Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness: have we overdone work?

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British mathematician, logician and philosopher, one of the founders of analytic philosophy, and in 1950 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. But many readers know him for his clear and provocative essays. One of the best known was published in 1932 and later became the title of a book: In Praise of Idleness.

The thesis

Russell opens the essay with a personal confession: he had been brought up on the saying that "Satan finds some mischief for idle hands to do", and for a long time he had believed it. But now he thought that a great deal of harm was being done in the modern world by the belief that work is virtuous in itself. He proposed that, thanks to technology, people should work about four hours a day, and the rest of the time should be free.

The pin example

To explain, Russell gives an example. Suppose a number of people work eight hours a day and make all the pins the world needs. Someone invents a machine that lets them make twice as many. In a sensible world everyone would work four hours and make as many pins as before. But in the real world, he says, they go on working eight hours, there are too many pins, some factories go bankrupt and half the workers are left unemployed. The result: the same amount of leisure, but unfairly divided, as misery for some and overwork for others.

For Russell, leisure was not wasted time. It was the space where art, science, curiosity and friendship are born.

What he meant by "idleness"

Russell was not praising aimless laziness. He wrote that, for leisure to be valuable, people needed an education that taught them to use it well: for reading, for play, for interests that bring no profit. He worried that many people, exhausted by work, could manage only passive amusements.

The debate today

Russell's idea was not realised, but his question has returned. In some countries programmes with a four-day working week have been tried, and many of the participating companies have reported less exhaustion among employees without large losses in productivity. The results depend a great deal on the kind of work, and the debate remains open.

We are busy so that we may have leisure

Russell's idea has ancient roots. Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics that we are busy so that we may have leisure, just as we make war so that we may have peace. For him, leisure, which the Greeks called scholē, the origin of the word "school", was not laziness but time for thought, study and civic life. The difference is that for Aristotle this time was the privilege of a minority who relied on the labour of slaves, while Russell wanted it to be shared by everyone.

Keynes's prediction

Russell was not the only one who thought this way. In 1930 the British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote the essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren", in which he predicted that within a hundred years, thanks to rising productivity, people in rich countries would be able to work about fifteen hours a week. Productivity did indeed rise a great deal, but working hours did not fall as much as he expected. Economists still debate why: some say people chose more consumption, others that the gains were not shared equally.

Kellogg's six hours

In 1930, during the Great Depression, the Kellogg company in Battle Creek, Michigan, cut the working day from eight to six hours, mainly to create jobs for more people. According to the historian Benjamin Hunnicutt, many workers used the extra time for family, gardening and the community. Over the decades the short day was gradually abandoned, partly because workers and managers came to prefer more income. It ended completely in 1985.

Iceland and the shorter week

In recent times, Russell's idea has been tested in practice. From 2015 to 2019 Iceland ran two large trials in the public sector, in which more than two thousand employees worked 35 to 36 hours a week instead of 40, with no cut in pay. According to the 2021 report by the organisations Autonomy and Alda, productivity stayed the same or improved in most workplaces, while employee well-being rose. The report was prepared by organisations that support a shorter week, so it is worth reading with a critical eye.

Russell himself was not idle

The irony is that Russell himself was extraordinarily hard-working. He wrote more than seventy books and thousands of articles and letters. According to his biographer Ray Monk, during the First World War he was imprisoned for six months in 1918 for an anti-war article, and in prison he wrote a book on the philosophy of mathematics. At the age of 89 he was jailed again for a week for protests against nuclear weapons. For him, "idleness" did not mean doing nothing, but having time to choose for yourself what to work on.

Questions for yourself

1. Do you measure your worth only by hours of work? Russell would invite you to reconsider.
2. What would you do with two free hours a day? If the answer is only the screen, it may be worth cultivating an interest.
3. Are you spending time earning money for things you do not need? A question Thoreau and Russell would share.