{"product_id":"9781681376820","title":"The Right to Be Lazy: And Other Writings","description":"\u003cb\u003eNow in a new translation, a classic nineteenth-century defense for the cause of idleness by a revolutionary writer and activist (and Karl Marx's son-in law) that reshaped European ideas of labor and production.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eExuberant, provocative, and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880, Paul Lafargue’s \u003ci\u003eThe Right to Be Lazy\u003c\/i\u003e is a call for the workers of the world to unite—and stop working so much! Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law (about whom Marx once said, “If he is a Marxist, then I am clearly not”) wrote his pamphlet on the virtues of laziness while in prison for giving a socialist speech. At once a timely argument for a three-hour workday and a classical defense of leisure, \u003ci\u003eThe Right to Be Lazy\u003c\/i\u003e shifted the course of European thought, going through seventeen editions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes’s ideas about overproduction. Published here with a selection of Lafargue’s other writings—including an essay on Victor Hugo and a memoir of Marx—\u003ci\u003eThe Right to Be Lazy\u003c\/i\u003e reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a “strange madness” consuming human lives.","brand":"New York Review Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":42435598155837,"sku":"9781681376820","price":15.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0603\/0838\/9949\/files\/9781681376820_p0.jpg?v=1771583323","url":"https:\/\/www.tatteredcover.com\/products\/9781681376820","provider":"Tattered Cover","version":"1.0","type":"link"}