In this, Lafargue is toying with a question central to Aristotle’s Ethics: which activity is most humanizing (or dehumanizing)—work or leisure? He reminds us that Aristotle looks down on work because per se it does not nourish our higher faculties. (Hannah Arendt echoes this point in her chapters on work and labor in The Human Condition.) It is leisure, or at least Aristotle’s understanding of leisure as a mode of philosophizing, that actually valorizes human beings as such. But work, as practiced by Lafargue’s contemporaries, is eroding just this philosophical humanism, becoming an automatic reflex, a conspiracy, a sinister ploy to kill off introspection. Here Lafargue is not far from Schopenhauer’s discussion of leisure in The World as Will and Representation. Free time, Schopenhauer contends, actually terrifies us. This might explain why so many people secretly hate Sundays, a day of forced rest that fills us with horror vacui. We do not know what to do with ourselves when we do not work. Lafargue, by implication, disdains such anxieties. He scowls at Hugo’s romantic charlatanism, at Paul de Kock’s grotesque naïveté—both have “chanted the nauseous hymns in honor of the God Progress, the eldest son of Work”6—and provides laundry lists of work-related abuses. He compares modern ateliers to “consummate penitentiaries where the working class is incarcerated, where men ... women ... and children are condemned to forced labor for 12 to 14 hours.”7 The Droits de l’homme are a mere farce; they have been “cooked up by those lawyer-metaphysicians of the bourgeois revolution.”8 Lafargue perceived the theorists of human rights as utopian philosophes blinded by self-righteous abstractions. While they claimed to free and humanize the individual, they were unknowingly concocting a different servitude, a new opiate—the work ethic. Imparted as a privilege, not as a means for survival, the freedom to work was about to become an insidious form of social pressure. There is no question, however, that Lafargue blinded himself to the consequences of his own argument. He assumed that inactivity would be used for self-improvement, forgetting that the workers he defended against exploitation were unlikely to spend their moments of leisure reflecting upon Plato’s ideal of the examined life. It is too bad that Lafargue did not write a twin essay on the equally nefarious side effects of inactivity.