Chapter Libero, liberato, liberatorio liberticida. I mutamenti del leisure time tra modernità e postmodernità

Abstract

Leisure can be defined as a condition in which one finds oneself when engaged in activities that one has chosen to perform in the absence of compulsion, for one's own pleasure, and, most often, but not necessarily, perceived as distinct from what is commonly regarded as its opposite, i.e., work, daily commitments, etc. As much as it is a dimension of daily life that is sometimes less clearly distinguishable from work commitments - the tendency for mixing and indistinction between the two dimensions is a figure of the way in which work is organized in contemporary society - it is clear that free time is also a time that constitutes a resource and, like all other resources, continues to be unequally distributed. To understand the evolution of leisure as a dimension of daily life and the meanings it has taken on since industrialization we will use four different meanings.