Understanding the complex relationship between labor, leisure, and leadership.

A Mirror for Presidents

By Chase Padusniak

If we as a society value our democracy, we would do best to understand the complex relationship between labor, leisure, and leadership.

Man prizes leisure as the precursor to philosophy, to the accomplishment of artistic passion.

Leisure is defined as the sum of activities and pursuits available when one is not producing, purveying, transmitting, or otherwise using goods for the upkeep of a given social framework. Work, specifically manual work, has made the greatest human achievements possible. Plato’s Socrates hints at this reality when he contends that the rich potter will be enticed to do more than just work on his craft: “‘In your opinion, will a potter who’s gotten rich still be willing to attend to his art?’ ‘Not at all,’ he said.” Philosophical leisure is attainable only either once one has become rich or once one dedicates oneself entirely to the discipline, regardless of material possessions. Socrates did the latter. Regardless, work and the leisurely world of ideas have long existed in symbiosis. Workers allow for the luxury of philosophizing while philosophizing makes possible just rule predicated on more than the simple principle of Thrasymachus: “The just is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.”

In a modern democracy, this mindset may seem outdated. Leisure time has been increased through various means of social intervention. That said, these strategies only work because they recognize the dichotomy gestured to by Plato’s Socrates. Limiting the work day, providing for workers’ compensation, and other adjustments do not reject the complementary relationship between work and leisure; they accept it and attempt to reorient it. As a result, they allow workers more leisure and thus hope to provide for a better contented, and perhaps better-educated, populace. Karl Marx himself highlights the desirability of an increase in leisure, tacitly recognizing the necessary relationship between manual labor and philosophical activity:

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Modern technology, however, has severely complicated this age-old relationship. On the surface, technology should simply mean more leisure. Ostensibly, if Marx is right, the introduction of new machines to replace the work formerly done by manual laborers will result in a populace better able to choose its own ends: “wie ich gerade Lust habe.” When people are thus freed to develop their own ideas and pursue their own interests as opposed to working to acquire basic material security, they can better society. In this sense, technology is good for the relationship between leisure and labor; it allows the work to be accomplished while giving more people a say in how they are ruled and the ideas responsible for ruling them.

The truth in this idea is that technology does reorient specialization. 

...............

Read more: ethikapolitika.org