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Articles

More Praise for Idleness

Bertrand Russell argued that the time spent working by an average person should be drastically reduced, work being an overrated virtue. Paul Western believes that ‘idleness’ is still not valued highly enough.

In his 1932 essay ‘In Praise of Idleness’, Bertrand Russell argued that work was an overrated virtue, and that civilised living demanded leisure time in which personal interests could be pursued. Moreover, he believed he was writing in an era when the mechanisation of production had reached a point such that no-one needed to work more than twenty hours a week or so in order to make a fair contribution to society. And yet he saw a society in which large numbers were left unemployed whilst most of the rest were overworked (often providing products and services of questionable value). Despite today’s even more effective production, we still have a far from fair distribution of ‘idleness’.

Russell saw the belief in a duty to work as part of the ‘morality of slaves’: a device used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interest of their masters.

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