Work and Leisure

22 A. J. Vealsocial and economic progress – and work. Industrialisation and urbanisation,which began to gather pace in the eighteenth century, brought with them achange in time sense which became an essential prerequisite for the growth ofindustrial capitalism. Along with these changes came long-term increases inmaterial rewards for the masses. Change, however, did not come about automatically:there was some resistance and persistence of existing habits – whatwould today be called ‘industrial inefficiency’. These concepts – progress,time sense, increasing material rewards and resistance – will now be discussedin turn.The idea of progressThe Renaissance was marked by new ideas about human possibilities.Christianity had provided a fixed, unchanging, view of the world andhumankind’s place in it, in which the purpose of human existence, it wasbelieved, was to follow God’s will; ‘improvement’ or ‘progress’ was not asocial task but a moral journey for the individual. In medieval Europeansociety, ‘The aim of work was not economic progress’ (Le Goff 1988: 222).Renaissance thinking, by contrast, saw progress as being possible for thewider human society here on earth. Philosophy, art, architecture andengineering flourished; labour aimed at improvement of human conditionson earth was celebrated. Tilgher summarises the thoughts of the sixteenthcenturyphilosopher Giordano Bruno:Bruno exalts the human age of toil in which man, driven by hunger,creates day after day still more wonderful arts and inventions, draws everfurther away from the animal, nearer to the divine – makes for himself asecond and higher nature of which he is the true god.(Tilgher 1977: 75)But while Renaissance humanist thinking and Protestantism may have laidthe moral foundations of capitalism, it is clear that they did not succeed inimmediately transforming the work culture of the masses which, as discussed,was based on the rhythms of agricultural and pre-capitalist urban life. Muchof the history of industrialisation, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuryEurope and North America, is the history of efforts to develop workers witha non-industrial work culture into a disciplined industrial workforce capableof realising the modern secular dream.Time senseHistorical changes in time sense were analysed by E. P. Thompson in his wellknown1967 essay. He noted that, some time before the industrial revolution,the appearance of clocks began to change people’s sense of time from the