John Wilson - 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.

Leisure is notoriously difficult to define. Some sociologists treat it as a portion of ones time. Others regard it as a quality of experience unonfined 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 peoples 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 worldtheme parks, vacation spots, cinemas, libraries, fairs, sports stadiums and playing fieldsare 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 purposemilitary preparation, rehabilitation for work, childminding, impression-managementit 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.