{"product_id":"9781400838714","title":"The Pursuit of Laziness: An Idle Interpretation of the Enlightenment","description":"\u003cp\u003eWe 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? \u003ci\u003eThe Pursuit of Laziness\u003c\/i\u003e 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-Siméon 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e Whether in the dawdlings of Marivaux's journalist who delayed and procrastinated or in the subjects of Chardin's paintings who delighted in suspended, playful time, Pierre Saint-Amand shows how eighteenth-century works provided a strong argument for laziness. Rousseau abandoned his previous defense of labor to pursue reverie and botanical walks, Diderot emphasized a parasitic strategy of resisting work in order to liberate time, and Joubert's little-known posthumous Notebooks radically opposed the central philosophy of the Enlightenment in a quest to infinitely postpone work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e Unsettling the stubborn view of the eighteenth century as an age of frenetic industriousness and labor, \u003ci\u003eThe Pursuit of Laziness\u003c\/i\u003e plumbs the texts and images of the time and uncovers deliberate yearnings for slowness and recreation.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Princeton University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47137795637488,"sku":"9781400838714","price":45.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781400838714_p0.jpg?v=1763712493","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781400838714","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}