is an Inquirer staff writer

In Maine, I keep an old Willys jeep for hauling my sailboat into and out of the water. Earlier this summer, the starter motor conked out. Since I didn't have a crank handy, this meant the jeep wouldn't go, which meant I couldn't go sailing. This was inconvenient and annoying.

The nifty thing about my old jeep is that it's simple and understandable. It was built in 1947, well before cars became electronic and computerized, complicated and inscrutable. In the engine compartment, the major parts are apparent, and anyone with a modicum of mechanical aptitude can figure out what they do and how they work. It's an Erector set for adults.

I unbolted the starter motor and began studying it. I was fascinated by how clever it is, the way it whirls a small pinion gear to the end of a shaft, where it engages the teeth of the ring gear on the flywheel. Once the engine ignites, and the flywheel reaches a certain speed, the gear disengages and retreats. I marveled at the genius of Vincent Hugo Bendix, the Illinois-born son of Swedish immigrants who invented this revolutionary gadget early in the last century.

One problem was obvious: The teeth on the pinion gear were worn and mangled. Inside the motor I discovered a frayed wire that probably caused a short. I replaced the wire and installed a new Bendix drive with a fresh gear.

I bolted the starter motor back on, connected the battery cables, and pressed the floor starter switch with my foot. I was thrilled with anticipation. Was my diagnosis correct? Would my repairs succeed? Or would I be chastened by failure?

Matthew B. Crawford knows the feeling. As a motorcycle mechanic and former electrician, he knows the joy of fixing things, of working with his hands, of applying his brainpower to solving material problems, of doing tangible work that is straightforwardly useful.

He is, proudly, a gearhead. But he is also an egghead, a philosopher fluent in the airy abstractions of academia. A think tank refugee, Crawford, 43, has a doctorate in political philosophy from the University of Chicago and is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

He is also the author of an unusual new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. It's a mechanic's manual that quotes Aristotle and Heidegger, a collection of cerebral essays that includes drawings of an intake manifold and clutch rod oil seal. And its thought-provoking themes are well worth considering this Labor Day, as millions of unemployed Americans struggle to find work, any kind of work, let alone work that suits their skills and talents and offers, in Crawford's words, "a tighter connection between life and livelihood."

The work Crawford considers most valuable is manual work. He argues that making and fixing things with your hands not only deserves respect but also fulfills basic human needs and nourishes the soul in ways that so-called knowledge work, for all its prestige, cannot match.

"The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy," he writes. "They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth.

"He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one's failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away."

Why is it, Crawford wonders, that when working with his hands, he feels not only a greater sense of agency and competence but also more engaged intellectually?

Reflecting on the challenge of troubleshooting problems during his fledgling years as a motorcycle mechanic, Crawford realizes "there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in my previous job at the think tank."

"When you're fixing stuff, you have to be mentally nimble. You have to improvise," Crawford told me when we spoke on the phone the other day. "The service manual is never fully adequate."

The separation of thinking from doing has degraded work, Crawford argues, and stems from a prejudice that overlooks the cognitive richness of manual labor, the exhilarating reliance on hunches, intuition, and seasoned judgment. That same prejudice has led schools to cancel shop class and to push every student with a pulse into college.

"Some people, including some very smart people, would rather learn to build and fix things," Crawford says. "We don't do a very good job of promoting that. We've developed an educational monoculture where everyone is hustled onto a certain track and ends up working in an office.

"Some very smart people are totally ill-suited both to higher education and to the kind of work you're supposed to do once you have a degree. You're likely to be less damaged and quite possibly better paid as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems or low-level 'creative.' "

Colleges and universities mint flexible generalists with pleasing personalities who "know that" rather than "know how." These eventual cubicle captives submit to the soft despotism of manipulative managers and conform to corporate culture by being joiners with "a disposition of teaminess." Meanwhile, they toil at ghostly work in white-collar jobs that have been routinized and stupidified and that are all about process, not product. At the end of the day, their accomplishments are not visible and palpable but elusive and vaporous, resisting measurement by objective standards. Over time, this takes its toll on the soul. It stultifies and emasculates.

"The physical circumstances of the jobs performed by carpenters, plumbers, and auto mechanics vary too much for them to be executed by idiots; they require circumspection and adaptability," Crawford writes. "One feels like a man, not a cog in a machine. The trades are then a natural home for anyone who would live by his own powers, free not only of deadening abstraction but also of the insidious hopes and rising insecurities that seem to be endemic in our current economic life."

Crawford urges a renewed appreciation of "the useful arts" and the "yeoman aristocracy" - "those who gain real knowledge of real things, the sort we depend on every day." Above all, he exalts craftsmanship - "learning to do one thing really well, dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it because you want to get it right." Craftsmanship, he suggests, is a potent defense against planned obsolescence, wastefulness, consumerism, narcissism, alienation, isolation, and the outsourcing of jobs.

"Practical know-how is always tied to the experience of a particular person," Crawford asserts. "It can't be downloaded; it can only be lived."

Speaking of practical know-how, you may be wondering about the fate of my jeep. When I pressed the foot switch, the starter motor responded instantly. The gears meshed with the silky, buttery sound of a well-oiled sewing machine, and after a couple of revolutions, the engine sputtered to life. The satisfaction I felt was deep and sweet. I had figured it out myself, done it with my own hands. I was the sort of "spirited man" Crawford would admire.

"The mechanical arts have a special significance for our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness," Crawford says. "Things need fixing and tending no less than creating."