Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal

by Gary S. Cross

Overview

The history of leisure time, from the earliest societies to the work-from-home era

Free time, one of life’s most precious things, often feels unfulfilling. But why? And how did leisure activities transition from strolling in the park for hours to “doomscrolling” on social media for thirty minutes?

Today, despite the promise of modern industrialization, many people experience both a scarcity of free time and a disappointment in it. Free Time offers a broad historical explanation of why our affluent society does not afford more time away from work and why that time is often unsatisfying. Gary S. Cross explores the cultural, social, economic, and political history, especially of the past 250 years to understand the roots of our conceptions of free time and its use. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common expectation was that industrial innovations would lead to a progressive reduction of work time and a subsequent rise in free time devoted to self-development and social engagement. However, despite significant changes in the early twentieth century, both goals were frustrated, thus leading to the contemporary dilemma.

Cross touches on leisure of all kinds, from peasant festivals and aristocratic pleasure gardens to amusement parks, movie theaters and organized sports to internet surfing, and even the use of alcohol and drugs. This wide-ranging cultural and social history explores the industrial-era origins of our modern obsession with work and productivity, but also the historical efforts to liberate time from work and cultivate free time for culture. Insightful and informative, this book is sure to help you make sense of your own relationship to free time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479813070
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	675,074
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Gary S. Cross is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Modern History in the Department of History at Pennsylvania State Universityand author of Freak Show Legacies and Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture.

Editorial Reviews

"A sweeping and thought-provoking evaluation of the history of how people use leisure time, and why these ways often fall short in the present day."

Peter N. Stearns

"A seminal and ground-breaking study, "Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal" is an inherently fascinating and thoughtfully informative history of the concept and practice of 'leisure time', from the earliest recorded societies to our contemporary 'work-from-home' era."

Midwest Book Review

"Free Time, like all important books, provides us with a narrative that both establishes indispensable new perspectives and invites reflections that go beyond them... [Cross's] book helps us recognize the less than innocent influences that have captured time that had once been painstakingly liberated from work and converted it into little more than consumer activity."

Washington Post

"Cross’s compelling history of free time illuminates the economic, political and cultural causes that led us to this place."

Times Literary Supplement

"Free Time is an academic journey through two-and-half millennia of leisure options."

The Spectator

"Free Time sheds light on why so many of us feel our free time is unfulfilling (let alone, scarce). Cross is a truly innovative scholar with remarkable range, and an admirably clear writer who is able to present complex ideas in an accessible way; he deftly addresses issues that are intimately connected to each other but are all too often treated separately."

Susan Matt

"Our free time is both vanishing and worsening, and Cross traces the history of this spiral with an emphasis on the transformation of consumer capitalism."

The New Yorker - Erik Baker

"A gifted stylist, a master researcher, Gary Cross is the leading authority on the most lasting and influential -ism of the twentieth century: consumerism. No one has written with such insight into the origins, evolution, nature, meaning, and appeal of consumer culture. Written in an engaging and highly accessible style, and addressing a topic of widespread public concern with an intellectual seriousness that is missing in works of pop psychology and sociology, Free Time is rich and highly original."

Steven Mintz

"No one has written with such insight into the origins, evolution, nature, meaning and appeal of consumer culture. In Professor Cross’s view, consumerism—the desire to earn in order to consume—helps explain why American workers haven’t lobbied for a shorter workweek."

Inside Higher Ed

"In 1962 Herbert Marcuse wrote that technology “threatens . . . the reversal of the relation between free time and working time . . . [making likely] the possibility of working time becoming marginal . . . . The result would be a radical transvaluation of values . . . . Advanced industrial society is in permanent mobilization against this possibility.” Free Time is a magnificent account of that “mobilization.” His is one of the best and most thorough explanations of why the shorter hours process ended during the 20th century after a century of progress, and why the accompanying expectation of what Walt Whitman called “higher progress” has been nearly forgotten."

Benjamin Hunnicutt