The Worker: Dominion and Form (German: Der Arbeiter. Herrschaft und Gestalt) is a 1932 book by the German writer Ernst Jünger.
Summary
Influenced by the experience of World War I and the fragility of the Weimar Republic, Jünger sought to formulate a sustainable model for modern life through something he called the "worker". A central argument in the book is that what may appear as nihilism may instead be understood as failures to recognise shifts in the dominating metaphysics of a society, and the worker is presented as someone who keeps up with the shift away from bourgeois values. The arguments of the book are related to concepts Jünger had developed in his 1930 essay "Total Mobilisation [de]".[1][2]
Jünger published a comment on The Worker in 1964 titled Maxima–Minima. In this and other later works, such as An der Zeitmauer (1959) and Der Weltstaat [de] (1960), he developed his views of technology and the worker. He argued that war is what drives technology and science, and that the logic of war, which is the basis for the logic of the worker, cannot be tamed by rules and laws, and the worker is by extension in conflict with both the nation state and the individual.[5]
^Casewell, Deborah (2020). "The worker: dominion and form: by Ernst Jünger, edited by Laurence Paul Hemming, Translated by Bogdan Costea and Laurence Paul Hemming, Chicago, Northwestern University Press, 2017, 232 pp., $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8101-3617-5". Political Theology. 21 (8): 738–739. doi:10.1080/1462317X.2020.1748791.
^Quinn, Timothy (2021). "Ernst Jünger's The Worker: Dominion and Form". Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual. 11: 290–297. doi:10.5840/gatherings20211116.