From the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas, March 25, 2024:
How Reason Encountered Work: The Encylopédie and the Métiers
The destruction of the communatés des métiers, the corporations which for centuries organized the work, life and exchange of trades in the kingdom of France, was undoubtedly a turning point in modern European history. Their dismantlement, which was first unsuccessfully attempted by Louis XVI’s minister Turgot in 1776, was a key element in the abolition of the feudal order during the French Revolution, and was later reinforced with the application of the Le Chapelier law in 1791, which fully banned any association or gathering in the workplace. The end of corporations seemingly enabled the emergence of an individualistic capitalist economy, the birth of modern civil society, but also foregrounded the transformation of the languages of labor that were at the origin of socialism. If its undertaking is intertwined with the revolutionary destruction of privilege, it nonetheless followed a singular trajectory related to the problem of how labor should be organized and governed. This piece explores some of the intellectual preconditions of this process.
Before the royal edicts or the national assembly resolutions that aimed at the political and legal destruction of guilds, labor had to be first comprehensively reimagined in theory. The reshaping of work as something different from its corporate experience (which structured the life of workers inside and outside the workshop through confraternity rites, master-apprentice relations, and social identities) was already enacted in the pages of Diderot and D’alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772). In this major work of modern European thought, both an enlightened critique of corporations and a revalorization of the arts méchaniques, the crafts that turn nature into useful or beautiful things took place. If work has to be reimagined anew, it was also because pure manual labor and the mechanical arts—which were thought as a combination of manual effort and some degree of intellectual competence—were, vis-à-vis the liberal arts—considered the endeavor of pure mind and spirit—usually despised and deemed unbecoming of noble men. In what follows, we seek to understand how these two aspects of Diderot and D’Alembert’s projects are related and to what effects.
The full title of the Encyclopédie is a systematic [raisoné] dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts [métiers]. This foregrounds a novel centrality of work and production in an already atypical project that set out to reorder all available knowledge in purely alphabetical order. Its editors explicitly declared the celebration of the mechanical arts’ utility and the unprecedented meticulousness of their study and description as a guiding principle of their endeavor. Even further, the alphabetical classification itself implied a scandalous reordering of things which no longer respected the hierarchies of estate and status. The most diverse crafts thus occupied a place within the undifferentiated progression of the a-b-c, alongside topics which were traditionally considered to be noble or lofty.
Alongside the egalitarian order of the alphabet, however, a system of new hierarchies was also being established—as is not only evident in the depiction of the difference of literacy, but also the theoretical divisions of enlightened thought as shown in the Figurative system of human knowledge (1751) (see figure 1). In this “tree of knowledge,” trimmed and rearranged by the philosophes, work appears under the name of “uses of nature”; as the last sprout of the branch related to memory from which history also springs, and opposed to the branch of reason and philosophy. The latter overcomes the mere reminiscing of what has happened throughout time or the awareness of what is repeated in practice, and starts corresponding to the domain of law and all of the former’s underlying causes. Moreover, experiences—already singular and limited in themselves—are also bespoken in different dialects rather than in the universal language of science. The habits of remembering and the conventions of communicating about experiences vary greatly; they are always idiosyncratic, randomly accumulated through time, and consequently equivocal and confusing. True knowledge—full understanding of the causes and the possession of a language to express it—is thus, for these enlightened intellectuals, always external to the mere recollection of experience, to which the expertise of the métiers (trades) belongs. For the encyclopedists, the knowledge of the gens de métier, tradesmen that lived from the mechanical arts, had to be as poor as their spoken language because of their intrinsic distance from philosophical reason and the universal grammar that should be science’s only idiom....
....MUCH MORE
Big changes, little remembered.
