"Crawford does not want to romanticize the mechanic's life, but his upholding of it as a model turns out to be a personal escape plan rather than a blueprint for social transformation."

On the back cover of this book there is a photo of the author in his jeans, standing by his dark shop, not working but looking at the reader, one hand holding what looks like a spanner, the other resting on a vintage BMW motorbike. But, as we soon learn, this is no ordinary mechanic. Matthew B. Crawford is the son of a physicist, was brought up in a commune, and holds a PhD in political philosophy as well as his own degree in physics; yet he gave up a highly paid job in a Washington think tank to set up a motorcycle repair shop. Why?

In essence this book is an attempt to explain the virtues of working in what Crawford calls the trades, that is to say, service occupations involving manual work. The trades, he explains, differ from other occupations in important ways. Unlike white-collar service work whose immediate concern is the management of people and ideas, the work of mechanics, electricians, and other trades people directs itself towards material objects. But, unlike manufacturing and the crafts, it does not involve making those objects from scratch; rather, it involves caring for things that have been previously created, tweaking and fixing them on behalf of their owners. Into these peculiarities of trade work Crawford pours a considerable amount of ethical, political and philosophical content.

The modern world of work, he rightly complains, is oriented towards the knowledge economy and dominated by vast impersonal corporations. Young people are educated and trained to fit into this world, exhorted to cultivate their self-esteem, for example, but denied the autonomy and satisfaction of measuring their work by objective standards. It is not only the economic crisis, Crawford suggests, but a growing awareness that something fundamental is missing from our working lives, that is driving many of us once again towards the tangibility and usefulness of manual work. We see this, for example, in the exploding trend towards urban gardening, in the coolness of knitting your own sweater, etc. By drawing us out of our own minds towards the material world that surrounds us, such work acts as an antidote against the narcissism of contemporary culture and the throw-away carelessness of consumer society.

That is the main point of the book, and it is well made. Crawford skillfully blends together the personal, the technical, and the philosophical, the story about why you shouldn't spin a wheel bearing while drying it under compressed air, with quotes from Anaxagoras and Heidegger. Even with a vague notion of what a wheel bearing does, the reader will appreciate its significance and the precision with which it fits into the narrative.

Yet the nature of Crawford's work, and his social position as a small-business owner, seem to have had a narrowing effect on his thinking. Trades work is necessarily small-scale and immediate, but it is only one kind of work: in our society, and in all future societies, it will always be connected with the other kinds. Tools and vehicles will need to be manufactured; crafts will play a key role in the development and expression of individual skills; a certain amount of white-collar or administration work will always be necessary; etc. Crawford celebrates the mechanic's work as a meaningful activity grounded in physical reality and carried out in communities of face-to-face interactions with customers and co-workers. But where does that leave the other kinds of work, those that in fact account for the majority of jobs on the planet? Where does that leave human work as a whole, as the totality of efforts that reproduce the life of a society? Crawford does not want to romanticize the mechanic's life, but his upholding of it as a model turns out to be a personal escape plan rather than a blueprint for social transformation: as he himself explains, it is not a revolutionary but a Stoical response to the dehumanizing character of work in modern society. It obviously suits someone who in addition to owning his own shop holds a fellowship at the University of Virginia, but it is of limited use to the rest of us.

The same small-scale conservatism misleads Crawford into a wrong-headed critique of modern science. Its mode of knowledge is too abstract and formulaic, he complains; better and more realistic is the intuitive knowledge of the skilled mechanic, the chess player, and the firefighter, the sort of knowledge that is accumulated through experience and can never be reduced to mathematics. But this is an overdrawn contrast, and not only because, as any biologist will tell you, much of science is non-mathematical. Both theoretical and practical knowledge are useful to society, both have much in common, and each draws from and checks the other. Practical knowledge, for example, involves abstraction too: the mechanic and the electrician have their own 'rules of thumb'. And science itself is the fruit of a historical experience that includes the evolution of work, as Crawford himself recognizes at one point. It was only after many generations of farmers had labored to breed plants and animals, for instance, that Darwin finally realized that nature too modifies species through selection. Conversely, of course, science has greatly contributed to the progress of farming methods.

Finally, a narrow range of concerns means that, for a craftsman who takes obvious pride in his work, Crawford's reading of alternative views is at times sloppy. Marx's concept of alienation, for example, he renders as an absurd objection to having one person's labor appropriated for the use of another. But what would a furniture maker do with a hundred chairs, he wonders. 'I find Marx unconvincing on this point' (186). Not surprisingly, since Marx's point was precisely the opposite, that consciously producing objects to satisfy the needs of others belongs in the communal nature of man. Marx condemned the present economic system for alienating the products of labor, and people's very capacity to work, not for use, but as the property of capital, as values to be bought and sold on the market irrespective of utility. And Marx did offer some ambitious suggestions for the rational integration of work into a collective enterprise free from the exploitation and brutal division of labor characteristic of class-based societies. But, like vintage motorbikes, the best ideas sometimes lie abandoned in dark corners, waiting for those who will rediscover them and pay them some long-overdue attention.

Paula Cerni MPhil is an independent writer. For other publications, please visit http://360.yahoo.com/p.cerni.