Work in the Machine Society

INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, by Georges Friedmann. (Edited and with an introduction by Harold L. Sheppard.) Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois, 1955. 436 pp., $6.00.

No Marx-ward inclination is required to see that work is central to man’s fate in modern industrial society. How could it be otherwise, when a man’s job is the place at which he spends most of his waking hours; is the source from which he derives his income with which to demand society’s resources, and which sets limits and gives form to his life chances; and is the single most important criterion by which he is assigned a rank in a highly rank-conscious society?

When these aspects of occupation are taken into account, it is clearly no longer possible to ta...