Histories of Leisure (review)

Appropriately, Rudy Koshar introduces this collection of new scholarship on leisure in modern western European history with a nod to Theodore Adorno’s critique of popular amusements as “after-images of the work process.” Adorno’s perspective surely has dominated historical analyses of leisure—as manipulations of capital, reproductions of class conflict, and compensations for alienated labor. With the decline of Marxist perspectives since the late 80s, the historical study of leisure has lacked a trajectory. Part of the goal of Koshar’s collection and his book series for Berg, “Leisure, Consumption, and Culture,” is to find fresh approaches to the culture of free time. Despite the continuation of narrow research models and the perhaps excessive influence of a few French cultural sociologists revealed in many of these essays, this is a good start.

Although admitting that he has left aside the political economic questions of access and control of leisure, Koshar presents a laudably eclectic collection loosely grouped around “Seeing,” “Traveling,” and “Consuming.” Some essays replace Marxist economic categories with the cultural notion of “modernity.” Nick Prior finds that state museums were organized to promote both “elitism and populist democratic pedagogy,” (p. 27) legitimizing emerging elites who adopted the arts of the aristocracy and set themselves apart from traditionalist carnivalesque popular culture. Yet the museum was also the carrier of modern secular and national values, designed to uplift and integrate if only to make the “technologies of power” effective. (p. 38) Marius Kwint’s makes a similar Foucualtian point in his well-informed study of the late 18th-century English circus, revealing it to be a reformation of carnival within the modern context of the commercial impresario and uplifting displays of human dominance over and care of animals. Ester Leslie takes a familiar path in her literary analysis of the flâneur, the observer of the changing everyday life of the new city, who sought not nostalgia, but people coping with a world of constant change. Rounding out these diverse meanings of modern “seeing” is Erik Jensen’s treatment of boxing crowds in Weimar Germany. Jensen finds a “rationalization” of a violent sport (enhanced by the appearance of genteel and fashionable women in the crowd).

In a series of essays on travel in the 19th and early 20th centuries, we find that the reading of leisure through the prism of economic class has hardly disappeared. Jan Palmowski offers a well-documented study of middle-class Britons’ cross-channel travel and use of the Baedeker guidebooks. Christopher Thompson follows with a class analysis of Belle Epoque French bicycling. Elite cyclists held the working class professional racer in contempt and cross-class “republican” cycling clubs never succeeded in erasing different perceptions of the sport. Patrick Young’s review of the Touring Club of France and Stephen Harp’s study of the Michelin Red guides make similar points about the coincidence of French regional consciousness, upper-class (male) values, and commercial tourism. Pieter Judson reinforces this theme, though with less emphasis on class, in his analysis of Austrian promotion of national consciousness and commercial tourism in country villages and towns. Although all are well-researched, the narrow (and similar) historical and regional range of these studies does not showcase fully the possibilities of travel history. The one exception is Rudy Koshar’s own essay on interwar German auto tourism. He justly laments the tight focus on Nazi policy rather than the long term implications of automobility and the meaning of the car for daily life. In Nazi Germany the car was a symbol of modernity and power but it also represented the state’s acquiescence to popular wishes.

The last third (grouped around “Consumption”) offers diverse perspectives. Robert Goodrich returns to the class theme in his study of the meanings of alcohol use among German Catholic workers in the 1880s. Rejecting economic explanations, Goodrich roots the communal drinking culture in Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus of the laborers, which the clergy were obliged to tolerate even as temperance sentiment emerged...