Summary of the main arguments developed in Worthy Effforts

Historiography is always a dialogue between past and present. At the end of the twentieth century, increasing numbers announced the crisis or even the imminent end of the ‘work society’. Some commentators viewed this as a threat, while others argued that the crisis was an opportunity, and that we were on the verge of a ‘leisure society’. On their quest to fij ind support for either perspective, many authors have looked to the past. They wanted to know whether work was decisive for identity, prestige and self-respect everywhere and for all time, and from what point in time, where, and under what conditions the work ethic evolved. In the greater debate about why some nations have been economically successful, while others have remained poor, David Landes and Niall Ferguson attribute immense importance to cultural values, especially about ‘the peculiar ethic of hard work and thrift’, to explain why ‘Western civilization’ has managed to dominate the rest of the world. Ferguson has even labelled the Western work ethic as ‘one of the six killer apps of western power’. Whatever their position may be in these (and other) debates, most authors tend to invoke the standard historical account, which fij igures in a specifij ic tradition with a rigidly circumscribed agenda, especially the quest for what is described as The Rise of the West, the birth of modernity or the origins of capitalism. This account distinguishes clearly between Classical Antiquity, when the elite deprecated work in general and manual work in particular, from subsequent periods, when a new and more favourable view gained ground. It emphasizes the revolutionary role of Christianity in this respect and presents the modern Western work ethic as the outcome of a slow but linear and cumulative process spanning the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times. In Worthy Effforts we critically examine this Grand Narrative, in which monasticism, urban expansion, humanism, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment generally fij igure as major milestones and signposts. The guideline is the heuristic question: who said what, when and how, in which circumstances, to whom, and why? The book is a systematic search