# In Praise of Idleness

(Bertrand Russell, 1932)

Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan finds
some mischief for idle hands to do.' Being a highly virtuous child, I
believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept
me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience
has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I
think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense
harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs
to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from
what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler
in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the days
of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of them
jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler was
on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean
sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will
be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading the following
pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to induce good
young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in vain.

Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of
one which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough
to live on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as
school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the
bread out of other people's mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this
argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle
in order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people
who say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends,
and in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income,
he puts just as much bread into people's mouths in spending as he takes
out of other people's mouths in earning. The real villain, from this
point of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a
stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they
do not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less
obvious, and different cases arise.

One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to
some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public
expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past
wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a
Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire
murderers. The net result of the man's economical habits is to increase
the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously
it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink
or gambling.

But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are
invested in industrial enterprises.  When such enterprises succeed,
and produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days,
however, no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a
large amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing
something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines which,
when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who invests
his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore injuring others
as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in giving parties for
his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure, and so would all
those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher, the baker, and the
bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon laying down rails for
surface card in some place where surface cars turn out not to be wanted,
he has diverted a mass of labor into channels where it gives pleasure
to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through failure of his
investment he will be regarded as a victim of undeserved misfortune,
whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his money philanthropically,
will be despised as a fool and a frivolous person.

All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that
a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the
virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies
in an organized diminution of work.

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the
position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other
such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is
unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The
second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those
who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be
given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by
two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required
for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice
is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing,
i.e. of advertising.

Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men,
more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men
who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the
privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are
idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately,
their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others;
indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source
of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is
that others should follow their example.

From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution,
a man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was
required for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife
worked at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor
as soon as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare
necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated
by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the
warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times,
with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system
persisted in Russia until 1917 [1], and still persists in the East;
in England, in spite of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full
force throughout the Napoleonic wars, and until a hundred years ago,
when the new class of manufacturers acquired power. In America, the
system came to an end with the Revolution, except in the South, where it
persisted until the Civil War. A system which lasted so long and ended so
recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men's thoughts and
opinions. Much that we take for granted about the desirability of work
is derived from this system, and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted
to the modern world. Modern technique has made it possible for leisure,
within limits, to be not the prerogative of small privileged classes, but
a right evenly distributed throughout the community. The morality of work
is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.

It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to
themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which
the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less
or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and
part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to
induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their
duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in
idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened,
and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per cent
of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were proposed
that the King should not have a larger income than a working man. The
conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the
holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their
masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal
this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are
identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true;
Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure
in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have
been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to
civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered
possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable,
not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern
technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without
injury to civilization.

Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount
of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This
was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the
armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of
munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or
Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive
occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among
unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or
since. The significance of this fact was concealed by finance: borrowing
made it appear as if the future was nourishing the present. But that, of
course, would have been impossible; a man cannot eat a loaf of bread that
does not yet exist. The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific
organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations
in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern
world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organization, which had
been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work,
had been preserved, and the hours of the week had been cut down to four,
all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored,
those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the
rest were left to starve as unemployed. Why? Because work is a duty,
and a man should not receive wages in proportion to what he has produced,
but in proportion to his virtue as exemplified by his industry.

This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances
totally unlike those in which it arose.  No wonder the result has been
disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given moment,
a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They
make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a
day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make
twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be
bought at a lower price.  In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the
manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight,
and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this
would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are
too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously
concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end,
just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally
idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that
the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being
a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to
the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours
was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much,
and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies
suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told
that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was
a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain
public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the
upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor
want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank,
but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic
confusion.

Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without
superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course
of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming,
as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that
a man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide
services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but
he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this
extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.

I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside
the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely
all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not
think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so
harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or starve.

If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be enough
for everybody and no unemployment -- assuming a certain very moderate
amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the well-to-do,
because they are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so
much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when they are
well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for
wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment; in fact,
they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while they
wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized,
they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the
snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society,
extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this,
however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.

The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of civilization
and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become
bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a considerable amount of
leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things. There is no longer
any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation;
only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist
on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.

