I read The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew B. Crawford's newest book, in 2024, and it blew my mind. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I still think about that book a lot and consider it to be one of the most impactful things I've read. I gave me a framework to understand so many things about work, creativity, and craft, and had a clear intent, a prescription for the spiritual and societal ills that I was thinking about.
Shop Class as Soulcraft is his earlier, and judging by review counts, more popular book. It covers a lot of the same ground as The World Beyond Your Head. It's about the value of mastery, tacit knowledge, and communities of craft. It critiques the proliferation of knowledge work and, in different ways, capitalism itself. While the later book refers to Crawford's work as a motorcycle mechanic occasionally, this book has it as a centerpiece, and often draws comparisons between that job and his previous one at a think thank.
It has a lot of beautiful, quotable lines:
I believe the mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness. Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.
Or:
For the neo-Darwinian, the frolicking of the dolphin is assumed to have some survival value, either for the preservation of the individual or for the passing on of its genes. I suspect that if you were to ask a dolphin about this, he would say it is backward: he lives in order to frolic, he doesn’t frolic in order to live. This is the Aristotelian view, precisely. Such activities are experienced as intrinsically good.
So: I enjoyed it a lot. Crawford's books are almost like religious texts for me: they're polemics and utopian visions that pull me into a frame of mind. I agree with a lot of what's going on, and enjoy being swept away in the philosophy.
The World Beyond Your Head is my favorite of the two, though. Both have a lot of philosophy, but Shop Class is written in the unnecessary philosophy vernacular. The World Beyond Your Head feels more developed and directed, though both are pretty broad and eclectic.