Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization — A Basic Bibliography

Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization—A Basic Bibliography Patrick S. O’Donnell (2022) Epigraph “The wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world may be the poorest in what was supremely precious to the highest cultures of classical antiquity and the renaissance of world history—the availability of time for thought and contemplation, for relaxation and creative work, for conversation and study, for love and friendship, for the enjoyment of the arts and the beauties of nature, for solitude and communion, for doubts and dreams. There is little room or time for indolence and excellence, for salons and coffeehouses and the market-place, for laughter and tears, for poetry and philosophy, for song and dance and worship, for birds and beasts, for sleep and convalescence, for birth and death; time to live and enough time to dwell on eternity. Can the mere availability of more time teach the most time-saving society in history how to spend time, how to transcend it, and how to appreciate timelessness? [….] A crucial feature of the [Guaranteed Annual Income or ‘GAI’] model is that communal time will be employed not only in creative work but also in informal associations. This is the immense opportunity made possible by the enormous increase in leisure consequent upon the enactment of the GAI. The arts of friendship, participation in new forms of folk activities and play 1 activities, and of conversation and dialogue are casualties of the present industrial society. They are the lost arts which could be vital in the new society, giving it a richer way of life than is now known to Americans, helping to transform a mechanistic ‘utopia’ into a high culture and a true civilization. The great ages of achievement in world history reflected a fortuitous clustering of creative individuals, a high degree of social and especially intellectual mobility, the confrontation and eventual fusion of diverse world-views and personal philosophies, the concentration of common energy on pervasive and transcending themes, the magical release of imagination from the ruts of conformity and effete tradition, the free flow of persons and ideas. The art of conversation requires that each member of a voluntary group be judged by his individual value and not as a member of a class or race or status group. As centers of extended conversation arise, the issues of deepest concern to men—the ultimate questions of life—can be explored with a degree of freedom that organizations with formal and partisan allegiances cannot allow—academic or political, vocational or religious.” — Raghavan Iyer, from the essay, “An Unfinished Dream,” in his Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979): 299-331. This chapter discusses the Guaranteed Annual Income (or ‘basic income’) proposal in light of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888). Apologia This compilation assumes there are several profound truths and urgent questions embodied in our epigraph. In addition to works that more or less directly address topics in the title, I’ve included material that treats—in whole or part—philosophical and psychological presuppositions and assumptions one finds in exploring the subject of “free” or discretionary 2 time, including how such time is relevant to the quest for human fulfillment and sundry forms of self-realization. The voluntary group of associating individuals Iyer refers to in our epigraph is close in spirit if not letter, for example, to the meaning of “eudaimonistic” communities in the work of the late David L. Norton, the praxis of salons in the Republic of Letters in the French Enlightenment, and the radical social circle(s) that included the provocative anarchist philosopher William Godwin; and all three conceptions are importantly different from those found in the “communitarian” literature* insofar as these exemplary communities serve individuals, that is, provide the propitious (yet not all of the necessary) conditions for would-be self-responsible and self- actualizing (if not self-governing) individuals, conditions conspicuously conducive to the actualization of objective value(s) in the world. I want to elaborate a bit on the third example from Godwin’s “radical” world by way of concluding our apologia. The anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756 –1836) drew inspiration for his model of the anarchist society and its well-known reliance on sophisticated individual judgment as a vehicle of rationality and benevolence from “the context of the social circles in which he lived, worked and debated.” These radical social circles in turn “were part of a larger middle class community which drew on a range of philosophical and literary traditions in developing critical perspectives on contemporary social and political institutions” (Mark Philp). To be sure, Godwin drew upon the philosophes and British radicals, as well as the periphery of the early Liberal tradition (e.g., Paine), but especially the “writings, sermons, and traditions of Rational Dissent” when composing An Enquiry Composing Political Justice (first edition, 1793, later editions to 1798), but his belief in the veracity of his critique and vision was grounded in the daily life of the social circles of metropolitan radicalism in which he worked and spent his convivial and leisure activities. While this social and intellectual culture soon succumbed to government repression, it provides intimate empirical evidence that might be said to confirm Godwin’s belief—one shared with Condorcet—in the “perfectibility” (which is distinct from ‘perfectionism’) of man and the anarchist society for the provision of fertile soil for same. Godwin was not a political activist (although he knew members of radical groups and organizations) but a philosopher, but the radical social circles in which he lived temper the utopian (and crudely utilitarian) tendencies of his great work, at the very least they demonstrate the viability of at least some radical principles through their incarnation in daily praxis, even if Godwin lacked sufficient appreciation of the wider and deeper socio-economic and political conditions that made possible that praxis and served as a necessary condition for radical sentiment and actions. 