Humanism and the sociology of post-work

Abstract

This paper tracks and exposes the persistence of a ‘theoretical humanism’ through the contemporary sociological imagination of a social future beyond and without work. Building on the work of Louis Althusser [For Marx, Verso, 1996] and the critical appraisal of his anti-humanist epistemological intervention on the pages of Economy and Society, this paper argues that the critique of theoretical humanism reveals particular theoretical shortcomings and oversights in this emerging sociology of post-work. In both the definition of its epistemological boundaries and in its advocation of a politics reflective of these boundaries, this paper argues that the sociology of post-work reproduces an anthropological and moralistic ideological discourse of the working human subject, behind which it eclipses a material sociological analysis of the problems with work today.