Critical leisure as an alternative politics of prosperity: a political economy approach to the good life

By most accounts in popular press and in academic journals, we are in crisis. Regardless of the geographical scale in question, there are pressing social crises concerning soaring rates of wealth inequality, racial injustices, institutional corruption, educational inequities, displacement of Indigenous peoples, social isolation, and political instability, to name a few examples. Further, by nearly any sober account, we are in the midst of an ecological crisis as well. While climate change is the overarching behemoth that encompasses most of these concerns, there are more specific worries associated with species loss, desertification, overfishing, topsoil despoliation, paradoxical drought and flooding, agricultural monocultures, ocean acidification, and many others. Most assessments are that we have passed a ‘point of no return’ in our warming climate, as we have already exceeded many of the supposed tipping points (polar sea ice loss, melting of Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, tundra methane release, etc.), accelerating a disastrous feedback loop. In short, assessing our social and environmental world often paints a grim picture. What, then, are we to do? The weight of these contemporary social and environmental concerns are so totalizing that they regularly feel overwhelming, if not paralyzing (Robbins and Moore 2013). We see them, we consider them, and often, we move on, hoping that others undertake the significant work to address them. Because, after all, these problems are just too much to take on. This collective feeling of anxiety and inadequacy in the face of insurmountable problems seems to have gripped our contemporary culture (Remes et al. 2016), and an unevenly experienced global pandemic has only worsened this condition (Salari et al. 2020). In this essay, I make the case that a critical political economy approach can address not only the crises at hand, but also these feelings of inadequacy, paralysis, and complacency that all too often accompany the facing of crises. A critical political economy approach places the structure of the economy and sets of power-laden relationships as primary drivers of these socioenvironmental phenomena that mark our crises. I address these pressing, materialist concerns through a critical philosophy of leisure, of all things. I make that case that our neoliberal political economy masks and obfuscates the social and environmental exploitation at the heart of capitalism, a system that has an explicit goal to ‘rob us of our capacity to recognize that we are in crisis’ (Stewart 2021, 263). Understanding leisure, and a recentering and perhaps a reconceptualization of the good life, is one necessary and materialist confrontation that we can and should make.