XII Symposium of the Iliad Institute in Paris

XII Symposium of the Iliad Institute

Saturday 5 April 2025 in the Maison de la Chimie, Paris, France

The theme will be “Thinking Tomorrow’s Labour: Identity, Community, Power”.

Globalization and financialisation, deindustrialisation and tertiarisation, digitisation and dematerialisation, uberisation and casualisation, robotisation… In a few decades, labour has undergone profound mutations, sources of tensions, disenchantments, and concerns that lead to questioning its place in our lives and our society. Labour is in crisis. We must therefore “re-think” it, but also imagine new ways to “re-enchant” it, in the context of the new shared destiny that Europe must build for itself.

The Greeks and the Romans distinguished alienating labour (ponos, labor) from the creative activity per se (ergon and poiesis, opus), intrinsically associated with the logos. The former did not suit the free man and the citizen, who must, on the contrary, learn to cultivate the otium, the time dedicated to studious entertainment and meditation, beyond the negotium, realm of production and commercial profit.

The medieval society was articulated in three orders, inherited from an old Indo-European structure: the laboratores had to ensure a productive activity to secure their livelihood, whereas the wielding of the two swords, the spiritual and the temporal, was handed down to the oratores and the bellatores. The practice of an occupation, considered by the Church as a path toward redemption and sanctification, took on a deeply communitarian dimension, in the context of village communities, of corporations and guilds, within which prevailed the ideal of the “job well done”.

In the wake of the Protestant Reformation, then through the English liberal theories of the Enlightenment and Marxist theories of the following century, a new concept of labour, essentially utilitarian and mercantile, in stark opposition to the antique and medieval concepts, had progressively affirmed itself in the West. Born from the rise of industrial capitalism, the notion of labour reduced to its strictly material dimension is a modern concept. A concept now intrinsically linked to the search for productivity, ruled only by economic rationale, labour imposes itself as a determining “value” within the whole of society. The rise of mechanisation and the era of the masses will result, during the 20th century, in the “total mobilisation” of the productive forces, in such a way that the entirety of human activity will tend to become fully quantifiable, and that man will evolve and become but a cog in the workings of a global economy.

It did not seem necessary to dispute this evolution. It seems, however, that labour nowadays is a value that is put into question in the whole current Western world. Is it the end of a cycle?

As the rhythm of technological revolutions accelerates, labour is witnessing radical mutations that are emphasising some already long-standing tendencies: the loss of meaning in one’s occupation, addiction to futile entertainments, disappearance of any communitarian dimension, expansion of the virtual sphere, job destruction, and transformation of the employee into an interchangeable element of the “managerial machine.” Additionally, at a moment in which competition between great powers intensifies and sounds the death bell of the illusions of “happy globalisation”, the choices made by our leaders for several decades have placed the peoples and nations of Europe in a worrying situation of vulnerability: loss of sovereignty in energy and technology, deindustrialisation and excessive tertiarisation, resort to a cheap and unqualified non-European workforce, a true reserve army of the capital, destined to satisfy the idleness of the consumers as much as mercantile greed from private interest groups, while states crumble under the weight of their debts.

This decline likely isn’t inevitable, as long as Europeans retake their destiny in hand and show themselves capable of thinking tomorrow’s labour in terms of identity, community, and sovereignty: it is by drawing from the enduring values of their civilisation but also by displaying inventiveness that they will be able to give back meaning and efficiency to their productive activities, and conceive anew of labour as a path towards excellence and as an instrument of power. The conquest of a strategic autonomy for the European continent constitutes the preliminary and unavoidable step towards this renewal. It rests upon eminently political decisions, and not upon exclusively short-term financial considerations. But it implies a true moral and intellectual recovery, where spiritual and aesthetic dimensions will play a key role: to give back meaning to labour, it matters to exceed the strictly materialistic, egotistical, and utilitarian vision of human activity, to replace it with the perspective of a common historical destiny.

Beyond these considerations, the European man must also rediscover the mastery of his time, to substitute the consumerist approach of entertainments with the taste of the otium, the leisure that elevates mind and soul. It is precisely one of the perspectives offered by technological development, should the mastery of the latter be conquered by a new creative elite, whose world vision will ally a sense of restraint and will to power.

So are the paths that the Iliad Institute will explore within the context of its 12th symposium and the 2nd periodical of the Studies Center, which will be published on this occasion.