Politics and Leisure

John Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429656170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Kulturpolitik

First published in 1988. This book provides a lucid and exceptionally well-informed account at the controversial relationship between politics and leisure.

The author combines historical and sociological material to show the ways in which 'leisure' has often been a fiercely disputed battleground. Free time and free space have always posed a threat to political authorities, while providing room for experimentation and expression for the citizenry. This has led to extensive attempts at leisure regulation; John Wilson examines the purposes and effectiveness of such regulation in the fields of games sexuality, the mass media, and gambling. He is able to draw on evidence of leisure planning and policy from a wide variety of political regimes, from communist and socialist through social democrat to liberal, conservative, and fascist.

The importance of the relationship between political forces and leisure, in subjects as disparate as the future of the Olympic games and the future of full employment, has rarely been so evident. John Wilson has provided an excellent guide to its intricacies.

1

Politics and Leisure

In this opening chapter, I shall introduce the major concepts and ideas to be used in the book and explain how they will be used. ‘Politics’ and ‘leisure’ are words with deceptively obvious meanings. Actually each has many meanings, not only in everyday speech but also in the social sciences. I need to indicate how I shall be using them. A second problem is that we do not usually associate politics and leisure. Rather, we think of them as completely separate spheres. I therefore need to explain how they are related.

What Is Leisure?

Leisure is notoriously difficult to define. Some sociologists treat it as a portion of one’s time. Others regard it as a quality of experience unčonfined to particular times. It is generally agreed that attempts to list all ‘leisure’ activities do not help much, because almost any activity can be a leisure activity if the right attitude of mind is adopted toward it. Nor should we be misled by the enormous popularity of commercialized entertainment or the prestige of the ‘high culture’ world of museums and galleries when trying to decide what leisure is. At the heart of most people’s leisure are informal and everyday things like playing with the children or pets, chatting with friends, pottering about in the garden, keeping one eye on the television, browsing in shops, or simply daydreaming. The more public part of the leisure world—theme parks, vacation spots, cinemas, libraries, fairs, sports stadiums and playing fields—are only the tip of the iceberg. Another difficulty in drawing a boundary around leisure is that much of our leisure occurs in the interstices of other social institutions; we might read a novel on the way to work, play squash on our lunch break, play with the children while taking the dog for a walk, gossip on our way to the shops, play softball with our church group. All this makes distinguishing leisure from other activities extremely difficult. Much overlapping and merging occurs, and much depends on the attitude taken toward an activity by the individual or group.

Leisure and Freedom

We should not abandon the attempt to define leisure simply because exceptions to any definition we agree upon will always be found. Leisure is essentially ‘autotelic’ activity. In other words, it is chosen primarily for its own sake. If there are sanctions applied for failure to participate in a given activity, it is not leisure because it is not freely chosen’ (Lane, 1978, p. 149). Leisure is thus to be distinguished from whatever has to be done, it is voluntary, and the motivation is intrinsic. Of course, each of these elements in the definition is subject to modification in the real world. It is often impossible to decide what is absolutely necessary as opposed to something that is discretionary. For example, how clean does the car really have to be to prevent rust and deterioration? We can all agree that leisure must be free, but what kind of freedom do we have in mind? We must distinguish between freedom from compulsion (play is hardly something we can be forced to do) from freedom in the broader social and political sense. We can certainly define leisure as free in the first sense but it is not so clear that leisure could ever be free of social or political constraint. Specific leisure activities might be freely chosen, but the choice is always made within social and cultural constraints. For example, we can choose what we read, but not every kind of reading material is widely available. Finally, although we all have a fairly good idea of when we are doing something for its own sake, just for fun, much of what we do, such as jogging, contains both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, and we ourselves are not sure where one begins and the other leaves off. None of these ‘real world’ problems with our definition, however, should be allowed to obscure our view of the one essential and universal feature of leisure, that it is autotelic or instrinsically motivated. ‘All people experience the two states of existence, one that asks no question of objectives beyond itself, the other that is stimulated and sustained by the goal that exists outside the behavior’ (Blanchard and Cheska, 1985, p. 40). No matter how much our free time becomes encrusted within activities which have some ulterior purpose—military preparation, rehabilitation for work, childminding, impression-management—it will have at its core a leisurely component if it is energized and directed in part ‘for its own sake.’ The desire to protect, reproduce and distill this essentially autotelic experience without at the same time sacrificing its spontaneity and freedom is part of the dialect of leisure.

