Reading Habermas on Leisure

Abstract

Habermas invokes leisure in a number of places in his published works, though it is rarely a central concept to his critical and epistemological frameworks. The exception to this in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, where bourgeois leisure is used to articulate the development of the public sphere, and its necessary opposite, the private sphere. In this chapter I will provide a commentary on Habermas’s work on leisure, beginning with The Structural Transformation and continuing chronologically through his later works, where leisure is used in bigger arguments about reason, public discourse and action. In providing a commentary, it will be necessary to quote Habermas at length. In the translations provided by Thomas Burger to Habermas’s main works, the author’s forceful, magisterial style is still evident, but the conceptual frames depend on an a priori familiarity with the similar philosophical and critical work of, among others, Adorno and Horkheimer, which in turn draws on the earlier work of Hegel, Weber and, of course, Marx. I make no apology for citing Habermas at length in this critical analysis, indeed it would be deficient of this book to not include such citations; for those who feel daunted by the depth and breadth of his arguments, I can only suggest that these extracts are to be read slowly, and carefully, alongside my discussion of them.