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Random House Books for Young Readers

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

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A philosopher/mechanic's wise (and sometimes funny) look at the challenges and pleasures of working with one's hands “This is a deep exploration of craftsmanship by someone with real, hands-on knowledge. The book is also quirky, surprising, and sometimes quite moving.” —Richard Sennett, author of The Craftsman Called “the sleeper hit of the publishing season” by The Boston Globe, Shop Class as Soulcraft became an instant bestseller, attracting readers with its radical (and timely) reappraisal of the merits of skilled manual labor. On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a “knowledge worker,” based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world. Read more Read less

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (April 27, 2010)


Language ‏ : ‎ English


Paperback ‏ : ‎ 246 pages


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0143117467


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 69


Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.4 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.66 x 5.3 x 0.69 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #20,382 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3 in Philosophy Aesthetics #5 in Philosophy Reference (Books) #5 in Labor & Industrial Economic Relations (Books)


#3 in Philosophy Aesthetics:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Excellent and thought provoking
Make no mistake, this book is no easy read. It is a work of philosophy by a man who has a Ph.D. in the field. Still, anyone with even a basic familiarity with philosophy can read it with profit. If one lacked such preparation all they would need is a good dictionary. A friend of mine who is in a Ph.D. program recommended it to me when we were talking about my dream of restoring a muscle car on my own. What a great book! This work touches on many different areas: from education, to anthropology, to the nature of work itself. I found myself largely agreeing with it throughout, although I would quibble on a few of the details. For instance, if I am reading him correctly, the author seems to get the history of modern scientific method wrong, and seems ignorant of new work on the Middle Ages. For a philosopher this is problematic (how can a professional philosopher not thoroughly understand scholasticism and the history of monasticism?) but that is the state of the academy these days. I am no scholar, just a teacher with interests in music, history, theology, and philosophy. However, I recently had some life changing experiences that this book really speaks to. With our conversion to Catholicism, and the commensurate arrival of our third child, my wife informed me of the importance of her staying home with the children. She desired to home-school them to provide them with a classical education, and that meant changes in my life (I was a Catholic school teacher at the time). I had to leave my job in favor of public schools in order to make the necessary income for her to stay home, but that was only the first step. Expenses had to be cut, and drastically. I have had to find ways to save money and make it on one salary. The brakes were going on my car and I did NOT want to put the bill on my credit card. A guy at Church told me that disk brakes were easy. I should do them myself. I bought a couple of books, looked on-line for vehicle specific directions (Auto Zone has a GREAT website), bought a ratchet set and got to work. My friend was right. I replaced brakes and rotors and bought tools and books at it cost me less than it would have cost at a facility to get the brakes and rotors done for me. Plus, I was equipped to do it again and again. That was just the beginning. She wanted new cabinets in the kitchen. I had to build them. My mom's car needed new plugs and wires. I had to do it (she lives with us and is on a fixed income). I have had to make MAJOR changes, and the biggest one is that I rarely have the money to hire people. I am redoing the back porch. I have been amazed at how much I love the process of doing all this work myself. And, the thing is, I am truly happiest when I am doing this work. There is no time when I am more at peace than when I am trying to tackle a difficult new problem. My respect for the trades (and the men and women in them) has grown immensely. I am fortunate to love my job as well, but I really do believe that had I known what I know now about how fulfilling, intellectually stimulating, and rewarding the trades are, I might have skipped the four year degree and the masters, picked up automotive and electrical at the local community college, and saved myself and bundle and been just as fulfilled. This book put flesh on an idea and expressed competently knowledge that I had come across experientially. Had I the chance to do things differently I probably wouldn't, but if my son (or daughter) informs me that they love working on the car with me and would like to do it for a living, I will certainly encourage them in their vocation. Two years ago, my stupid snobbery might have prevented that. Also, this book clearly communicates why many of the electricians and mechanics I have met are some of the smartest people I have spoken to. In as much as I am in a position to do so, I will advocate from now on for a return of the manual crafts in the classroom. Any high school education that doesn't teach someone to work a little with wood, and little about their car, and a little about the plumbing in their house is really no education at all. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on August 15, 2009 by bookscdsdvdsandcoolstuff
