The worker

Summary

Influenced by the experience of World War I and the fragility of the Weimar Republic, Jünger sought to formulate a sustainable model for modern life through something he called the "worker". A central argument in the book is that what may appear as nihilism may instead be understood as failures to recognise shifts in the dominating metaphysics of a society, and the worker is presented as someone who keeps up with the shift away from bourgeois values. The arguments of the book are related to concepts Jünger had developed in his 1930 essay "Total Mobilisation" with modern economic life was an extension of wartime total mobilisation which meant that the bourgeois order brought in by the Enlightenment was giving way to a new society organised around the figure of the Worker.

Reception

Scholars and critics have discussed what the book means with its terms "worker" and "Gestalt", and how its content relates to the Enlightenment, bourgeois society, history and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. The book had significant influence on Martin Heidegger's philosophy of technology.

Jünger published a comment on The Worker in 1964 titled Maxima–Minima. In this and other later works, such as An der Zeitmauer (1959) and Der Weltstaat (1960), he developed his views of technology and the worker. He argued that war is what drives technology and science, and that the logic of war, which is the basis for the logic of the worker, cannot be tamed by rules and laws, and the worker is by extension in conflict with both the nation state and the individual.