Utopias of Work: Historical Perspectives

Recent changes in the world of work – changes such as growing precarity in people’s access to the goods of work, the rise of platform work, the resurgent popularity of the ideal of productive self-sufficiency, and the unequal impact of automation and AI – have renewed interest in how work might be valued, compensated, and organized differently. The moral issues raised by these changes are not new, however, and we would benefit from revisiting the long history of thinking about ideals of work and its place in the good life. This conference turns to the history of philosophy and political economy for utopian and radical perspectives on work. We will explore how philosophers and political economists from Plato to Gandhi saw the rational or democratic organization of firms, unions, and labor markets as means of advancing justice, freedom, and virtue at work. In particular, we are interested in insights from these figures that might help to address today’s injustices surrounding work. The conference will conclude with a panel on the overall relevance of returning to utopian and revolutionary thinkers from our past. What (if anything) can we learn from them for the 21st century? 

Keynote Addresses

• David Leopold (University of Oxford) -Utopian Work: Lessons from the Nineteenth-Century
• Laurence Davis (University College Cork) -The Dialectic of Labour in the Political Thought of William Morris 
• Michelle C. Smith (Clemson University) -Time, Tradwives, and Utopia: The Temporality of Women’s Work in Mid-19th Century American Communities

Conference Talks

• Özhan Öztürk (Eötvös Loránd University) -Reversing the Division of Labor: Badiou’s Utopian Challenge to Plato
• Lisa Herzog (University of Groningen) -Care for the working class: Flora Tristan on the political economy of care work
• Michael Eigner (University of Groningen) -The Workplace after the Revolution: A Conceptualization of a New Kind of Group Agent
• Natalia Danilkina (Independent Researcher) -Labor Transformations on the Way to Self-regulating Machines in A. Bogdanov’s Thought
• Tyler Colby Re (University of Groningen) -Utopia in Fichte’s Closed Commercial State
• Gregorio Demarchi (Independent Researcher, Volkshochschule Zürich) and Leo Grob (University of Fribourg) -Utopias of Autonomia? Autoriduzione and Autovalorizzazione against Work
• Sophie Cardin (University of Oxford) -The Medem Sanatorium (1926-1942): Work in a Socialist ‘Children’s Republic’
• Alexandre Carvalho (CEPS and University of Barcelona) -Unmasking the Fetishism of Technical Decisions
• Claudia Roesch (University of Konstanz) -Utopian Engineering: Imaginations of New Forms of Labour in the Age of Machinery
• Sean Irving (University of Essex) -Neither Boss nor Bureaucrat: Constitutionalism and Real Utopias of Work in Economic Republicanism
• Joshua Graf (University of Osnabruck) - Marx, Engels, The Socialist Tradition and the Communist Day
• Manuela Peitz (Freie Universität Berlin) -Utopia and Labor: The Changing Role of Fourier’s Utopian Thinking
• Emmanuel Chaput (Université Laval) -States of Solidarity: Célestin Bouglé’s Political Thought Between Léon Bourgeois and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Conference Program: