1. Keynes’s Mistake
2. The Faustian Bargain
3. The Uses of Wealth
4. The Mirage of Happiness
5. Limits to Growth: Natural or Moral?
6. Elements of the Good Life
7. Exits from the Rat Race

“The purpose of this book is to persuade the reader that such a
thing—the good life—does exist and can be known, and that we ought to
strive to live it. How much money we need to live it comes at the end
of the argument, not at the beginning.” [Preface]

In a previous book, Robert Skidelsky did venture to name a sum that
the economist John Maynard Keynes would have considered “enough” to
satisfy average needs: £40,000 or $66,000 or €46,000 a year (in
today’s money). See Robert Skidelsky, Keynes: The Return of the
Master, 2nd edn. (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 142, which also reveals
the basis of the calculation. But Keynes was assuming a more settled
idea of what the good life was than is now true, and less pressure to
lead a bad life than now exists.

This book is an argument against insatiability, against that
psychological disposition that prevents us, as individuals and as
societies, from saying “enough is enough.” It is directed at economic
insatiability, the desire for more and more money. It is chiefly
directed at the rich parts of the world, which may be reasonably
thought to have enough wealth for a decent collective life. For the
poor parts of the world, where the mass of the people still live in
great poverty, insatiability is a problem for the future. But in rich
and poor societies alike, insatiability can be seen wherever the
opulence of the very rich runs wildly ahead of the means of existence
of the many.

Marxists contend that economic insatiability is a creation of
capitalism, which will disappear with its abolition. Christians argue
that it is the product of original sin. Our own view is that it is
rooted in human nature—in the disposition to compare our fortune with
that of our fellows and find it wanting—but has been greatly
intensified by capitalism, which has made it the psychological basis
of an entire civilization. What was once an aberration of the rich is
now a commonplace of everyday life.

Capitalism is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it has made possible
vast improvements in material conditions. On the other, it has exalted
some of the most reviled human characteristics, such as greed, envy
and avarice. Our call is to chain up the monster again by recalling
what the greatest thinkers of all times and all civilizations have
meant by the “good life” and suggesting changes in current policy to
help us achieve it.

In doing this, we will be challenging the current obsession with the
growth of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the chief goal of economic
policy. We are not against economic growth as such, but we may
reasonably ask not just growth for what, but growth of what. We
want leisure to grow and pollution to decline. Both are part of any
sane idea of human welfare. But both are excluded from GDP, which
measures only that portion of domestic production that is traded in
markets. There is no subtraction for pollution, and no addition for
leisure. The extent to which further GDP growth will improve welfare
is therefore moot. It surely does so for very poor countries, but it
may be the case that rich societies already have too much GDP.

First, he asked something hardly discussed today: what is wealth for?
How much money do we need to lead a good life? This might seem an
impossible question. But it is not a trivial one. Making money cannot
be an end in itself—at least for anyone not suffering from acute
mental disorder. To say that my purpose in life is to make more and
more money is like saying that my aim in eating is to get fatter and
fatter. And what is true of individuals is also true of societies.

An air of arbitrariness hangs over lists of basic goods, to dispel
which we must make clear our criteria of inclusion. There are four:

1. Basic goods are universal, meaning that they belong to the good
life as such, not just some particular, local conception of it. To see
the universal through the particular requires strong philosophical
intuitions, guided by the testimony of different ages and cultures. This
latter proviso is frequently forgotten. Too often, the “intuitions” of
modern philosophers simply repeat the platitudes of early
twenty-first-century liberalism. Nussbaum’s catalogue of central human
capabilities includes, for example, “protection against discrimination
on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion, caste,
ethnicity, or national origin”—an impeccably progressive list, but
hardly a universal one.^10^ A more philosophical caste of mind might
question the equation of universal with modern liberal values. After
all, from the standpoint of eternity, our own civilization is just as
parochial as any other.

