The Worker: Dominion and Form
by Jünger, Ernst (2017)
Abstract
Written in 1932, just before the fall of the Weimar Republic and on the eve of the Nazi accession to power, Ernst Jünger’s The Worker: Dominion and Form articulates a trenchant critique of bourgeois liberalism and seeks to identify the form characteristic of the modern age. Jünger’s analyses, written in critical dialogue with Marx, are inspired by a profound intuition of the movement of history and an insightful interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Martin Heidegger considered Jünger “the only genuine follower of Nietzsche,” singularly providing “an interpretation which took shape in the domain of that metaphysics which already determines our epoch, even against our knowledge; this metaphysics is Nietzsche's doctrine of the ‘will to power.’” In The Worker, Jünger examines some of the defining questions of that epoch: the nature of individuality, society, and the state; morality, justice, and law; and the relationships between freedom and power and between technology and nature. This work, appearing in its entirety in English translation for the first time, is an important contribution to debates on work, technology, and politics by one of the most controversial German intellectuals of the twentieth century. Not merely of historical interest, The Worker carries a vital message for contemporary debates about world economy, political stability, and equality in our own age, one marked by unsettling parallels to the 1930s.
Key Passage
Leisure time and work time are two modes of one and the same technical occupation by which one is claimed. The strange result of modern revolutions consists in the fact that the number of factories increases and that one calls for more, better and cheaper labour. From the socialist theoreticians and men of letters has developed a special, and incidentally no less boring kind of official, statistician and engineer of the state, and a socialist of {248} the 1900s would notice with astonishment that the argument no longer operates with wages, but with production numbers. There are countries in which one can be shot for sabotaging work like a soldier who leaves his post, and in which food is rationed for fifteen years like in a city under siege – and these are the countries where socialism has been already most unambiguously implemented. (p.178)
Keywords
Ernst Jünger, Der Arbeiter, Weimar Republic, Bourgeois Liberalism, Marx, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Technology, Politics, Political Theory, Political Economy, Twentieth Century, German, Social ContractThemes
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