Hegel’s thought on work is too often obscured by Marx’s influential critique. Work is central to Hegel’s accounts both of selfhood and of the intersubjective recognition enabled by market-based civil society and by political representation. This chapter seeks to harmonize the discussions of work in the Phenomenology of Spirit with those in the Philosophy of Right, devoting special attention to Hegel’s transformation of early modern political economists, to capture work’s essential two-sidedness: its ability both to liberate and enslave, and its simultaneously public and private character. This requires drawing a distinction between Hegel’s accounts of labor as such—that is, of labor as a universal condition of humankind—and of its historical determinations. For all individuals, work is constitutive of the self-conscious subject and not merely appended to a fully formed individual. Work develops in history, however, and reaches its highest social expression in modernity.