“Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure,” quoth Benjamin Franklin, in a much-loved proverb. The main argument of Stephen Rosenberg's dense study of the relationship between work and leisure is that consumption has supplanted leisure as the main motivation for wage labor. This is not a new thesis, but the equipment Rosenberg uses to build it is notable. To begin with, it overturns the famous Marxian proposition that once the necessities of subsistence have been fulfilled, “the realm of freedom,” in which “the free and full development of the individual” is supported, will happily come to pass. This now looks like old hat. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, organized labor successfully campaigned to reduce the working week and transform earned leisure into a citizenship right. Since the interwar years the unfaltering trend has been for workers to replace the old organized labor goal of shortening the working week with the aim of increasing real wages. Faced with the choice of accumulating revenue for consumption or having more time off, workers have chosen to work longer.

Classical sociology was well aware of this paradox. Max Weber famously explains the work ethic in Western society as the reflection of religion. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), he argues that people work hard and, by implication, ration their leisure in order to demonstrate their salvationist credentials. Why would God reward hard-working men and women in this life if he did not intend them to enjoy a higher reward in the life to come? Rosenberg is an unreconstructed materialist. He gives short shrift to the thesis that there is anything spiritual or religious about the will to work. Instead, he deploys an arrangement of resources drawn from social theory combined with evidence from history and economic data to develop a theory of mass consumption as “wage-labor commensuration.” According to this, since the 1920s the preference to trade the prospect of the leisure dividend with the pursuit of the wage-labor increment (to finance a greater propensity to consume) is the hallmark of work-leisure relations. Rosenberg is nothing less than heroic in assembling an enormous range of the theoretical and empirical date to make the case. His book is not a little exhausting. Nor is it absented from the weaknesses of repetition. Rather than leave the case to stand alone, he moves from one vantage point of verification only to move to another that effectively makes the same point. The book does not have a light touch.

This is a shame, for Rosenberg's take on consumption is original and can be concisely stated. To my way of thinking, it is more compelling than the Frankfurt School position that equates mass consumption with conformity, pseudo-individualism, and distraction. Rosenberg delineates the mass preference to consume to be a matter of rational choice rather than corporate manipulation and blind obedience. His case rests upon three corroborated points of empirical evidence. Since the 1920s, people in Western society have not consumed in any contingent or quixotic sense. Rather, they have consumed reflexively and with purpose. The objects that they have coveted are durable: transport, houses, and appliances. Wherever possible, most citizens have elected to dispense with renting in favor of owning freehold; seeing the world through travel rather than staying in their own backyard; and cutting back on the chores of life by investing in automated domestic devices for cooking, cleaning, mowing, heating, and the other necessities of life. Workers have decided that if the wage return for labor is commensurate with work output, they will allocate their time to more paid work. This is very different from being addicted to a work ethic. Rosenberg's wage-labor commensuration thesis makes it clear that all other things being equal, paid labor will be invested only in work tasks that are perceived as giving a fair, or worthwhile, financial rate of return. This has major implications for the question of the transformation of the work-leisure relationship. If the innovations in artificial intelligence that are predicted in the next decade come to pass, it will lead to a major contraction in the demand for labor. Workers will face either retraining or spending more of their working lives in leisure. Any statuary shifting of the balance in the relationship toward more leisure is likely to be widely perceived as objectively unfair. For it will be seen that the leisure dividend has not been commensurately earned by the investment of wage labor. If the state rules that everyone should be given a three-day workweek, dissent may be expected from those workers who perceive their labor input to be more objectively appreciable than others.

The social ills of the wage-labor commensuration thesis do not stop there. Allocating more time to paid labor that is perceived as distributed at a fair financial rate cuts down on the development of personal interests that might be expected to contribute to a more balanced, healthy personality. If leisure is consumed on a snack regime, it is unlikely to rise above the level of bread and circuses. There is also the risk to health and well-being that follows from making commensurate wage labor a prime want of adult life. Labor becomes consumed by work, so that the fruits of paid employment lose their compensatory value. Austerity programs in welfare and pensions hardly support the value of a life of leisure. It is remarkable that Western society has deregulated the retirement age without so much as a real peep from the citizenry. Presumably, the logic to expand working life is an extension of wage-labor commensuration thinking. Namely, it is rational for older citizens to work longer since they cannot rely upon the state to look after them in an acceptable way in their old age. This prompts me to venture that Rosenberg might have usefully changed the title of his book; given the social and economic forces that he so successfully elucidates, it should be called not “Time for Things” but “Work without End.”