Visualising the Division of Labour

Abstract

Since the late eighteenth century the idea of the division of labour has been a crucial tool in the attempt to isolate and define a notion of cultural modernity; but it has always been a double-edged tool. We are most familiar nowadays with the idea as it was used by Marx, and so with the notion that the narrative it recounts is a bad narrative — a story of alienation, from the unity of the productive process, from the social totality, from the self. But in the late eighteenth century, the idea of the division of labour functioned as a fully articulated discourse, offering a comprehensive account of human history, which could be appealed to by aestheticians, linguists, literary critics and speculative historians. It was predominantly associated, however, with the institution of political economy: with the celebration of economic expansion and industrial improvement, and with the attempt to vindicate the structure of modern commercial societies as, precisely, a structure, as something which, despite its arguably chaotic appearance, was available to be known, to be comprehended. And for political economists, of course, it was a discourse which had, for the most part, a good story to tell. It posited a primal, pre-social moment of undifferentiated occupational unity, when each person performed all the tasks necessary to his or her survival.