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Publications

 (Selected Works)

On Being Free

Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 1977

 “Bergmann’s accomplishment is substantial. His is the most important philosophical examination of freedom since Isaiah Berlin’s celebrated essay of a generation ago.” - Social Science Quarterly

 "The book is brilliant and terribly exciting.” - Frederick Suppe
Available through Publisher or on Amazon.

 

Brave New Work 

"People wonder why anyone in GM management would listen to someone who looks like me and talks like me.  But people are so desperate they are willing to listen to a philosopher."

  • Scanned pdf file of January 18, 1987 Detroit Free Press article on Professor Bergmann's New Work initiative in Flint.

On The Biological Economy of Education

1987, in memory of Betty Anne Sankar

Philosopher of the New Work Order

"Technology displaced people from the land into the factories.  Now it was displacing them from the factories into the service industries.  Soon it will be displacing them from the service industries into..."

  • Jpeg image of March 28, 1993 Detroit Free Press article on Professor Bergmann and New Work

The Future Of Work

"Consider, simply as an opening proposition, the idea that half the sum-total of the now existing jobs could soon be eliminated..."

  • Scanned pdf file of 1996 article in Perspectives on Business and Global Change, Vol. 10, no. 1.  Reprint of an article, at the request of the publishers, which originally appeared in the October 1983 Praxis International, a Yugoslavian journal now out of print.

Ecology and New Work

Excess Consumption and the Job System
1999 paper, presented in German and English at geokey Open Project

"So far Environmentalism and the Labor Movement have been very far apart. Fundamentally both believed that they were a threat to each other. Labor, naturally, has wanted growth and Environmentalism of course did not. So the conflict could not have been more head-on. But my most encompassing point has been that we are all helpless in the grip of the job-system, and that Environmentalism has no chance of making any serious difference unless that system is changed. That, I propose, is our common purpose and our common cause."

 The New Work Life

Pdf file of essay published in 2003.  "What will actively support you in the great task of living your life in earnest? What will fit the manner in which you will work? What will make the best and most intelligent use of the new technologies, of the new materials, of the new building systems we now have?"

The Big Book:  New Work New Culture
First Chapter - The Post Cold War Condition

"Imagine a scene in a possible Hitchcock Film. A train is going deeper into an arid mountain region, but the passengers strangely are gradually becoming more and more apprehensive. A while ago it was only a sense of unease, then it became nervousness and now it is barely controlled panic. In quick succession a series of incidents suggested that the train seems to be running without an engineer, that there is no one at the controls in the locomotive, and the passengers also discovered that the emergency breaks don’t function. The train is running downhill and by now is moving far too quickly for anyone to jump off. But one further still more terrifying matter has become clear: namely, it seems that every last one of the doors and equally all the windows have been locked and in a completely firm and indestructible way."
 

An Early Post-Industrial Business Opportunity

Pdf file of February 2005 paper posted to the Neue Arbeit-Neue Kultur website.  Discussion and examples of a new model of post-industrial, decentralized, and high-tech manufacturing as steps towards greater self-reliance.

 

A 2020 That We Could Attain

Pdf file of paper presented at the 2008 Vision Summit.  In depth look at the New Work uprising in Flint, Michigan and an exploration of the paradigm shift implicit in New Work ideas.

Overview of New Work Exhibit 2000

Pdf file.

Nietzsche and Analytic Ethics

Pdf file.

Epistemology and Social Science

Pdf file.

Working out the kinks in Flint

Pdf file.

"I have tried to evolve an organically integrated set of policy proposals that would have the power not only to stop the appalling deterioration of our country – her accelerating descent into a pit of cynicism, passivity, violence and despair – but that, instead, would define a step by step process leading us back to the path of our original mission: to becoming the greatest force on the globe in the struggle for a more humane, a more intelligent and a more life-giving culture."

- Frithjof Bergmann