In “In Praise of Leisure,” an essay adapted from their book
How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life (Allen Lane, 256 pages), economics professor Robert Skidelsky and political philosophy lecturer Edward Skidelsky—father-and-son coauthors—argue that the unending pursuit of wealth is madness. “The material conditions of the good life already exist, at least in the affluent parts of the world, but the blind pursuit of growth puts the good life continually out of reach,” they contend. “Under such circumstances, the aim of policy and other forms of collective action should be to secure an economic organization that places the good things of life—health, respect, friendship, leisure, and so on—within reach of all. Economic growth should be accepted as a residual, not something to be aimed at.”
According to the Skidelskys, people in the West are in the paradoxical—and wrongheaded—situation of goading themselves to ever new feats of enterprise, not because they think them worthwhile, but because any activity, however pointless, is considered better than none. Instead, the Skidelskys propose, people should believe in the possibility of genuine leisure: “We need to bring together insights from both disciplines—economics for the sake of its practical influence, philosophy for the sake of its ethical imagination. It’s time to revive the old idea of economics as a moral science, a science of human beings in communities, not of interacting robots.”
Read Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s essay “In Praise of Leisure” in the Chronicle Review now!Read Larry Elliott’s “How Much Is Enough?”, a review of the book In Praise of Leisure in the Guardian.co.uk now!ABOUT THE AUTHORS:Robert Skidelsky is an emeritus professor of political economy at the University of Warwick; his biography of the economist John Maynard Keynes received numerous prizes, including the Lionel Gelber Prize for International Relations and the Council on Foreign Relations Prize for International Relations. His son, Edward Skidelsky, is a lecturer on moral and political philosophy at the University of Exeter.
ANOTHER INTERESTING READING:In “Q&A: Sam Harris,” the web magazine
Tablet features a wide-ranging interview by David Samuels of Sam Harris, the author of
The End of Faith,
The Moral Landscape, and other best-selling works of moral philosophy and anti-religious polemic. Samuels says that, among others, the interview covered what has always bothered him about Harris’s work—“namely, my feeling that his demand for the strict application of reason to the psycho-dynamics of collective human experience might be its own form of dogmatism, which is deaf to the lived experience of the vast majority of humankind.”
Read “Q&A: Sam Harris” by David Samuels in the magazine Tablet now!
