His books include Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (Princeton). Jonathan van Belle is an independent scholar and former philosophy editor at Outlier.org. He is also coeditor with Kaag of the anthology Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James (Princeton).

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Teacher, surveyor, laborer, pencilmaker, lecturer, writer—why is Henry Thoreau called a layabout when he worked so hard at so many jobs? Because, as the coworkers Kaag and van Belle show us, Thoreau always sought to work deliberately—and so can we. Part conversation, part meditation, this urgent book probes the roots of our post-Covid discontent and suggests how we can reorient our lives to the quest for meaningful work. What’s your work? Whatever it is, set it aside for a spell and join the conversation: as Thoreau would say, it’s never too late to make good on the business of living.”—Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life

“This is a necessary book. It recovers the true Thoreau, who, far from the loafer of many accounts, was the most practical of all our philosophers. He worked hard, and he also thought about why he was working, an American Buddha with a hammer and a hoe. This book should correct our history and reintroduce many to one of its greatest figures.”—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“Henry at Work is a tract for our times. At this moment of social questioning, no writer is better suited to provide inspiration and guidance than Henry David Thoreau. He modeled the message he preached, and his labors can inform and inspire our rethinking of work today. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle present a concise and engaging account of what Thoreau has to teach us about the possibilities and pitfalls of labor in the changing circumstances of the twenty-first century.”—Robert A. Gross, author of The Transcendentalists and Their World

“For those, like me, who never got on with Thoreau, this book is a revelation. Gone is the smug, superior dreamer; in his place, a hopeful cynic, an industrious worker determined not to hurry, and a prophet with no patience for pretension. This is a must-read for anyone who works.”—Kieran Setiya, author of Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Editorial Reviews

04/03/2023

In this astute study, Kaag (Sick Souls, Healthy Minds), an ethics professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and van Belle (Zenithism), a former editor at Outlier.org, explore what lessons Henry David Thoreau’s life and writings hold for 21st century workers. Suggesting that Thoreau’s opposition to the “alienation and nihilism” caused by capitalism defined his attitudes toward work, Kaag and van Belle explore how readers might push back against “meaningless work” by following his example. The authors examine Thoreau’s takes on the commodification of time, the dehumanizing effects of repetitive labor, and employers’ inability to provide spiritual fulfillment for their workers, and draw lessons for modern workers from Thoreau’s life. Telling how Thoreau quit a teaching position after his boss insisted he use corporal punishment to discipline students, Kaag and van Belle contend that resignation offers laborers the opportunity to claim moral agency from employers. The speculation on what Thoreau would think about modern workplaces is plausible and well supported (Thoreau would object to automated technology because of its inability to exercise “moral autonomy”), making a strong case for the transcendentalist’s continued relevance. This should give workaholics pause. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"[I]mpassioned. . . . [Kaag and van Belle] share with [Thoreau] an engaging style of everyday philosophy that extrapolates big questions about a well-led life from seemingly more practical concerns: how to live frugally, to make a living. . . . [T]his accessible and timely book has great potential to urge more people to see Thoreau not as a solitary sluggard but as a resource for thinking together about the future of work, or a future after work as we know it."—-Nathan Wolff, Washington Post

From the Publisher

"It is finally time to move past the idea that Thoreau was a ponderous layabout whose solitary musings were only possible because of behind-the-scenes support staff (his family). . . . In a post-Covid moment when society is struggling to define the meaning and purpose of so much of what we call work, Thoreau’s 19th-century ideas about labor are both highly relevant and weirdly prescient."

Lit Hub

2023-03-11
Two philosophers turn to Henry David Thoreau for help in understanding the nature and purpose of work.

To witness a society obsess over efficiency, productivity, and profitability as ours does would have distressed Thoreau, if not surprised him. After all, he recognized the seduction of rapid communication long before the age of social media: “We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate….As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly.” Kaag and van Belle want to showcase a Thoreau who is not the out-of-touch stubborn recluse of lore but rather a philosopher with his feet on the ground, someone who has relevant advice for our daily lives, including how we spend a majority of our waking hours: at work. The authors speculate that, following the most recent recession, the “Great Resignation” might be an indication that in the aftermath of the pandemic, Americans are finally ready to take after Thoreau’s example of living deliberately. Even if the current disinclination to punch the clock is less idealistic than that, we might still benefit from hearing from Thoreau in light of high inflation rates. The first chapter of Walden, after all, is “Economy,” and Thoreau shows us how to do more with less. Kaag and van Belle range widely over a variety of relevant topics, including meaningful versus meaningless work, annoying co-workers, and the threat of AI to human workers. Readers of Kaag’s philosophical memoirs will recognize a similar clarity and command of language here even as the personal takes a back seat to the sociological as well as the philosophical. This is philosophy as Thoreau would have recognized it: full of life.

An inspiring book that will give you the succor you need to reconsider—and possibly change—the way you work.

Kirkus Reviews