Now in a new translation, a classic nineteenth-century defense for
the cause of idleness by a revolutionary writer and activist (and
Karl Marx’s son-in law) that reshaped European ideas of labor and
production.
Exuberant,
provocative, and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880,
Paul Lafargue’s The Right to Be Lazy is a call for the
workers of the world to unite—and stop working so much! Lafargue,
Karl Marx’s son-in-law (about whom Marx once said, “If he is a
Marxist, then I am clearly not”) wrote his pamphlet on the virtues
of laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a
timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of
leisure, The Right to Be Lazy shifted the course of European
thought, going through seventeen editions in Russia during the
Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes’s ideas
about overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue’s
other writings—including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of
Marx—The Right to Be Lazy reminds us that the urge to work
is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a
“strange madness” consuming human lives.