2. Basic goods are final, meaning that that they are good in
themselves, and not just as a means to some other good. (This
distinguishes our basic goods from Rawls’s primary goods and from
Nussbaum and Sen’s capabilities.) The standard philosopher’s way of
uncovering final goods is to ask “what for?” over and over, like certain
annoying small children. When no further answer is forthcoming, we know
we have hit upon a final good. “What is that bicycle for?” “To get me to
work.” “And what is work for?” “To make me money.” “And what is money
for?” “To buy me food.” “And what is food for?” “To keep me alive.” “And
what is life for?” Blank stare. Life is not “for” anything. In our
terms, it is part of the basic good of health.

All basic goods are final, but not all final goods are basic. An
explanatory chain might conceivably come to an end with “in order to
complete my collection of Soviet stamps.” Completing a stamp
collection is a final good—it is not usually for the sake of anything
else—but it is not basic, since it fails the test of both universality
and indispensability, to be discussed in more detail below.

Many philosophers would want to add an additional last term to any
given sequence of explanations, namely “in order to make me happy.” We
think this is a mistake. Outside psychiatric clinics and philosophy
seminars, people do not generally explain their actions by saying
“this will make me happy.” As we have already argued in Chapter 4,
this is a strong reason not to treat happiness as the ultimate good.

The requirement of finality rules out many goods that appear at first
glance to be basic. Food, for instance, features in many traditional
lists of basic goods, but as the above chain of questions shows, it is
in fact instrumental to the basic good of life or health. Indulged in
beyond this point, it ceases to be useful, and may even be harmful.
(This is not to say that all spices and relishes superfluous to health
are not good, just that they are not basic goods. We do not wish to
reduce everyone to a diet of salad and tofu.) More relevantly to our
theme, money cannot be a basic good, since it is essentially an
instrument for obtaining other things. Other goods are more ambiguous.
Health, security and leisure are on some accounts final, on others
instrumental. We return to this issue below.

3. Basic goods are sui generis, meaning that they are not part of some
other good. The good of “freedom from cancer” is certainly universal and
final, but not basic, because it can be subsumed under the larger good
of health. Whether a good is sui generis or not is often hard to
decide. For instance, family relationships, which we have included under
the good of “friendship,” might be thought to merit a separate heading
of their own. However, since what makes family and non-family
relationships good is very much the same set of things—love, trust,
stability—we decided that two categories would be superfluous.

4. Basic goods are indispensable, meaning that anyone who lacks them
may be deemed to have suffered a serious loss or harm. The qualification
“anyone” is important. That missing, set-completing stamp might cause
the stamp fanatic much genuine anguish, but this does not make a basic
good. Nor need the loss or harm in question be perceived as such by its
victim. Harms are frequently so taken for granted that they no longer
register, but they are still harms.

Health. By health we mean the full functioning of the body, the
perfection of our animal nature. Health includes all things needed to
sustain life, or a reasonable span of life, but is by no means limited
to them. It implies vitality, energy, alertness and that ruddy beauty
favored by Tolstoy and other moralists over more decadent ideals.
Health is generally associated with absence of bodily pain, but its
value is not purely utilitarian, for a comfortably ill person (on a
morphine drip, say) is still worse off than a healthy one. Above all,
health means a happy obliviousness of one’s own body, as of a tool
perfectly fitted to its tasks. In the words of French physician René
Leriche, it is “life lived in the silence of the organs.”^12^ Health
looks outwards. Illness throws one back upon oneself.

Many philosophers have ranked health lower than the other goods, on
the grounds that it belongs to our animal as opposed to our
distinctively human nature. “It is for the sake of the soul,” wrote
Aristotle, setting the tone, “that … goods of the body are desirable
at all, and all wise men ought to choose them for the sake of the
soul, and not the soul for the sake of them.”^13^ If this is true,
then health is not final in our sense, and so has no place on a list
of basic human goods. But why deny health the status of a final end
simply because animals can enjoy it too? Is that not just an
intellectual’s prejudice? Our admiration of a young man’s vitality
need not involve the further thought that it will help him walk to
work, serve his country or whatever. We can admire it for its own
sake, just as we do that of a playing dolphin or leopard cub.

