Emancipating Leisure: The Recovery Of Freedom in Leisure

Freedom has been a frequent theme in the analysis of leisure. Existing conceptualizations of freedom in leisure focus on interior mental experiences and fail to acknowledge the historical horizon against which leisure occurs. This failure reinforces existing patterns of dominance. A critical theory of freedom in leisure addresses the deformation of leisure's emancipatory potential by exploring the horizon against which leisure occurs. J. Habermas's analysis of rationality types and the eclipse of leisure in the public sphere provides a framework for examining the diminished emancipatory potential of contemporary leisure, while a review of recent democratic theory illustrates the necessity of emancipating leisure for a restoration of democracy.KEYWORDS: Leisure, freedom, critical theory IntroductionThis essay was written to expand the theoretic framework for investigating the association of leisure and freedom.l This association has existed at least since Aristotle wrote that leisure is freedom from the necessity to labor at menial tasks (Politics, 1269a), but this statement has yet to be understood in all its dimensions, at least in leisure studies. Aristotle's account has this advantage: leisure is set in a specific context, the ancient polis, and has a specific aim, virtuous action. The freedom realized in leisure is thus given a richer substance than in contemporary discussions, in which inattention to social, cultural, economic, and political structures obscures ways contemporary forms of leisure are dominated by and contribute to the continuing dominance of social, cultural, economic, and political forces inimical not just to freedom in leisure, but to that expansion of human capacities which is the core of the very idea of freedom.Drawing on recent developments in critical theory, particularly the work of J. Habermas,2 a second purpose in writing this essay was to point out the specifically political nature of freedom in leisure, with the central thesis that leisure has been deformed through increasing commodification and consumerization, themselves reflecting the growing instrumentalism accompanying modernization. Instrumentalism undermines the discursive, civic foundations of Aristotle's original association of freedom and leisure. The application of critical theory to this topic yields a theoretically richer and politically more substantive understanding of the issues involved than is presently available in the leisure studies literature.Marx (1977, p. 38) defined critique as the effort to attain a reflective "self-understanding" by the participants of the principles underlying social practices. Practices are patterns of human activity defined by two sets of socially determined rules: regulatory, which operate within practices to direct activity; and constitutive, which define practices themselves by forming the boundaries between them and the rest of the world (see Hemingway, 1995, pp. 37-39). Critique of practices proceeds along two axes. Empirically, critique examines the historical development of practices from within to understand the principles out of which their constitutive rules emerged and to explore the contemporary content of their regulatory rules. Normatively, critique states this as the relationship between the original emancipatory potential of a practice and its current emancipatory content, with emancipation understood as the process of exposing, and preparing the ground for the elimination of the often latent restrictions on the development of human capacities embedded in existing social practices. As Horkheimer (1968) noted, the critical attitude challenges both the content and the justification of social practices in the name of emancipation so defined. A critical analysis of freedom in leisure will therefore address the social practices of leisure and particularly their historical evolution, being attentive to ruptures between principle and practice; between, for example, claims of enabling freedom in leisure and particular forms of leisure that in fact restrict freedom or channel it into a narrow range of practices. …