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Work, Leisure and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Extract

Throughout the ages it has been held that leisure is the basis of culture. This view can be found in the Old Testament and in Plato, in Burke, Marx, Veblen, and in T. S. Eliot. Whether they were glad for it or sad, people seem to have always taken it for granted that in order to have culture one must first have leisure. Applicable to society as well as to individuals, this rule was put concisely by Dr. Johnson as follows: “All intellectual improvement arises from leisure; all leisure arises from one working for another.”

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1981

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References

1 Simon, Yves R., Work, Society, and Culture, ed. Kuic, Vukan (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

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3 Simone Weil, for example, wrote this in 1943: “Our age has its own particular mission — the creation of a civilization founded upon the spiritual nature of work. The thoughts relating to a presentiment of this vocation, and which are scattered about in Rousseau, George Sand, Tolstoy, Proudhon and Marx, in papal encyclicals and elsewhere, are the only original thoughts of our time, the only ones we haven't borrowed from the Greeks” (The Need for Roots [London, 1952], pp. 9192).Google Scholar See also Clayre, Alasdair, Work and Play: Ideas and Experience of Work and Leisure (New York, 1974).Google Scholar

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11 Ibid., p. 379.

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13 Ibid., p. 409.

14 Ibid., p. 434.

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16 Ibid., p. 56.

17 Ibid., pp. 64–65.

18 Ibid., pp. 70–71.

19 Ibid., p. 75.

20 Ibid., p. 78.

21 Ibid., p. 80.

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25 Ibid., p. 40.

26 Ibid., p. 26.

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28 Ibid., p. 34.

29 Ibid., p. 35.

30 Ethics 10.7.1177b.

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