Today, health is the one good on which liberal states feel entitled to
take a positive stance, for, unlike the goods of the soul, it carries
the authority of science. But is there really a distinction here?
Science can tell us whether drug x treats condition y, but not
that condition y itself constitutes “ill-health.” This latter
presupposes a pre-scientific, common-sense understanding of what it is
for human beings to flourish. We all know a healthy baby when we see
one, just as we all recognize blindness and lameness as disabilities.
Other cases are more controversial. How fat does one have to be to
count as overweight? How bodily capable to count as fit? Our answer to
these questions will depend on what we think of the martial virtues,
of sport, sex and much else besides. In short, judgments of health are
objective in the same sense and to the same degree as ethical
judgments: they too rest on an idea of human flourishing.

Given this relationship, it is not surprising to find that the eclipse
of teleological thinking in our culture has proceeded hand in hand
with an unravelling of the concept of health. The process is similar
to that we have already traced in connection with money. An earlier
notion of health as being in “tip-top condition,” with everything
“working as it should,” has given way to a new ideal of perpetual
improvement. One symptom of this slippage is our obsession with
longevity. Older medical traditions aimed to help individuals realize
their natural lifespan; dying “of old age” was not deemed a calamity.
But if there is no such thing as a natural lifespan, only a shifting,
culturally relative norm, then death at any age can be seen as a
regrettable and remediable failing. Modern science has rekindled the
old alchemical promise of eternal youth; meanwhile, people who a few
decades earlier would have died swiftly and relatively painlessly are
kept alive in a state of chronic, debilitating sickness.^*^

Another symptom of this disorientation is the disappearance of any
sharp distinction between curing the sick and enhancing the
already healthy. Once the dividing-line was clear-cut: vital
operations fell on one side, cosmetic improvements on the other. But
if there is no such thing as perfect health, then any undesirable
condition can be defined as illness and made an object of medical
treatment. (And, as we saw in Chapter 1, there is no limit to the
number of things that people can find undesirable.) This whole process
is hastened along by the drugs companies, who have a strong interest
in identifying the illnesses that their products will cure. The role
of Pfizer, manufacturer of Viagra, in transforming what was once part
and parcel of the human comedy into the fearsome new ailment of
“erectile dysfunction” is a case in point.

Ultimately, this assimilation of medicine to the economic rat race
destroys the very idea of good health. If every state of the body can
be seen as defective relative to some other, preferred state, then we
are all in a sense perpetually ill. The world becomes, as Goethe said
it would, a vast hospital, in which everyone is nurse to everyone
else. What is more, where the demand for health is insatiable, medical
costs expand in tandem with or faster than income, keeping us tethered
to the work/growth treadmill. It is thus crucial to our purpose that
health not be defined in this demand-relative sense, but retain the
older meaning of the body’s natural perfection. For it is only in this
sense that it can function as part of a criterion of enoughness.

Security. By security we mean an individual’s justified expectation
that his life will continue more or less in its accustomed course,
undisturbed by war, crime, revolution or major social and economic
upheavals. Security is a necessary condition for the realization of
other basic goods on our list, in particular personality, friendship
and leisure. But it is also a good in itself. Like any creature, a
human being has an environment, a set of taken-for-granted objects
against which his life runs its course. If this environment is changed
abruptly or frequently, he will feel perplexed and threatened, like a
cat in a new house or a caged animal released into the wild. Of
course, as intelligent beings, we have in us that which transcends any
environment—which sees “the stars above the roof,” as the philosopher
Josef Pieper puts it.^14^ Nonetheless, roofs and all that they imply
are still necessary, not least as providing a stable location from
which to gaze upon the stars. Across the world, the word “peace” has a
soothing ring, while “turmoil,” “chaos” and their equivalents bode
ill.

