The genesis for this project was reading the material on work from Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche and being struck by how divergent the views of work were even on one continent (and mostly from one country!) during the course of one century. I gradually began collecting snippets of writings about work from over the centuries and thought it would be useful to explore however variously it has been conceived by different major thinkers. These conceptions run the gamut from viewing work as positively opposed to living the best life, to seeing it as the most essential part of living the best life. How did this almost schizophrenic view of work come about? And how did various thinkers defend their positive or negative evaluations of work? These questions are vital to contemporary liberalism, and to its critics, as a vital issue dividing liberals from their critics—Marxist, distributist, post-liberal, etc.—is the role of work in human life.