Abstract
Such brutality and insolence, such debauchery and extravagance, such idleness, irreligion, cursing and swearing, and contempt of all rule and authority. … Our people are drunk with the cup of liberty. (Josiah Tucker, 1745, quoted by Edward Thompson in ‘Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, in M.W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (eds), Essays in Social History, Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 56.)
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Further reading
Edward Thompson’s essay ‘Time, work-discipline and industrial capitalism’ remains the classic statement on the development of work and leisure in British capitalism, and highlights the emergence of the ‘leisure problem’. Originally published in Past and Present (1967), vol. 38, it has been much reprinted, including in M. W. Flinn and T. C. Smout (eds). Essays In Social History (Oxford University Press, 1974). In Hooligan: a History of Respectable Fears (Macmillan, 1983), Geoffrey Pearson provides a compelling account of the recurrent moral panics about ‘dangerous youth’ and their abuses of free time.
Tony Watts, Education, Unemployment and the Future of Work (Open University Press, 1983), surveys a number of different’ scenarios’ of the future development of work and leisure. The journal of the Leisure Studies Association — Leisure Studies — is a regular source of articles by academic commentators and professionals working in the leisure field.
Finally, some of the arguments which helped to shape this book can be found in a more theoretical form in J. Clarke, C. Critcher and R. Johnson (eds), Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory (Hutchinson, 1979), and in the discussions collected in A. Tomlinson (ed.), Leisure and Social Control (mimeo, Brighton Polytechnic, 1981).
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© 1985 John Clarke and Chas Critcher
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Clarke, J., Critcher, C. (1985). Idle hands. In: The Devil Makes Work. Titles in the Crisis Points series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18013-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18013-4_1
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