This chapter considers the meanings of human labor in the work of three Bloomsbury writers: John Maynard Keynes, Bertrand Russell, and Virginia Woolf. The psychological and social potential of “idleness” is discussed with reference to Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of Peace and his “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” in which he argues that in future, society will see a radical reduction in working hours. Russell’s essay “In Praise of Idleness” is also analyzed in relation to his argument that “modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all.” These positions are contrasted with Woolf’s explorations of the increasing access of women to professional work. Woolf’s focus is not on the liberatory potential of “idleness” but rather on the continuing barriers to productive work faced by women in the period. The chapter concludes that while for Keynes and Russell “idleness” offered an opportunity to live a more meaningful and free life, for Woolf the recent entry of women to the professions offered important new opportunities for individual agency and financial autonomy through work.

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.

Chapter 3 examines post-1873 depression-era Ottoman novels and plays that articulate a language of difference by juxtaposing the success of industrious heroes against the failure of consumerist dandy anti-heroes. The representation of industrious and dandy characters in fin-de-siècle Istanbul shows the interconnectedness and interdependence between novels and the discourses and practices of productivity, in sharing the same new moral universe. Differing from the normative and distant language of the morality authors, or the authoritative and punitive language of the bureaucratic reforms explored in Chapters 1 and 2, the playful voices of novelists displayed dynamic and at times ambivalent representations of the idle and dandy, as an alternate, yet socially undesirable form of self-fashioning. By pitting a hardworking and upwardly mobile hero against the dandy anti-hero, novels thematized the period’s concern with valuing work as a constitutive element of character and nation-building, and also drew boundaries that defined who was and was not included in the nation. As a forum in which citizenship was debated, fiction established difference using ridicule, marginalization, and even criminalization as a social intervention.