Chapter Lavoro e senso della vita in Max Weber

Abstract

Work as vocation is the typical phenomenon of the modern West, whose conditions of possibility, phenomenology and decline Weber reconstructs as part of an overall reflection on the way in which the question of the meaning (Sinn) of life is posed in waning modernity. The prognosis on the future of the work ethic and on the possibility of identifying in work a source of meaning for life once its religious motivations have disappeared is inauspicious: work (of the entrepreneur as well as the worker) has ceased - in different forms and for different reasons - to be a vocation, to constitute an ethical duty and thus a possible source of meaning for life. Weber's reconstruction of modernity arrives at a Zeidiagnose in which work has become an improbable vocation for the entrepreneur and, instead, for the worker an entirely residual ethical posture of which Weber does not categorically exclude a re-proposition starting from the image of the world (Weltbild) of socialism.