To be sure, there are types—tyrants, speculators, romantic poets—who
thrive on chaos. Chairman Mao, a tyrant and a romantic poet, loved
chaos so much that he renamed it “permanent revolution.” In the West,
security has so long been vilified by bohemian artists and
intellectuals that admitting to a fondness for it now is almost like
admitting to a fondness for garden gnomes. Yet the truth is that
security is cherished by all creative spirits—including poets, when
they are honest with themselves—as a condition of their own
productivity. W. B. Yeats, writing in 1919, as Ireland descended into
war, prayed that his young daughter would grow up to enjoy security:

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house

Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;

For arrogance and hatred are the wares

Peddled in the thoroughfares.

How but in custom and in ceremony

Are innocence and beauty born?

Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,

And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

Yeats was not immune to the romanticism of disorder. He had written
rapturously about the “terrible beauty” of the Easter 1916 uprising.
Yet faced with real chaos, his choice was clear. He knew that extreme
civil disorder is destructive of the arts of civilization.

What are the effects of capitalism on security? Nineteenth-century
liberals argued that le doux commerce would have a pacifying
influence on international relations, since nations that traded with
each other would have no good economic reasons to go to war. This
argument has something to it, though of course trading nations can
still go to war for bad economic or non-economic reasons, as they did
in 1914. Internally, the effect of free markets on security is less
salutary. “All that is solid melts into air,” wrote Marx famously,
referring to the endless revolution of technologies, skills and ways
of life under capitalism. This perpetual ripping up of the social
fabric is wearisome for both workers and consumers. It is particularly
taxing for those over the age of 40 or 50, who may have lost their
taste for novelty. Free-market fundamentalists respond to such
discontents with thinly veiled contempt. Those who cannot find work
locally are urged to relocate, those whose talents have become
redundant to “retool.” This is to get things precisely backwards. It
is not human beings who need adapting to the market; it is the market
that needs adapting to human beings. That was the guiding principle of
the early twentieth-century social liberals, whose enlightened efforts
to minimize the insecurities of capitalism have now largely been
jettisoned, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Respect. To respect someone is to indicate, by some formality or
otherwise, that one regards his views and interests as worthy of
consideration, as things not to be ignored or trampled on. Respect
does not imply agreement or liking: one can respect an enemy. It does
not imply any special admiration. But it does imply a certain
recognition or “taking account” of the other’s point of view, an
attitude fundamentally different from that shown towards animals. One
can have great affection for a pet dog, but not respect or
disrespect.^*^

Respect is a necessary condition of other basic goods, friendship in
particular. But it is also a good in itself. Everywhere, slavery—that
is, the complete withdrawal of respect—is regarded as a calamity
second only to or worse than death. Indeed, as has often been said,
slavery is a kind of social death, since the slave, though still human
in the biological sense, has lost the status of a human being. “That
look was not one between two men,” writes Primo Levi, a survivor of
Auschwitz, recalling his cross-examination by a Nazi scientist.^15^
Those exposed regularly to such looks soon come to assimilate their
perspective. Self-respect cannot long survive the withdrawal of
respect.

Respect need not be equal or reciprocal. I can respect someone who
respects me less or not at all. Nonetheless, reciprocal respect is
uniquely satisfying to both parties, for our deepest wish is for the
respect of those whom we ourselves respect. (The adoration of a
sycophant or a mob leads more often to self-contempt than to
self-respect.) In all ages, we find groups of “peers” or “equals”
respecting each other while looking down on everyone else. The
citizenry of ancient Athens was one such group, as was the medieval
nobility. Modern democracy extends the circle of peers to all adults
in a given territory. Whether or not its triumph is guaranteed by
History, as Francis Fukuyama has claimed, it now has the support of
almost all the world, at least on paper. No modern vision of the good
life can be such as to thwart it. This rules out, as we noted in
Chapter 3, values such as mastery and “greatness of soul,” which
cannot in principle be universalized.

Respect has many sources, varying from culture to culture. Strength,
money, land, nobility, education and office have all figured
prominently at one time or another. In modern bourgeois societies, the
two basic sources of respect are civil rights and personal
achievement. Civil rights confer what one might call “formal” respect;
they guarantee their possessor protection against the worst forms of
arbitrary power. But because they are bestowed on all citizens
regardless of their merits, they are powerless to create real respect.
For this, an individual must make something of his life; at the very
least, he must earn an “honest crust.” Rank and title no longer
automatically confer respect. The modern-day duke must prove his worth
by sitting on charitable boards and so forth; otherwise he appears
little better than a parasite.

