“This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as ‘knowledge work’.”

How many people with University of Chicago PhDs in philosophy do you think become motorcycle mechanics? After you read Shop Class as Soulcraft, you can claim you know of at least one. Having gotten a well-paid position at a thinktank, Crawford left it after 5 months, and turned instead to working with his hands. He claims he’s happier for it.

Shop Class as Soulcraft is about the difference between monetary and psychic nourishment. It worries that in today’s world, it is assumed that we get the first from our jobs and the second from our two week holiday, a somewhat woeful ratio. It is in the trades, Crawford argues, that both can be found, and his book merges philosophy, psychology, a love of the local, and stories of fixing motorbikes.

In today’s world, manual labour all tends to be dismissed as mindless. Crawford suggests this arises from the error of confusing manual labour with assembly line work. Assembly line work is easily depersonalized and turned into a process, forced to respond to forces remote from where the work is done. Indeed, this was a stated goal of production when the assembly line was introduced, as it allowed the use of unskilled labour. It has little if anything to do with a trade like woodworking or fixing motorcycles, however, in which problems must be diagnosed and unique solutions formed: the jobs simply vary too much to be reduced to a single process. Modern white collar labour, in contrast, often can be, and as Crawford wisely points out, trafficking in abstraction is not the same as thinking.

For Crawford, “real knowledge arises through confrontations with real things:” it is in facing the real world, with universal standards like ‘does the engine run?’ that we truly test ourselves. In the corporate environment, on the other hand, accountability is at best diffuse, and we rarely have any sort of independent standard by which to judge our success.

In the end, the best jobs engage the human faculties as much as possible. For some people, this is in the life of the mind. For others, it is in the trades. If Crawford is arguing for anything, it is for people to pick careers based on what is good for their soul, not just what is good for their wallet or the respect of society. He believes that can be found in the trades, and though I probably believe it will vary widely between people, I’m happy to agree they’re worth a try.