Ages of Leisure
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2195823 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alfred H Lloyd (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1922 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 160-178 |
| Publication date | 1922-09-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Journal of Sociology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9602 • E-ISSN: 1537-5390 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/213437 |
| OpenAlex | W2090625781 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
Leisure as much a problem as work.-Not less important than the problem of labor and efficiency, of occupational expertness, is the problem of leisure, today pressing for reckoning. For many leisure is only rest or entertainment, but it is important to life constructively. Beset with dangers, it still is of evolutional value, enabling education, imagination, progressive adventure. Three eras of leisure.-Witness the leisure afforded by long infancy and youth, in some sense the basis of man's superiority. Witness, againg the leisure and culture made possible by slavery domestic and proprietary or socially institutional. Witness, thirdly, the leisure which has been coming to man through automatic machinery, the "Iron Man," and which offers such adventure, such mixed danger and opportunity, as history has never known. The new leisure and industrial democracy.-With this third leisure must be associated the call for an industrial democracy. All democracy would free men from some subjection and insure to all in some measure and to many in large measure the leisure attending the liberation and also the opportunity and importance attending the leisure; and, as to democracy today, with so much automatic and dehumanized instrumentation of life, leisure might properly even be added as a fourth natural right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The servile class, then, servants, laborers, even soldiers, would participate in the results, benefits, and responsibilities of modern mechanical automatistm. With the new leisure a new culture.-As leisure through non-human instruments must have a quality different from that resting on slavery or on any labor and fatigue of man's own kind, so the culture and adventure enabled or actually incited by it must be different. There is no universal culture, any culture always being a specific answer to the challenge in the peculiar restraining instruments of its time. Thus the challenge of today comes from the Iron Man, the Giant Automaton, and no former culture can answer. Analogously, Virgil may have accompanied Dante, but he could not have replaced him
Adventure · Dehumanization · Democracy · Entertainment · Political science · Proletariat · Sociology · Witness · Digital Games and Media · History · Law
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1973 - 2017 (45) |
| Highly cited | No |