Chapter Ágnes Heller. Il lavoro come espressione di libera individualità

Abstract

Heller focuses the issue work in the 60s and 70s, mainly in three different contexts: everyday life, radical needs, the critique of Lukács’s Ontology of social being, in which “work” is presented as a model for social praxis. At the time she still used Marxian categories – no matter how unorthodox her analysis - and looked at a non-alienated society, believing in the possibility of communism. Only after she emigrated to Australia (1977) she abandoned Marxism to embrace a kind of Kierkegaardian existentialism. She maintains that work is a vital need for man, necessary to reproduce his free individuality. Later, following Marx, she developed a theory of radical needs, in which the human goal is to achieve new qualitative needs outside work time, in the disposable time. But Heller does not fail to also highlight some deficiencies and inconsistencies of the Marxian analysis on the subject.