Leisure Ideologies

The concepts of social science, so often drawn from everyday speech, are frequently weighted down with political assumptions which limit their usefulness in research and analysis. In thus defining leisure I have tried to eliminate as much of this political bias as possible, because the relation of leisure to politics is the subject of the book. Nevertheless, it is as well to be aware of the ideological freight the concept of leisure carries in our culture. Simply to define leisure as time ‘left over’ from work in which people seek self-fulfillment means making a number of covert assumptions about what social life is ‘really’ like, none of which stand up to historical scrutiny. One of these assumptions is that the boundary between work and leisure is fixed and clearly marked. Another is that work is primary and leisure secondary. Most of us also assume that leisure needs are principally geared to the improvement of the self. As assumptions about the part played by leisure in social life, each is false. Before people started working in factories, fields and offices for hourly wages it was very difficult to separate work time from non-work time, as it still is today for the self-employed or for housewives. If we drop all reference to work and simply describe leisure as ‘non-obligated time’ we discover that few people living in the eighteenth century would have enjoyed any ‘leisure’ at all. Most would have had ‘sports’ and ‘pastimes’ which were organized, communal activities and hence more or less obligatory occasions. Leisure, in the sense of non-obligated time, would have been considered ‘idleness’ on the part of any group except the aristocracy. The definition of leisure as time ‘left over’ from work implies that work comes first and leisure is the residue. This, too, is an assumption that history questions. The idea that hard work is good and play is bad is Puritanical. As that world-view has begun to fade, so too has the idea of the work ethic, to be replaced by a ‘fun ethic’ in conformity to which people feel the ‘duty’ to have a good time. If work comes to be seen as a necessary inconvenience, a return in many ways to the morality of the Middle Ages, then we should not see leisure as a left-over. Finally, the idea that leisure is by definition devoted to the pursuit of self-fulfillment contains a bias toward a more individualistic conception of the good life. But not all societies have exalted the pursuit of individual happiness in preference to, or at the cost of, the common good. Not all societies are as inclined as modern capitalist societies to define happiness in terms of the gratification of the individual consumer.

It is not possible, nor is it necessarily desirable, to eliminate all traces of such ideological biases from our treatment of leisure. As we shall see, virtually any sociological analysis of the relation between politics and leisure contains its class and gender biases. All we can hope for is to be cognizant of them and to draw our conclusions about politics and leisure fully conscious of the starting point from which we began. These sociological and ideological problems of defining leisure are very similar to those presented by an institution like religion, another human activity that has proven difficult to define precisely. It might be instructive to draw out the parallels. Like leisure, religion is not ‘contained’ in any set of activities; no list of practices or beliefs could hope to be exhaustive. Like modern leisure, modern religion is somewhat misleading because it has become highly organized; the churches, with their salaried professionals, bureaucratic staffs and complex budgets, suggest themselves as the obvious ‘site’ of religiosity. But there are many people who are neither church members nor regular church-goers who nevertheless consider themselves religious, just as there are many people who can be ‘at leisure’ although they belong to no club and attend no sporting event. Like leisure, religion is very difficult to circumscribe; where does religious behavior end and political behavior begin? In religion, as in leisure, there are always those who want to alter its definition for the purposes of controlling the behavior of others. Thus groups dispute not only what a religion teaches but whether or not it is a religion at all and therefore entitled to protections accorded other religions. As we shall see, groups have fought over not only their right to enjoy a form of leisure but, more fundamentally, whether an activity should be regarded as leisure at all. The sociologist commits himself to one side or the other the moment he settles upon his definition of leisure.

