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Soulcraft.

I don't remember ever noticing the word "soulcraft" before today, when I saw it in a David Brooks column. Writing about "the cultural transformation" that could be achieved through the Democrats' $4 trillion in spending, he declared: "Statecraft is soulcraft." I blogged that — with disapproval — here. 

But what is "soulcraft"? If "statecraft" makes sense, it must mean the work of the state, so shouldn't "soulcraft" mean the work of the soul? But, in context, it seems to mean the state's work is to work on the soul. I think he's saying that the state ought to engage in massive spending with the aim of shaping the soul of the people who live under the power of the state, and the lack of parallelism in the use of the ending "-craft" is disturbing.

I try to think of other "-craft" words. "Witchcraft" is the work of witches, not the shaping of witches. It's done by witches, not to witches. It fits with "statecraft," not "soulcraft."

In the comments to my post, Lloyd W. Robinson and Peter Spieker independently bring up George Will, and Quaestor writes: 

Will's phrase is statecaft as soulcraft, and it was the title of his book published in 1984 (the date is not insignificant). Will argued that the national government should function as a force for social change, which was a direct challenge to the then-dominant Reagan wing of the Republican Party which thought of governmental power as a necessary evil that should only be brought to bear when private conscience proves inadequate to the manifest national will.... 

Statecraft as soulcraft is conditional, the phrase admits the possibility that government can leave souls alone, that there is such a thing as private conscience. Brooks, however, corrupts Will's phrase into an unconditional statement. Statecraft is soulcraft is unalloyed fascism.

I suppose I ought to have noticed "soulcraft." I guess I've failed to read deeply in the Neo Con literature. Brooks is trying to sell the Democrats' spending package to conservatives, and I guess he thought the old buzzword would lure them in. I find that offensive, presenting government as a religion substitute, and I agree with Quaestor that that's fascism talk. 

I searched the NYT archive for the word "soulcraft." It first appears in 1983, in a review of Will's book, "Statecraft as Soulcraft" (note the correct publication date, 1983, not 1984). From the review:

Viewing Western society as the flowering of ideas whose seeds have been planted over many centuries, Mr. Will, ''a lapsed professor of political philosophy,'' blames Hobbes and Machiavelli for much of the contemporary obsession with self-interest, narrowly conceived. He places himself in a different line of thinkers, from Aristotle to his special hero Edmund Burke, who have appreciated the organic nature of a good society. He dislikes modern politics for its readiness to accommodate to human passions rather than to encourage human potential. In this nation preoccupied with the material, he wants ''a politics that nurtures the spiritual.'' That's what he means by ''soulcraft.''...

Some readers are likely to find Mr. Will's exhortations for moral uplift quaint, and possibly a touch unsettling; the history of official efforts to purify souls has been a bloody one. Liberals in particular may be hard put to share his enthusiasm for school prayer or his abhorrence of abortion.

But, of course, liberals can do "soulcraft" just as well, in the opposite direction. They can offer to purify us of old religion and replace it with new pieties and promote abortion as the vindication of the rights of women.  

"Soulcraft" — in the NYT archive — mostly pops up in the context of George Will, and sometimes it's Brooks talking about Will. 

And then, beginning in 2009, there's another book, "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work" by Matthew B. Crawford. The NYT has a long excerpt from it, and I blogged that at the time — here — so I had encountered the word before, just forgotten it. 

Crawford is clearly talking about the work you do on your own soul. I wrote:

Crawford's hands-on real-world job is working in his own business as a motorcycle mechanic and his reward-for-going-to-college job was cranking out abstracts of scholarly articles that he couldn't understand for $23,000 a year. So the "real world" job was particularly good and the "information" job was particularly bad. You've got to concede that there are plenty of good, bad, and middling jobs in both categories and to match up 2 good ones or 2 bad ones or 2 middling ones to make a fair comparison about what different sorts of work do to your soul.

The Crawford meaning — working on one's own soul — sounds right to me. The George Will meaning bothers me, and I think David Brooks has taken that meaning and made it worse. It feels like a cheap slogan to lure conservatives away from the core belief in limited government. 

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