He was also the first to realize that in the modern era most people went to work to make money rather than products, and that it was the factories themselves that made actual things.
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The fact that the Roman economy was sustained by what were, from the point of view of most citizens, intelligent working machines posed some similar economic challenges to those posed by large-scale automation. One of these was wealth inequality.
Of these myriad new professions that emerged when people congregated in cities, two entirely new classes of work were especially important. The first was a by-product of the invention of writing, and the second of the emergence and increasing power of the merchants who controlled the allocation and distribution of energy and other resources procured from the countryside.
The embrace of conspicuous consumption was at first confined to the aristocratic and well-to-do merchant classes, but as more and more people became dependent on cash wages rather than the product of their own labors, consumption became more influential in shaping both the fortunes and the aspirations of what would later be referred to as the working classes.
Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the desire of poorer people in cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history of work as the invention of technologies to exploit the energy in fossil fuels. Without it, there would have been no markets for mass-produced items, and without markets the factories would never have been built. It also rewrote the rules by which much of the economy operated. The growth of Britain’s economy increasingly came to depend on people employed in manufacturing and other industries reinvesting their wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured.
But even if work offers people a sense of community and belonging, the kinds of communities that Durkheim imagined might coalesce around the workplace have not materialized to the extent he predicted. Indeed, when Durkheim pictured the city of the future as being made up of a mosaic of work-based communities, he hadn’t quite come to grips with the changing nature of employment and work in the industrial era.