ded to support themselves·cooking, baking, raising animals, and making clothing. In Egypt, there were early divisions in the practice of medicine, with a specialist for each type of disease, not doctors as we would think of today, but healers who practiced their arts for various parts of the body that they knew well (Friedmann, intro.) In Europe, the guilds arose with each craft belonging to a particular trade. These workers were, however, much less specialized than we would expect today, each of them being able to do all facets of a masterpiece.
Social thinking Durkheim observed that work became tremendously divided in the eighteenth century. He and Adam Smith foresaw some problems developing because of this (Simpson, 39). Until the industrial age took over, people took care of themselves with simple, small farms and mostly manual labor. The invention of the steam engine moved societies to more and more concentration of labor on machines and a more extreme division of labor. If one has seen Charlie Chaplin's silent film, Modern Times, one can see how nervous people were as work became more mechanized and less personal. Ford invented the assembly line and large manufacturing companies took over more and more capital.
During the time of the Renaissance person a man could be a mathematician and a poet, a scientist and a painter. Leonardo da Vinci was an incredibly gifted genius that foresaw the invention of helicopters and studied detailed anatomy in order to give beautiful realism to his paintings. It would be quite rare to find someone like that in the 21st century. As societies have become more and more sophisticated, work has been divided more and more until the person working with the end product has no connection with its beginning (Simpson, p. 41). Durkheim thought that this extreme specialization would affect people morally and psychologically, possibly in negative ways. He thought that people could move with ...