Equality of formal respect can coexist with inequality of real
respect, but only up to a point. If the gulf grows too gross, formal
equality will come under strain. Suppose (what is not too implausible)
that persistent unemployment were to lead to the division of society
into two hereditary castes, a working majority and a jobless minority.
It would then be all too easy to enshrine this de facto distinction in
law, with differential civil and voting rights. Democracy as we know
it would cease to exist. It is also important for mutual respect that
inequality not exceed certain bounds.^16^ An elite that lives, plays
and learns entirely separately from the general population will feel
no bond of common citizenship with it. A more equal—not a completely
equal—distribution of wealth and income is a requirement of democratic
solidarity.

It is a feature of our approach, in contrast to most recent liberal
discussions, that the requirements of justice are not seen as fixable
in isolation from the good but as flowing from a particular conception
of it. Equality is founded on fraternity, not vice versa. It follows
that there can be no abstract, a priori answer, of the kind attempted
by Rawls, to the question “how much inequality is too much?” One must
look to the effects of inequality on the moral fabric of society, and
on the political system in particular. Where the rich behave with
lawless arrogance, the poor with impotent resentment and politicians
with obeisance to money, inequality has exceeded the mark.

Personality. By personality we mean first of all the ability to
frame and execute a plan of life reflective of one’s tastes,
temperament and conception of the good. This is what Kantians call
autonomy and Aristotelians practical reason. But the term personality
implies something else as well, an element of spontaneity,
individuality and spirit. Many philosophers—Kant himself springs to
mind—have been models of rational self-government yet sadly lacking in
personality.

Why distinguish personality and respect? Are the two concepts not
correlative: respect is paid to personality; personality calls forth
respect? But there is a subtle difference. One can picture a
community—a monastic order, say, or a revolutionary phalanx—where all
property is shared, all affairs open to scrutiny, and all wills bent
on the common good. Members of this community might hold each other in
the highest respect yet would lack personality. Personality implies a
private space, a “room behind the shop” as Montaigne called it, in
which the individual is at liberty to unfurl, to be himself. It
denotes the inward aspect of freedom, that which resists the claims of
public reason and duty.

Personality is pre-eminently a post-medieval, European ideal; it
corresponds roughly to what the French liberal Benjamin Constant
called “modern liberty.” But its appeal is not just local. All
cultures have their holy fools and star-crossed lovers, honored in
verse and song if not in real life. A society devoid of personality,
where individuals accepted their social role without tension or
protest, would scarcely be human. It would be more like a colony of
intelligent social insects, of the sort envisaged in certain
science-fiction films.

There is a tendency in modern liberalism to elevate personality—or
autonomy, as it is usually called—into the ur-good from which all
others derive. Something like this underlies, as we saw, the
reluctance of Rawls, Sen and Nussbaum to discuss final ends. We think
this is a mistake. Autonomy is one good among others, with no special
precedence. (It can, without obvious absurdity, be sacrificed to
love.) Detached from any broader background of ethical concern,
autonomy degenerates into that “liberty of indifference” for which all
things are possible and nothing matters. The modern rhetoric of
“choosing values” is one symptom of this confusion. Properly
understood, choice responds to value. Where it is allowed to
create value, its exercise becomes arbitrary—like firing arrows into
a barn door and drawing targets around them.

Private property is an essential safeguard of personality, for it
allows individuals to live according to their own tastes and ideals,
free from the tyranny of patronage and public opinion. “Stable
fortunes … are an invisible social asset on which every kind of
culture is more or less dependent,” wrote the French economist Marcel
Labordère in a letter to Keynes. “Financial security for one’s
livelihood is a necessary condition for organised leisure and thought.
Organised leisure and thought is a necessary condition of a true, not
purely mechanical, civilisation.”^17^ Note that it is specifically
property, not income, that has this liberating influence. Soviet
apparatchiks, with access to consumables of all sorts but not to
capital, were not free to develop their personalities. Neither are
those Wall Street traders whose huge pay packages vanish immediately
in “necessary” expenses.^*^ Independence is distinct from opulence,
and vastly more important.

