New Work New Culture The New Book

Bergmann’s New Work, New Culture

The idea of New Work, conceptualised originally by the German-born, American social philosopher, Frithjof Bergmann, is no longer new in the sense of time. Yet, it’s an idea just as relevant today as it was when it was first brought to the world’s attention nearly 40 years ago.
New Work was first conceived as Bergmann travelled through Eastern Europe of the 1970s and 1980s, witnessing the devastation of industrialisation on Communist countries. He found similarities in the spirit-crippling activities that many in America’s workforce were undertaking in the early 1980s, particularly in the automobile manufacturing centers of Michigan, where Bergmann was teaching. Combined with an increasing concern over the automation of factories and workplaces that would lead to massive layoffs and unemployment, Bergmann, now a Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, began to recognise that Capitalism, too, not just Communism, was stripping people of their ability to find meaning in their lives. Neither was a recipe for a happier future. So, he began advocating a system, essentially a new culture, where people could pursue their calling or purpose, something they truly believed in and were passionate about.

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New Culture. Transition. Change. Shaping the New

Frithjof Bergmann is a philosopher and anthropologist and is internationally known as the founder of the New Work movement. Born in Saxony in 1930, he fled from the Nazis to Austria during the Nazi period and emigrated to the United States four years after the end of the war. There he worked as a dishwasher, prizefighter, dock worker, playwright, and in complete self-sufficiency before turning to philosophy and making it his life’s work. As a professor, he taught at the country’s best universities (Princeton, Stanford, Chicago, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor) and advised companies, trade unions, government organizations, and municipalities around the world on implementing his theories of New Work.

Starting from the conviction that the concept of freedom is entirely misunderstood, he published his first philosophical volume, On Being Free, in 1977. The central message of this book: real freedom becomes possible for human beings only when they recognize what they really want to do in and with their lives, and when they are enabled to put that insight into practice. With this idea, he laid the foundation for the theories of New Work.