The best way to proceed in the face of these definitional problems is to remember that ‘leisure’ is an abstract term. No concrete activity will necessarily exhibit all its defining characteristics in their purity. This should present no insurmountable obstacle. We study not leisure in general but leisure in particular. We focus on the specific and concrete. Observing changes in the programs people watch on television or accounting for the demise of the public house or saloon does not require that we decide in advance whether or not these are ‘really’ leisure issues.

I have defined leisure very broadly and consequently will treat most specific leisure activities very briefly and abstractly. I will devote considerable attention to sports. With the assistance of the mass media, they have become the most important component of the leisure-time industry. People want to be entertained in their leisure time, and those who run sports as a business have responded adroitly and zealously to this demand. But the reason that sports figure so prominently in a book on politics and leisure is not because they are so popular. Indeed, they rank fairly low in lists of leisure activities people prefer to engage in. Sports represent the most bureaucratized of leisure activities; they are most likely to brush up against political life. This is especially true when considering international affairs. Sports are vulnerable to the ministrations of the law; they stake a claim to scarce resources and a share of public goods (such as city spaces and airwaves); and they are erected on a complex scaffolding of economic agreements and contracts which almost inevitably brings them into contact with the state and renders them an object of attention from politicians and the state. Apart from the mass media, no other component of the leisure sphere has this corporate existence, no other component is so much a creature of past political decisions. Although I will be at pains to argue that all leisure is in some sense political, I will be able to demonstrate this most convincingly in the case of sports. In totalitarian regimes, where all activities are political, sports loom so large in the leisure world because they effectively administer free-time activities. Their promotion is testimony to the authorities’ fears and suspicions of free, unorganized street play and private pastimes (e.g. hobbies).

Despite the fact that their relationship to politics is close. I shall allude only briefly to the arts, which are best treated as a topic in their own right. However, I shall have something to say about mass media such as radio and television, because people spend much of their leisure time attending to them and because they have an obvious ‘public’ or collective dimension which inevitably introduces political influence. The kind of casual, private and informal leisure that occupies a considerable amount of our free time rarely becomes part of the public world and impinges less upon politics even in totalitarian regimes. This part of the leisure world is politically important, however, precisely because it provides the ‘room’ for people to distance themselves from control and surveillance. I will therefore have something to say about it under the heading of ‘resistance. ‘

What Is Politics?

A study of politics and leisure must concern itself with states (as social institutions), with political processes (such as elections) and with the play of political ideas to the extent that they impinge upon people’s free time. To take into consideration the ‘political factor’ in leisure is to acknowledge that people’s use of their free time is not simply the result of social and economic forces but is the outcome also of political struggle. Leisure has seldom been a burning issue in election campaigns and is unlikely to topple a government or mobilize a social movement. However, leisure figures in many political debates indirectly; when groups contend over conditions of work, proper child care, censorship, adequate transportation, decent housing and a clean environment, they are also contending over leisure issues.

Leisure is also ‘political’ to the extent that ‘the personal is political,’ to the degree that the everyday lives of men and women, extending to control over their ‘persons,’ are shaped by relations of domination and submission. A common constraint experienced by large numbers of women who seek leisure satisfactions, for example, ‘is that of male control, both on an individual basis (husbands or partners controlling where “their” women go) and through the fears generated in women by collective male control over female sexuality’ (Deem, 1968a, p. 7). I shall have a great deal to say about collective, or public, control over women’s leisure but not much to say about the more private forms. This is not to pretend that there is no ‘micro-politics’ of leisure; in a certain sense, all leisure activities take place within constraints imposed by other, more powerful groups. But such a broad definition of what is political threatens to undermine any discrimination the concept originally possessed. Not all relations can be reduced to struggles for power; not all struggles for power become institutionalized into political structures. Gender is an important issue for leisure at the micro-level, but it is equally important at the collective or macro-level, and it is with this level that the present book concerns itself.

