This hard-working talk will belabour the issue of labour in the concrete and the abstract, i.e. as productive of wealth and of value respectively, as well as the question of wealth without labour, and the value of drifting on water. Nothing will be produced – the paper will bring forth hardly a mouse, if at all. Lazyness could be an issue, as could be race (yes, also the rat race). It will not exactly be fun, either.

Marcel Stoetzler is a lecturer in Sociology at Bangor University, Wales, UK. He works on social and political theory, intellectual history and historical sociology, and has lately concentrated on various aspects of modern antisemitism, especially its interconnections with liberalism and nationalism and the emergence of the discipline of sociology. He has also published on feminist theory, critical theory (‘Frankfurt School’), Hannah Arendt, and Marx. His first book, The State, the Nation and the Jews. Liberalism and the Antisemitism Dispute in Bismarck’s Germany was published in 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press. He serves on the editorial board of Patterns of Prejudice of which he has edited a special issue (May 2010) on Modern Antisemitism and the Emergence of Sociology.