Javascript must be enabled to continue!

Leisure in Aristotle’s Political Thought

Abstract The concept of leisure found in Aristotle’s corpus is both elusive and challenging. It eludes categorization into our current understandings of work and play while at the same time challenging those very conceptions. Here, I attempt to come to grips with Aristotelian leisure by (1) demonstrating its centrality in Aristotle’s thought, (2) explaining leisure as primarily a ‘way of being’ rather than merely the absence of occupation or one of several preconditions to the virtues, and (3) exploring what leisure might mean to liberal democracy. As a ‘way of being’, Aristotelian leisure is more than an absence of work, but is a positive comportment that itself requires virtues, material means, and an education.

Brill

Jacob T. Snyder

Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought

2018

Title: Leisure in Aristotle’s Political Thought

Description:

Abstract The concept of leisure found in Aristotle’s corpus is both elusive and challenging.

It eludes categorization into our current understandings of work and play while at the same time challenging those very conceptions.

Here, I attempt to come to grips with Aristotelian leisure by (1) demonstrating its centrality in Aristotle’s thought, (2) explaining leisure as primarily a ‘way of being’ rather than merely the absence of occupation or one of several preconditions to the virtues, and (3) exploring what leisure might mean to liberal democracy.

As a ‘way of being’, Aristotelian leisure is more than an absence of work, but is a positive comportment that itself requires virtues, material means, and an education.

Back

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a significant political theorist who could be regarded as the founder of social contract theories. Hobbes’s philosophy is worthy of attention in the h...

Lambs to the Slaughter: Leisure and Laboring-Class Poetry

The idea of leisure is essential to understanding how laboring-class poets conceived of themselves as writers, what they imagined the activity of poetic composition to be, a...

The Problem of the Partheniae in Aristotle’s Political Thought

This article examines Aristotle’s discussion of the Spartan revolt of the Partheniae in Politics V.7. Aristotle appears to use the Partheniae as examples of two sources of instabil...

Ernest Barker and Greek Political Thought: Aristotle

Ernest Barker is best remembered for his study of Plato and his Predecessors (1918), yet his early efforts to mine Greek political theory for relevant insights centred on Aristotle...

Ernest Barker and Greek Political Thought: Plato

For much of the twentieth century Ernest Barker was the most frequently cited authority on Greek political thought in the English-speaking world. The centenary of his first publica...

Aristotle on the Period (Rhet. 3. 9)

Aristotle (Rhet. 3.9) distinguishes two types of style, the ‘periodic’ or ‘rounded’ (λ⋯ξιςκατεστραμμέη) and the ‘non-periodic’, ‘strung-on’ or ‘continuous’ (λέξιςε;ἰρομένη).* The l...

Democracy in Ancient Greek Political Theory: 1906–2006

The notion of ‘democracy’ as found in ancient Athens and the work of ancient Greek political theorists has crucially functioned as a critical, distant mirror for major authors of t...

Demokratia and Arete in Ancient Greek Political Thought

This article interprets demokratia and arete as dynamically related terms of political thought in ancient Greek culture, from Homeric times to the end of the classical era. It does...

Email:
Password:

Email:

Leisure in Aristotle’s Political Thought

Related Results