In praise of idleness and other essays PDF
Preview In praise of idleness and other essays
In Praise of Idleness ‘Invariably intelligent, stimulating and lucid.’ The Listener ‘There is not a page which does not provoke argument of thought.’ The Times Bertrand Russell In Praise of Idleness And other essays With a new preface by Anthony Gottlieb With an introduction by Howard Woodhouse London and New York First published 1935 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd, London First published in Routledge Classics 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1996 The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Ltd Introduction © 1996 Howard Woodhouse Preface to Routledge Classics edition © 2004 Anthony Gottlieb All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A Catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-48858-X Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-57420-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–32506–4(Print Edition) CONTENTS Preface to the Routledge Classics Edition vii Introduction xi Preface xxv 1 In Praise of Idleness 1 2 ‘Useless’ Knowledge 16 3 Architecture and Social Questions 28 4 The Modern Midas 39 5 The Ancestry of Fascism 53 6 Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism 72 7 The Case for Socialism 81 8 Western Civilisation 107 9 On Youthful Cynicism 121 10 Modern Homogeneity 130 11 Men versus Insects 138 12 Education and Discipline 141 13 Stoicism and Mental Health 148 vi contents 14 On Comets 157 15 What is the Soul? 159 ndex I 165 PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION John Maynard Keynes wrote that his friend Bertrand Russell ‘held two ludicrously incompatible beliefs: on the one hand he believed that all the problems of the world stemmed from ff conducting human a airs in a most irrational way; on the other, that the solution was simple, since all we had to do was to behave rationally’. Russell was a better logician than Keynes, and could have objected that, strictly speaking, these beliefs are not incompatible at all. Keynes’s point, though, is clear enough, and right on the mark. Russell exhibits a faith in the power of reason to solve problems that is belied by the examples of stupidity fi which he shows to have created those problems in the rst place. If it is the lack of reason that gets man into his messes, how can reason get him out of them? For all his well-known hostility to orthodox religion, especially Christianity, Russell often spoke in the tones of an other-worldly prophet. The ideal of rationality may, like holiness, be almost impossibly hard to attain in this life; but it is the unshirkable duty of the prophet to laud it. viii preface to the routledge classics edition ff Russell looks down on human a airs from empyrean though not dispassionate heights. With a command of history that incessantly draws parallels with what has gone before, and a command of the natural and social sciences of his day that tries— fi sometimes less successfully, since scienti c ‘knowledge’ quickly dates—to cast new light on old problems, Russell’s prose delights by combining detachment and engaged, tart wit. The result can be shockingly blunt, or comically over-generalised. ‘[T]he peas- ant everywhere’, he tells us in ‘Modern Homogeneity’ (pp. 130– ffi 7), is ‘cruel, avaricious, conservative, and ine cient.’ All peas- ants? Well, he is talking in terms of broad tendencies: of what the nature of peasanthood generally entails, given a certain concep- tion of peasanthood. The opposite end of the social scale is treated no more kindly: ‘The rulers of the world have always been stupid’. With such obiter dicta Russell is perhaps harking back to his Hegelian apprenticeship. Although his technical work in what has come to be known as analytical philosophy is rightly seen as a revolt against Hegel’s overarching theories and iron laws of cos- mic development, the Hegelian style of abstract generalisation still looms large, particularly in Russell’s more popular writings on social topics. But the poetic licence of the entertainer is much in play, too. There are, he argues in ‘The Case for Social- ism’ (pp. 81–106), too many hat shops in London, and they are ‘usually kept by Russian countesses’. fi When this collection was rst published in 1935, a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement wrote that because of his ‘impatient’ wittiness and lack of subtlety, Russell was a ‘curi- ously unconvincing writer’. Yet the reviewer conceded that it is ff worth making an e ort not to be immediately unconvinced, fi because ‘the simpli cation of a problem, even the undue simpli- fi cation of it, often means a new approach to it’. There is no better proof of this than the title essay of In Praise of Idleness. Russell’s theme and conclusion in this essay are startlingly provocative. Immense harm is caused, he argues, by the belief preface to the routledge classics edition ix that work is virtuous, and only a ‘foolish asceticism’ makes us continue to insist on it in excessive quantities now that the need fi no longer exists. The First World War showed that the scienti c organisation of production can keep people in fair comfort with a much smaller, or less active, workforce. For the well-to-do, Russell writes, it has long been acceptable for wives and daugh- ters to be idle. Indeed, it has been positively encouraged. For the aristocracy it has been acceptable for all ages and both sexes to do nothing productive. Now we should recognise that, for everyone, ‘the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organ- ised diminution of work’. This cannot be called an unpopular view, because it is barely ever even considered today. Russell has not yet been hailed as a prophet for advocating it. But the time is ripe for that to change. Statisticians know that the amount of time spent on work has declined enormously and pretty much consistently throughout the twentieth century. Between 1870 and 1998, the number of annual hours worked per person employed has fallen by half in Britain. Since 1950 it has fallen by 24 per cent. Working people in rich countries have much more leisure than their grand- parents had, but are barely aware of the trend, or of its implica- fi tions when combined with other ndings of social science. In 1998 in Western Europe workers produced, in real terms, nearly eighteen times what they had produced in 1870, while in the same period the number of hours worked per head of popula- tion fell steadily by almost half, from 1,295 hours per year to 657 hours. People have got vastly richer as they have spent less ff time on work, and di erences between countries strongly sug- gest that longer hours do not automatically bring greater prod- uctivity—which implies that they could work fewer hours still and lose little. When France introduced a shorter working week fi of thirty- ve hours in 2000, unemployment fell and economic growth remained strong, thus supporting the case for at least a little more idleness.
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