    • Beyond Left and Right
This book will pose difficulties for most American readers outside acadaemia, because it represents a squaring of the circle on which most of us have been taught to plot "liberal" and "conservative". Crawford is neither liberal nor conservative by the standards of contemporary American political discourse. Instead, he draws on elements of classical Marxist and related social critique to reach conclusions that are not so different to those espoused by what Rod Dreher calls "Crunchy Conservatives". This is because Crawford, like Dreher's crunchy cons, espouses values that have been deliberately distorted or discarded in the rise of US-style corporate capitalism: the elevation of personal agency, responsibility, and work-identity over passive consumption, disengagement, and the destruction of responsibility through "flexibility". This is a curious result: Marxists and American conservatives in agreement about something. It is understandable, however, if we go "back to the roots" of both viewpoints. Like Marx, Crawford is essentially a conservative, backward-looking utopian in rebellion against the dominant political economy of his day. Marx admired the pre-industrial agrarian/craftsman ideal of the unification of producer and product; Crawford's vision is of a Jeffersonian post-agrarian yeomanship rooted in the Stoic consciousness supposedly produced by the mechanical trades. Crawford and Marx both believe (rightly, I think) that political consciousness is to a certain degree "determined" by material conditions, i.e. the physical and sociological conditions of daily work. Marx, Crawford, and (one suspects) most crunchy cons would admire a universe in which the radical commodification of all aspects of human existence characteristic of contemporary capitalism has been eradicated, replaced by one in which most people can choose their work and become experts in it because it pleases them. Concerning solutions, these utopian logics diverge. Marx's, famously, was to predict the intensification of worker alienation as a prelude to revolution and the magical reconstitution of society and economy; his followers (e.g. Lenin) perfected political means to help this "ineluctable" historical process along (a task whose irony was lost on most of them). Crawford recommends a deliberate re-valorisation of the manual trades (although he invariably means the mechanical trades) in both physical and philosophical terms. The "crunchy cons", on the other hand, have no obvious solution to embrace: simultaneously alienated and held captive by a system of commodity production and a political economy they don't fully understand, they retreat into wistfulness and boutique environmentalism. All three viewpoints run up against the hard facts of power, and the almost limitless capacity of the "ruling class" - i.e. those who benefit from the evolving status quo - to manipulate it to its advantage. Crunchy cons cannot grasp that the rootsy, organic, self-responsible world to which they aspire was deliberately destroyed by the very system that their conservative political ideology helps preserve. Marx did not foresee that new forms of class domination could lie on the other side of proletarian revolution. And Crawford struggles to accept that his idiosyncratic vision cannot be generally realised within our globalised, hyper-commodified, corporate-dominated political economy. The truth is that things won't really work out very well if everyone is trying to be a mechanical technician of some sort. Crawford admirably outlines the deliberate attempt, in the first half of the 20th century, to engineer the destruction of the craftsman-mechanic, but he doesn't really come to terms with the difficulties (economic or political) inherent in reversing it. Indeed, one suspects that Crawford's acknowledged omission of any serious economic interrogation of his thesis is due to the obvious contradictions of trying to do so. We can't all be motorcycle mechanics because the world is made up of much more than motorcycles - especially the vintage type that only aficionados can afford to maintain. HAVING SAID ALL THAT, this is an absolutely wonderful book - one of the most powerful and resonant American polemics written in the last 20 years. It is beautifully written and often hilariously ironic. It is inspiring - not because it offers a way out of the contradictions of our commodified, stratified existence, but because it suggests an entry point for those trying to find one: finding common ground between those on the right and left who are divided only by the demagoguery that passes for political discourse in the USA. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States on July 13, 2009 by Captain Spaulding

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