Untitled

354 leisure
trol of mining, forestry, inshore and freshwater
fishing, land and water use. Finally, pollution
protection applies to all media of pollution ± water,
air and noise ± dangerous substances and special
areas �for example, ship-borne oil pollution in
coastal waters). All such legislation has directly and
indirectly influenced the growth and development
of tourism almost worldwide.
See also: codes of ethics, environmental;
environment; environmental auditing;
environmental management systems;
environmental compatibility; impact assessment,
environmental; precautionary principle; planning,
environmental;
leisure
DUNCAN HARTSHORNE, AUSTRALIA
Leisure, along with happiness and wisdom, were
according to Aristotle the goals of human life. Of
these, leisure was the most fundamental in that it
was a prerequisite to the other two. In this view,
leisure is not merely the perceived freedom of not
having to be busy, but the state of `truly
disinterested interest, the achievement of understanding'
�Craven 1937: 402). It is worth noting
that this lofty state was maintained both by the
refinement of the mind and by a large slave class, to
whom leisure was only a rumour.
Classical Rome superseded classical Greece
chronologically; whether their view of leisure
supersedes that of the Greeks is moot. For the
Romans, leisure was time off work. Properly
managed, it renewed people for work and war. In
the late stages of the Roman Empire, the filling of
leisure with entertainment and spectacle to prevent
boredom �and possible civil unrest) was one of the
challenges that faced government. These two
views of leisure, the Greek with an emphasis on the
mind and quality of life and an undercurrent of
elitism, and the Roman with an emphasis on rest
and entertainment and an undercurrent of social
control, characterise the two dominant views of
leisure through much of history.
Through the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church
viewed work as the necessary atonement for
original sin. The one day of leisure that God
created ± the Sabbath �a religious tradition created
by Judaism) ± was viewed more as rest for future
work rather than rest from past work. With the
Protestant revolution, rebellious theologians rejected
many Catholic traditions but kept and
reinforced the notion that the only value of leisure
was for rest and worship of a God that expected
and rewarded hard work.
The work ethic, founded in fundamentalist
Christian values, proved to be a useful social tool
to help advance the Industrial Revolution. The
social costs of the Industrial Revolution, including
radical changes in social structures, transformation
of family organisation and values, poverty, illness
and injury, and the destruction of rural environments,
created a setting in which nineteenthcentury
reformers such as Robert Owen and John
Stuart Mill became active. While these early
reformers were more interested in broad political
and social issues, later authors began to address
leisure specifically. These included Paul Lafargue
�La droite B la paresse or The Right to Be Lazy) and
Thorstein Veblen �The Theory of the Leisure Class).
Throughout this period, leisure was viewed as
synonymous with free time.
In the 1920s, scholars began to explore the role
of leisure in creating one's identity and in
socialising individuals. One of the more important
works to address leisure during the first half of the
twentieth century was that of Riesman �1950). He
argued that there had been only two major social
revolutions in the West in the last 500 years. The
first was the Renaissance, in which the force of
tradition was overthrown by a new respect for one's
own conscience and intellect. The second, following
the Second World War, replaced the emphasis
on self by concern for comparing oneself to others.
This was especially manifested in terms of the rise
in consumerism and a concern about nonhereditary
social status, both of which are most
clearly seen in leisure contexts.
Sociological inquiries into the nature of leisure
broadened dramatically from the 1960s onward.
From the role of leisure in creating a social identity,
researchers explored the relationship between
leisure and family, leisure and work, leisure and
community, and leisure and culture. Dumazdier
�1968) was one of the leading sociologists who
addressed the nature of leisure during the 1960s