This “personalist” defense of property is central to modern Catholic
social teaching, where it forms part of a subtle, two-pronged attack
on both free-market capitalism and state socialism. The foundation was
laid in Pope Leo XIII’s Encyclical of 1891, Rerum Novarum. Every
householder, argues Leo, should possess the means of providing for
himself and his family now and in perpetuity. To be without such means
is to be forced into a degrading dependence on the managers of
capital, be they private individuals or state servants. “The law,
therefore, should favour ownership, and its policy should be to induce
as many as possible of the people to become owners.”^18^ These ideas
were to flow into the “distributionist” movement of early
twentieth-century England, as well as into Christian Democratic
thought in Germany and Italy, as we shall see in the next chapter.

The personalist argument for private property is distinct from the
standard free-market one, and has different implications. For
mainstream economics, property is simply part of the legal
infrastructure of capitalism. Its distribution is not fundamentally a
matter of concern, except insofar as it leads to monopoly pricing. By
contrast, from a personalist point of view, the concentration of
property in a few hands violates its essential function, which is to
provide individuals and families with an independent livelihood.
Property must be broadly distributed, or it cannot do its ethical job.
How such a distribution might be brought about will be a central theme
of the next chapter.

Harmony with Nature. The case for treating harmony with nature as a
basic human good was argued for in the last chapter. But the issue
remains controversial. Martha Nussbaum reports that some of her South
Asian colleagues dismissed the whole idea as “a romantic Green Party
flourish.”^19^ We have encountered a similar reaction from Chinese
friends. There is no denying the proneness of modern Westerners to wax
sentimental over nature, sometimes to the extent of overlooking the
weightier demands of human suffering. Nonetheless, a sense of kinship
with animals, plants and landscapes is hardly a Western peculiarity.
The abundance of nature poetry in Sanskrit, classical Chinese and
other languages around the world is sufficient proof of that.

Harmony with nature has often been understood to favor rural over
urban life. Ever since the days of Babylon and Rome, cities have
appeared as sinks of squalor and vice. But the opposite point of view
has also had its defenders. Socrates found all the wisdom he needed
within the walls of Athens. Marx spoke of the idiocy of rural life.
There is no need for us to enter into this old debate; both sides have
some truth to them. What is new, however, is the sheer scale of the
modern city. An inhabitant of eighteenth-century Paris, then the
largest city in the world, had only to walk thirty minutes to find
himself in farmland. His modern equivalent would have to walk six
hours through crowded traffic. Here is the source of that typically
modern feeling of urban malaise and that yearning, often comic in its
effects, to “get back to nature.” The ill-effects of urban
overcrowding on behavior and mood have been well documented by
psychologists.

Should we abolish the modern city, then? With current population
densities, such a policy would only succeed in transforming the
country into a vast suburb. But we should strive to ensure that
cities are not entirely alienated from their rural surroundings. For
millennia, local food markets served as the main point of contact
between town and country. These are now largely gone, and with them
all sense of place and season. The modern British foodie can tickle
his jaded palate with Japanese tempura, Sichuan chili, Moroccan
couscous and a host of other pickings from the global storehouse, all
equally detached from any context of meaning. Alienation from nature
is just one of the unpriced costs of consumer choice.

