The New Leisure, Voluntarism and Social Reconstruction in Inter-War Britain

Abstract

In post-World War I social reconstruction, leisure acquired a new meaning as a social good with the capacity to contribute to the building of a new post-war society. A discourse of citizenship and leisure emerged which drew from Christian socialism and the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, and the social idealist thinking of T. H. Green and J. A. Hobson. The classical Athenian model of leisure was re-worked by Ernest Barker and Cecil Delisle Burns who argued that the function of a leisure class could become that of the whole community through a democratic redistribution of leisure. Although efforts to realize idealist visions were rarely successful they were nevertheless important to twentieth-century understandings of leisure and citizenship and brought leisure within the framework of social policy.