On the Compulsion to Work and the Antinomies of Free Time: The Relation between Leisure and Work in Ancient Culture and in Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community

Abstract

For the ancient Greeks, leading a happy and reasonable life was an elite privilege and was limited to free people who, unlike slaves, did not have to work to provide themselves with the necessities of life. In this article, the author reconstructs the Aristotelian idea of leisure (schole), which is associated with the sphere of autotelic and non-instrumental activities, that is, with activities not subordinated to the practical imperatives of life. Although for the ancients, the mere fact of having free time was the necessary condition for pursuing a prudent vita contemplativa, today it turns out to be an insufficient condition. This article attempts to analyse situations in which too much leisure becomes a problem, causing a sense of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and a life wasted unproductively. To illustrate this phenomenon, the author refers to the classic sociological study Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community, which is devoted to the influence of long-term unemployment on social integration. In both cases, leisure is closely related to work, whose lack can be either a condition for a happy vita contemplativa or an unbearable burden, leading to loss of a sense of meaning in life. The text argues that in the conditions of modernity the idea of leisure is not, as for Aristotle, the opposite of work, but its extension, seamlessly inscribing itself in the modern idea of a vita activa.