3 “Given the assumptions and conventions of his background and his social circles” writes Philp, “his position could be rationally defensible.” Godwin’s seemingly naïve faith in the power of private rational judgment was confirmed in his experience of these social and intellectual circles, which included, but were not limited to academics. In Philp’s words, “… [Godwin’s] membership [in] a literate and intellectual culture … cannot be identified politically, socially or intellectually with either aristocratic privilege or with the potentially violent and disruptive London poor. It is in this group that we find the politically unattached intellectuals and writers who had greeted the French Revolution and who had called for reform at home on intellectual and humanitarian grounds. [While this group is] “diffuse and made up of heterogeneous social and intellectual currents … there seems to be no doubt that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there existed in both London and the provinces significant number of critical, literate, professional men and women who held often very radical views on social, political and religious issues who regularly met together for the purposes of discussion in a number of overlapping social and professional circles. [….] Godwin moves in the company of artists, portrait painters, engravers, grammarians, industrialists, writers, editors, publishers, antiquarians, librarians, actors, theater managers, playwrights, musicians, novelists, poets, classical scholars, scientists, dons, lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, surgeons, and divines— and this list is not exhaustive. We should also recognize that members of these groups sustained a commitment to radical thinking throughout most of the last decade of the century.” The middling class radicalism of these men and women was not simply the product of a Dissenting background, the French Revolution, and the influence of the philosophes, for it required the warp and woof of a cultural experience of that type of sociability that formed the “basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life:” “Once he had concluded his morning’s work Godwin’s day was free and he generally spent it in company—talking and debating while eating, drinking and socialising. His peers’ behavior was essentially similar; they lived in a round of debate and discussion in clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses, and in the street. And conversation ranged through philosophy, morality, religion, literature and poetry, to the political events of the day. Members of these circles were tied together in the ongoing practice of debate. These men and women were not the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group. Their consciousness of their group identity was of signal importance….” 4 Here we discern the skeletal structure of Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society, one which is fundamentally “discursive” or, better, conversational, in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society wherein advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and “argument” were the lifeblood of a radicalism that flourished in this kind of sociability: “The rules of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a highly democratic discourse, and it is essentially non-individualist: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.” The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of “sensibility.” Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society partially incarnate in the sociability that formed the “basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life,” the salons of the European Enlightenment, artists collectives, sundry communes and co-operatives, the Highlander Folk School, as well as social spaces created for and periods devoted to solitary time, be it spent walking, reflecting, meditating, reading, singing, performing, what have you (e.g., ‘doing nothing’), together provide exemplars and signs, suggestions and pointers of how we can, might and perhaps should live “beyond capitalist-attenuated time.” * For an uncommonly incisive analysis and sympathetic critique of that literature from an Enlightenment perspective, please see Robert E. Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003): 26-47. As Goodin explains, the “sovereign artificer” of the Enlightenment “stands partially apart from the ’we’ in question, constituting an independent locus of value and judgment to be blended with others to form the ‘we’ in question.” The communitarian’s “encumbered self,” on the other hand, “in so far as it is constituted by the attachments that constitute the ‘we,’ is naturally subsumed within it.” 5 Bibliography  Adorno, Theodor. “Free Time,” in J.M. Bernstein, ed. The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture. London: Routledge, 2001: 187–198.  Caillois, Roger. Man, Play and Games. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001 (Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1958).  Chamberlain, James A. Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2018.  Cohen, Josh. Not Working: Why We Have to Stop. 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The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Related Bibliographies (embedded links):  Anarchist Philosophy & Praxis  Beyond Inequality: Toward Welfare, Well-Being and Human Flourishing  Democratic Theory  Global Distributive Justice  Human Nature and Personal Identity  Marxism  Marxism, Art and Aesthetics 9