One of the most important philosophy titles ...
... published in the twentieth century, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial, today than it was when it first appeared fifty years ago.
This special edition, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the work's first appearance in Germany, has a new introduction by the eminent British philosopher, Roger Scruton, and a new translation by Gerald Malsbary, and contains a retrospective of past reviews from the first English edition in 1952.
Leisure is an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. With a series of philosophic, religious, and historical examples, Pieper shows that the Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure - a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture.
Further, he maintains that in our bourgeois Western world total labor has vanquished leisure. This book issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture - and ourselves.
These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Josef Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of "work" as he predicts its destructive consequences.
"Pieper's message for us is plain.... The idolatry of the machine, the worship of mindless know-how, the infantile cult of youth and the common mind - all this points to our peculiar leadership in the drift toward the slave society.... Pieper's profound insights are impressive and even formidable." - New York Times Book Review
"'Be still and know.' To receive the gift we need to be at rest. It is not only a discarded notion of the nature of knowledge that we are bidden recover; it is also a discarded notion of the nature of leisure. In Dr. Pieper's indictment of the contemporary world, no charge is meant to be more grave than that it is a world in bondage, a world that has succumbed to the idolatry of work, of activity for its own sake."
- Times Literary Supplement
"Dr. Pieper has done [an] invaluable service - the rearrangement of whole groups of thought both into a wider consistency and on deeper support."
- New Statesman and Nation
"[Pieper] has subjects involved in everyone's life; he has theses that are so counter to the prevailing trends as to be sensational; and he has a style that is memorably clear and direct."
- Chicago Tribune
Cover photo of the Rotunda of the National Gallery of Art by William Schleisner, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection (Library of Congress). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
