Fixated with profits and productivity, our culture has long glorified work and condemned laziness. The lazy are roundly critiqued as unfulfilled and ineffective, but have we got this the wrong way round? Matthew Qvortrup looks to the history of philosophy to argue that there is perhaps something to be said for idlers and idleness. 

Laziness is anathema to our work-obsessed civilisation. Over the centuries, thinkers have denounced idleness and celebrated industry. Solon, the founder of Athenian democracy, is said to have condemned “laziness [as] the mother of all evil”. The philosopher-bishop, George Berkeley, proclaimed that ‘the Lord conceal[s] Himself from the eyes of… the lazy’. And, the sociologist, Max Weber, famously attributed the success of capitalism to the legendary “Protestant work ethic”.

Yet, some of us – grudging the return to the office after the winter break – might wonder whether laziness is really so bad, and work so good. Is it not possible that maybe, just maybe, there is something to be said for idles, idleness, laziness, or whatever you want to call it? Despairing workers, still hungover from New Year celebrations, might take some solace from the history of philosophy; as, in tandem with the tradition of industriousness set out above, there has existed an alternative school of thinkers, who have written in celebration of laziness.