Leisure: The Basis of Culture

They wanted what the maverick Marxist Paul Lafargue would later call, in the title of his best-known pamphlet, The Right To Be Lazy.

Qui plus est, l’oisif possède une autre qualité, plus importante que toutes celles dont je viens de parler, à savoir la sagesse. Celui qui a contemplé à loisir la satisfaction puérile avec laquelle les autres vaquent à leurs menues activités aura pour les siennes propres une indulgence nettement ironique. Il ne rejoindra pas le chœur des dogmatique

To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure – by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation – was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its o

What’s the alternative to this state of affairs? Bennett suggests that his typical man see his sixteen free hours as a “day within a day,” explaining, “during those sixteen hours he is free; he is not a wage-earner; he is not preoccupied with monetary cares; he is just as good as a man with a private income.” Accordingly, the typical man should ins