Friendship. This is a necessarily inadequate translation of the
ancient Greek philia, a term encompassing all robust, affectionate
relationships. A father, spouse, teacher and workmate might all be
“friends” in our sense of the term. As mentioned above, this might
seem to blur a crucial distinction between family relations, which are
unchosen, and friendships in the strict sense, which are elective. But
examined closely, the distinction is not so clear-cut. All family
relationships have an elective element—beyond a certain point, one has
to work at being a mother or a sister—and all deep non-family
relationships have a binding force, often expressed by the extension
to them of family terms: blood-brother, mother superior and so forth.
Family and other personal relations vary in structure and importance
from culture to culture, but some such relations are clearly essential
to any conceivable version of the good life. “No one would choose to
live without friends,” noted Aristotle, “even if he had the other good
things.”^20^

Why do we speak of “friendship” instead of “community,” a word that
has become horribly popular in recent decades? Our concern has to do
with reification. It is all too easy to talk about the “good of the
community” as though this were something over and above the good of
its constituent members. The term “friendship” is not open to this
kind of abuse. My friendship with Paul is clearly a relation between
me and Paul; it does not float above us, ghost-like, with interests
and rights all of its own. If we could learn to think of communities
in this fashion, as networks of friends, one notorious source of
political oppression would be removed.

Friendship was taken seriously in the ancient world. Aristotle, in his
classic discussion of the subject, distinguishes friendship proper
from utility-friendship (based on a coincidence of interests) and
pleasure-friendship (based on shared amusements). True friendship
exists when each party embraces the other’s good as his own, thereby
bringing into being a new common good. It is a relationship possible
only between people of virtue, who love one another for what they are,
not for what they can offer. Friendship is both personal and
political. It binds together members of a family and, by extension,
citizens of a polis. It is “the greatest good of states and what
best preserves them against revolutions.”^21^ These words sound
strange to modern ears. We are used to thinking of the state as an
alliance of self-interested individuals, and of friendship as a purely
private relationship, of no political significance. But from
Aristotle’s point of view, a state without friendship is no state at
all. A state is not “a mere society … established for the prevention
of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange.” It is “the union of
families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life, by which
we mean a happy and honourable life.”^22^

Writing a hundred and fifty years before Aristotle, on the other side
of the world, Confucius nonetheless shared his belief in the political
importance of personal relationships. “Those who in private life
behave well towards their parents and elder brothers, in public life
seldom show a disposition to resist the authority of their
superiors.”^23^ But the resemblance is superficial only. Confucius’
focus is on deference to authority, not participation in shared goods.
And whereas Aristotle subsumes the family under the broader heading of
philia, the Chinese philosopher singles it out for special
commendation. “Surely proper behaviour towards parents and elder
brothers is the trunk of Goodness?”^24^ These differences of attitude
are still visible today. Western children often grow up to view their
parents as “friends” in the narrow sense, whereas in China the
relationship remains one of mutual love and sacrifice throughout life.

Friendship is not primarily an economic good, but it has economic
prerequisites. Social trust does not flourish in times of famine. And
an economy marked by continual restructuring, downsizing and
outsourcing will not be hospitable to deep, long-lasting
relationships. “You need to rid your life of Leeches and replace them
with Energizers,” writes American lifestyle coach Robert Pagliarini, a
message reiterated in countless self-help books and websites.^25^ In
Aristotelian terms, friends acquired with the specific aim of
“energizing” oneself are not real friends at all, but utility friends.
Still, they are a predictable feature of a culture that prizes
autonomy and mobility above almost all else.

Leisure. In contemporary parlance, leisure is synonymous with
relaxation and rest. But there is another, older conception of
leisure, according to which it is not just time off work but a special
form of activity in its own right. Leisure in this sense is that
which we do for its own sake, not as a means to something else. The
philosopher Leo Strauss wrote of his friend Kurt Riezler that “the
activity of his mind had the character of noble and serious employment
of leisure, not of harried labor.”^26^ It is in this sense that we
wish “leisure” to be understood.

