Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8745-6761
Date of Award
12-12-2018
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Philosophy
First Advisor
Sebastian Rand
Second Advisor
Peter Lindsay
Third Advisor
Calvin Thomas
Abstract
This thesis examines Hegel’s critique of abstract labor in the Philosophy of Right and the sections on objective spirit in the Encyclopaedia. Against both Frederick Neuhouser’s and Marxist interpretations, I argue that abstract labor, for Hegel, characterizes the specific kind of mechanical labor undertaken in the nineteenth-century factory. Such repetitive labor, Hegel claims, leads to the deadening (Abstumpfung) of the worker through the deforming of her ethical subjectivity, a social pathology he hopes will be resolved by machine automation. By developing two key aspects of Hegel’s social theory—that labor produces ethical subjectivity or education (Bildung) and that this education is the central locus of civil society’s ethicality—I argue that we ought to understand Hegel’s hope for machine automation as a critique of those forms of labor which prevent the worker’s rational participation in the totality of the labor process and thus fail to actualize her social freedom.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.57709/13444485
Recommended Citation
Delhey, Matthew J., "Machine Automation and the Critique of Abstract Labor in Hegel's Mature Social Theory." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2018.
doi: https://doi.org/10.57709/13444485