The Emergence of the State

Increasingly debates over the politics of leisure have focused on the state’s role with respect to these issues. We should therefore begin with a discussion of the state and how its functioning can be explained. Badie and Birnbaum (1983, p. 105) define the state as a ‘system of permanently institutionalized roles which has the exclusive right to the legitimate use of force, whereby it exerts sovereign power over a given territory.’ Its component parts are the government (of the day), the executive, the military and other coercive forces, the judiciary, parliamentary assemblies and the various units of sub-central government. The formation of classes and the evolution of the state go hand in hand, although, as we see in the case of the political institutionalization of private property, it is often difficult to decide whether class formation is the cause or the effect of state formation.

The notion of a distinct political sphere separate from ‘civil society’ is peculiar to capitalism. The very individualism of capitalism, the fact that all subjects are formally free and equal to pursue their own ends, requires a separate structure, the state, to represent their ‘common’ interests. The result is the evolution of the state and its relative autonomy from other institutions like the family and the economy. However, this is not to say that the state is neutral. By and large, the state embodies and furthers the interests of the ruling class. For example, the state attaches to all individuals abstractly equal faculties for freely disposing of their own resources. This meets the capitalists’ requirement that labor power be sold for wages through individual employment contracts. The state’s guarantee of a relatively free market for goods and of the equality of individuals before the law serves the same purpose.

While the modern Western state is appropriately conceived as a capitalist state, it is by no means the case that political developments can be inferred directly from the configuration of class forces. We must therefore look upon the state as partially autonomous from economic conditions and class struggles. ‘State power expresses at once the intentions and purposes of government and state personnel (they could have acted differently) and the parameters set by the institutionalized context of state-society relations’ (Held and Krieger, 1984, p. 18). After all, it is only when the state is removed from a direct relationship with particular fractions of capital that it can provide the necessary conditions for general capitalist production.

It follows from this, then, that the state cannot be conceived to be simply a servant of capital; although it has to cope with the general needs of the capitalist mode of production, the manner and direction in which it does this will be highly variable, depending on the conjuncture of a wide range of not only economic but also social and political forces as they operate within the context of specific national social formations.

(Scase, 1980, p. 13)

The state, in other words, has needs of its own which will be pursued in part independently of the needs of capitalism. For example, state agencies will want to incorporate (and thus remove from the market) sections of society in order to make them easier to control. The state must also concern itself with foreign policy and military needs. Independent action on the part of state functionaries is also furthered by the tendency for state agencies to become isolated by virtue of their sheer size.

The state thus embodies general, not specific, interests. Yet it remains a capitalist state, and will choose policies which in general and in the long run serve to reproduce the capitalist system. This means assuming responsibility for functions and services beyond the scope and capability of capitalist interests (i.e. needs not met by the marketplace), sustaining and expanding the capitalist economy, regulating markets and labor relations, defending the national interest abroad and maintaining law and order. The criteria by which state agencies make decisions will naturally differ from those used by businessmen, being less obedient to the logic of the marketplace and less preoccupied with profit maximization. On the other hand, the state must react to problems which have been created by structurally imposed conditions of work and residence. As we shall see, there are no inherent ‘leisure needs,’ only needs created by conditions of work and residence. Helping to foster fitness and recreation when conditions of work threaten health, or satisfying the need for clean air and open spaces created by overcrowding and long-distance commuting, the state meets ‘needs’ which have been created by the economic system on which it, too, depends for support.

Political Ideologies

Politics in capitalist countries range from socialist, through reform and liberal, to conservative (Alford and Friedland, 1985). Extremes meet at either end of this spectrum in the anti-capitalist politics of communism and fascism. Conservative politics treats the operation of markets as self-regulating and attempts to limit the scope of state intervention in the belief that such interventions te...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Politics and Leisure
• 2 The Control of Leisure
• 3 Resistance
• 4 Leisure in the Liberal State: the United States
• 5 Leisure in the Welfare State: the United Kingdom
• 6 Leisure in Totalitarian Regimes
• 7 Leisure and Nationalism
• 8 Conclusion: The Future of Politics and Leisure
• References
• Index