Leisure and the Market: Adam Smith on Freedom from Toil and Anxiety

Adam Smith has been recognized as an important theorist of labor, but he is also a sophisticated and underappreciated thinker on leisure, offering distinctive insights into its meaning, value, and social conditions. In contrast to recent definitions of leisure as time free from objectively necessary activities, Smith conceives of leisure as freedom from toil and anxiety—a release from the intense physical and psychological demands of self-preservation and social ambition. Paradoxically, he suggests, even as modern European societies improved their ability to meet basic needs and satisfy various desires, they simultaneously reduced leisure time for most individuals. The explanation lies in intensified status anxiety and the oppressive burden of labor imposed on the lower classes. While he values leisure both intrinsically and instrumentally, Smith stops short of calling for maximizing it at the expense of other social goods or endorsing institutional solutions such as legal limits on working hours. His modest vision for recovering leisure in market-based societies rests on the moral culture of prudence and on the voluntary restraint of employers in setting the working hours of laborers.