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The Pursuit of Laziness : An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment /

We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry--not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines moral, political, and econom...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Saint-Amand, Pierre, 1957-
Other Authors: Gage, Jennifer C.
Format: Electronic eBook
Language:Inglés
Indeterminado
Published: Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2011.
Series:Book collections on Project MUSE.
Subjects:
Online Access:Texto completo
Description
Summary:We think of the Enlightenment as an era dominated by ideas of progress, production, and industry--not an era that favored the lax and indolent individual. But was the Enlightenment only about the unceasing improvement of self and society? The Pursuit of Laziness examines moral, political, and economic treatises of the period, and reveals that crucial eighteenth-century texts did find value in idleness and nonproductivity. Fleshing out Enlightenment thinking in the works of Denis Diderot, Joseph Joubert, Pierre de Marivaux, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jean-Simeon Chardin, this book explores idleness in all its guises, and illustrates that laziness existed, not as a vice of the wretched, but as an exemplar of modernity and a resistance to beliefs about virtue and utility.
Physical Description:1 online resource (176 pages): illustrations
ISBN:9781400838714