The Philosophy Book

238 BERTRAND RUSSELL

Immense harm

is caused by

the belief that

work is virtuous.

Bertrand Russell

this perceived virtue rather than

for what they produce. And given

that we consider work itself to be

inherently virtuous, we tend to see

the unemployed as lacking in virtue.

The more we think about it, the

more it seems that our attitudes

toward work are both complex and

incoherent. What, then, can be

done? Russell’s suggestion is that

we look at work not in terms of

these curious moral ideas that

are a relic of earlier times, but in

terms of what makes for a full and

satisfying human life. And when

we do this, Russell believes, it is

hard to avoid the conclusion that

we should all simply work less.

What, Russell asks, if the working

day were only four hours long? Our

present system is such that part of

the population can be overworked,

and so miserable, while another

part can be totally unemployed,

and so also miserable. This, it

seems, does not benefit anyone.

The importance of play

Russell’s view is that reducing our

working hours would free us to

pursue more creative interests.

“Moving matter about,” Russell

writes, “is emphatically not one of

the ends of human life.” If we allow

work to occupy every waking hour,

we are not living fully. Russell

believes that leisure, previously

something known only to the

privileged few, is necessary for a

rich and meaningful life. It might

be objected that nobody would

know what to do with their time

if they worked only for four hours

a day, but Russell regrets this.

If this is true, he says, “it is a

condemnation of our civilization,”

suggesting that our capacity for

play and light-heartedness has been

eclipsed by the cult of efficiency.

A society that took leisure seriously,

Bertrand Russell Bertrand Russell was born in

Wales in 1872 to an aristocratic

family. He had an early interest

in mathematics, and went on to

study the subject at Cambridge.

There he met the philosopher

Alfred North Whitehead, with

whom he later collaborated on the

Principia Mathematica, a book

that established him as one of the

leading philosophers of his era. It

was also at Cambridge that he

met, and deeply influenced, the

philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Russell wanted philosophy to

speak to ordinary people. He was

a social activist, a pacifist, an

educationalist, an advocate of

atheism, and a campaigner

against nuclear arms, as well as

the author of numerous popular

works of philosophy. He died of

influenza in February, 1970.

Key works

1903 The Principles of

Mathematics

1910, 1912, and 1913 (3 vols)

Principia Mathematica

1914 Our Knowledge of the

External World

1927 The Analysis of Matter

1956 Logic and Knowledge

Russell, who are heard extolling
the virtues of “honest toil”, giving
a moral gloss to a system that is
manifestly unjust. And this fact
alone, according to Russell, should
prompt us to re-evaluate the ethics
of work, for by embracing “honest
toil” we comply with and even
promote our own oppression.
Russell’s account of society,
with its emphasis on the struggle
between classes, owes something
to the thought of the 19th-century
philosopher Karl Marx, although
Russell was always uneasy with
Marxism, and his essay is as
critical of Marxist states as it is
of capitalist states. His view also
owes much to Max Weber’s book
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism, first published in 1905,
particularly Weber’s examination
of the moral claims that underlie
our attitudes to work—claims that
Russell insists should be challenged.
For example, not only do we see
work as a duty and an obligation,
we also see different types of work
as occupying a hierarchy of virtue.
Manual work is generally considered
less virtuous than more skilled or
intellectual work, and we tend to
reward people in accordance with