Chapter Non solo per profitto. L’idea del lavoro in Benjamin Franklin

Abstract

This essay underlines how the idea of Franklin's work does not correspond to the interpretation developed by Max Weber: on the one hand it was combined with the enhancement of free time and, on the other, as Sombart had pointed out, it was not an end to itself from an ascetic point of view, but rationalistically linked to the idea of personal virtue and the republican common good. Franklin is however at the origins of a modern bourgeois idea of private work as a factor of autonomy and civilization. On this basis he developed independentist ideas, identifying parasitic rent in the English aristocratic culture; but also his colonialist civilizing vision of Native Americans, despite his anti-slavery stance.