In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there
is much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the
West, there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of
the governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational
propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly that
which the governing classes of the world have always preached to what
were called the 'honest poor'. Industry, sobriety, willingness to work
long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to authority,
all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the will of
the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new name,
Dialectical Materialism.

The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with
the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had
conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for
their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable
than power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both,
since the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them
about the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about
the worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in
Russia as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants
have written in praise of 'honest toil', have praised the simple life,
have professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more
likely to go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make
manual workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering
the position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe
that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement. In
Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has been
taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more honored
than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are made,
but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock workers for
special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before the young,
and is the basis of all ethical teaching.

For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country, full
of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be developed
with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is
necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will happen
when the point has been reached where everybody could be comfortable
without working long hours?

In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have
no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total
produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no
work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over production,
we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a large percentage
of the working population idle, because we can dispense with their labor
by making the others overwork. When all these methods prove inadequate,
we have a war: we cause a number of people to manufacture high explosives,
and a number of others to explode them, as if we were children who had
just discovered fireworks. By a combination of all these devices we
manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive the notion that a great
deal of severe manual work must be the lot of the average man.

In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over
production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational
solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can
be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually, allowing a
popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure or more goods
were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme virtue of hard work,
it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in which
there will be much leisure and little work. It seems more likely that
they will find continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to
be sacrificed to future productivity. I read recently of an ingenious
plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and
the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara
Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort
for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid
the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean. This sort of thing,
if it happens, will be the result of regarding the virtue of hard work
as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a state of affairs in
which it is no longer needed.

The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is
necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human
life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to
Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is
the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich,
for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking
care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the
new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly
clever changes that we can produce on the earth's surface. Neither of
these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask
him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say:
'I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man's
noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform his
planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I have
to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the morning
comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment springs.' I
have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They consider work,
as it should be considered, a necessary means to a livelihood, and it
is from their leisure that they derive whatever happiness they may enjoy.

It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not
know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of
the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is
a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any
earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness
and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of
efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for
the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded
persons, for example, are continually condemning the habit of going
to the cinema, and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But
all the work that goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because
it is work, and because it brings a money profit. The notion that the
desirable activities are those that bring a profit has made everything
topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who
provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money;
but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely frivolous,
unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly speaking,
it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing
that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd; one might as
well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad. Whatever merit
there may be in the production of goods must be entirely derivative
from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The individual,
in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of his work
lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce between
the individual and the social purpose of production that makes it so
difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which profit-making
is the incentive to industry. We think too much of production, and too
little of consumption. One result is that we attach too little importance
to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production
by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.

When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am
not meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily
be spent in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours' work a day should
entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and
that the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It
is an essential part of any such social system that education should be
carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part, at
providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure intelligently. I
am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would be considered
'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas,
but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist
in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly
passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the
radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies
are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again
enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.

In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working
class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no
basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited
its sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify
its privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in
spite of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call
civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it wrote
the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social relations. Even
the liberation of the oppressed has usually been inaugurated from
above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged
from barbarism.

The method of a leisure class without duties was, however,
extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be
taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally
intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to be
set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything
more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers.  At present,
the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic way, what
the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product. This is a
great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks.  University life is so
different from life in the world at large that men who live in academic
milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary
men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves are usually
such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they ought to have
upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in universities
studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some original line of
research is likely to be discouraged. Academic institutions, therefore,
useful as they are, are not adequate guardians of the interests of
civilization in a world where everyone outside their walls is too busy
for unutilitarian pursuits.

In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a
day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to
indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving,
however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged
to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view
to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for
which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and
capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested
in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their
ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university
economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the
time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be
exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they
learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to
be untrue.

Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed
nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia.  The work exacted will be enough to
make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since
men will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only
such amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will
probably devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits
of some public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these
pursuits for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered,
and there will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly
pundits. But it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages
of leisure will appear.  Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity
of a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less
inclined to view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out,
partly for this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe
work for all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the
world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security,
not of a life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have
given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen,
instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we
have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines;
in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being
foolish forever.

[1] Since then, members of the Communist Party have succeeded to this
privilege of the warriors and priests.

---

This text was first provided by the Massachusetts Green Party.

(from the Anarchist Reading List at http://www.zpub.com/notes/aan-read.html)

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