Shop Class as Soulcraft

In the introduction, author Matthew B. Crawford offers information both about himself and his goals in writing the book. Although Crawford holds a doctorate in political philosophy and for a time ran a political think tank, he left that world behind in order to find greater meaning in more tangible, hands on work. Crawford announces his purpose of arguing in favor of work that is “meaningful because it is genuinely useful” (6). For the author, this means working as a motorcycle mechanic and occasionally as an electrician. He wants to avoid the “precious images of manual work that intellectuals sometimes traffic in” (6) and instead speculate on why it is that people are now becoming newly interested in repairing their own goods, raising their own hens, growing their own food, and mending or sewing their own clothes. For Crawford, these are all signs of “the struggle for individual agency” (7) that he believes many find to be missing in a workplace dominated by teamwork and unclear outcomes of one’s own individual efforts. He feels that Americans have been sold too much on “virtualism: a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in pure information economy” (3).