Leisure in our sense has no very close connection to leisure as it
is generally understood. Paid work could be leisure in our sense if
undertaken not primarily as a means to money but for its own sake.
(Many writers would carry on writing even if they earned nothing for
it, or could earn more doing something else.) Conversely, many
“leisure activities” are not leisure in our sense, either because they
are undertaken instrumentally—playing squash to lose weight, for
instance—or because they are too passive to count as action at all.
(Watching television and getting drunk are actions only in the
minimal sense that everything we do is an action. They lack the
spontaneity and skill characteristic of action in the full sense, and
are therefore best viewed as “rest” rather than leisure.) Leisure in
our sense is distinguished not by lack of seriousness or strenuousness
but by absence of external compulsion. It thus comes close to what
Marx called non-alienated labor, which he defined as “a free
manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of life.”^27^

The importance of leisure has been recognized by civilizations across
the world. The three great Abrahamic religions all set aside a weekly
Sabbath or day of rest, though this is not quite leisure in our sense,
being primarily for the purpose of worship, not free activity.^28^
Aristotle came closer in his distinction between the “liberal” and
“mechanical” arts, the former being those suitable to freemen, the
later to workmen and slaves (“We call those arts mechanical which tend
to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb
and degrade the mind”).^29^ But it was in Edo Japan that the
cultivation of leisure was taken furthest. Deprived by centuries of
peace of its traditional occupations, the feudal aristocracy turned
instead to the arts of life, transforming everyday activities like
bathing and tea drinking into exquisite ceremonies. The French
philosopher Alexandre Kojève looked to Japan as the first successful
“post-historical” society. We may hope, he wrote, tongue only
partially in cheek, “that the recently begun interaction between Japan
and the Western World will finally lead not to a rebarbarization of
the Japanese but to a ‘Japanization’ of the Westerners.”^30^

Why is leisure a basic good? The reason is clear: a life without
leisure, where everything is done for the sake of something else, is
vain indeed. It is a life spent always in preparation, never in
actual living. Leisure is the wellspring of higher thought and
culture, for it is only when emancipated from the pressure of need
that we really look at the world, ponder it in its distinct
character and outline. (The ancient Greek for leisure, schole, hints
at this connection.) “When we really let our minds rest
contemplatively on a rose in bud, on a child at play, on a divine
mystery, we are rested and quickened as though by a dreamless sleep,”
writes Josef Pieper. “It is in these silent and receptive moments that
the soul of man is sometimes visited by an awareness of what holds the
world together.”^31^ Without leisure, there is no genuine, but only
that “mechanical,” civilization spoken of by Marcel Labordère. The
modern university, with its machinery of “targets” and “outputs,”
embodies this grim spectre.

Such a conception of leisure may seem narrowly highbrow, but that is
not the intention. All recreations involving active, skilled
participation—playing football in the park, making and decorating
one’s own furniture, strumming the guitar with friends—are leisure in
our sense. What matters is not the intellectual level of the activity,
but its character of “purposiveness without purpose.”

What are the economic conditions of leisure? First of all, a reduction
of toil, a category that includes not just paid work but all
necessary activity, including commuting and housework, and excludes
paid work undertaken primarily for its own sake, such as that of the
devoted writer or artisan. Where toil occupies so great a portion of
one’s day as to leave time only for sleep and rest, leisure is
impossible. But a mere reduction of toil is not sufficient for leisure
in our sense, as the figure of Keynes’s bored housewife suggests. To
live “wisely and agreeably and well” requires not just time but
application and taste. It is ironic, if unsurprising, that the old
arts of life—conversation, dancing, music-making—are atrophying just
when we have most need of them. An economy geared to maximizing
marketable output will tend to produce manufactured rather than
spontaneous forms of leisure.

If the first goal of the individual is to realize the good life for
himself, the first duty of the state is to realize, insofar as lies
within its power, the good life for all citizens. (This principle of
justice is founded on the good of mutual respect, as discussed above.)
The qualification “insofar as lies within its power” is important.
Health and friendship lie largely in the lap of fate. Personality,
respect and leisure depend partly on individual agency. Still, the
state has an important and legitimate role in creating the material
conditions under which these and other goods can flourish. Such
conditions include not just a certain overall level of national wealth
but its just distribution, its wise public expenditure and much more
besides. The rest lies in the hands of individuals and civil
institutions. To adapt a phrase of Keynes, the state is the trustee
not of civilization but of the possibility of civilization.