Modern Hebrew literature has been driven by a call to productivity from its inception. Zionist history was born out of a break with its traditional and religious past, a historical transformation that coincided with the birth and perseverance of the productive Jew. However, even well into twentieth and twenty-first-century Hebrew literature, these tensions remain active. They illuminate not only the ways in which capitalization and secularization are ongoing processes but also latent yet available possibilities of resistance to the demands of productivity. The chapter focuses on the figure of the Shabbat and other forms of inoperativity and nonwork inherent within it in the poetry of Zelda Schneurson. It offers a reading of Zelda’s poetry from a materialist and political-theological perspective to locate her poetry and her depictions of nonwork within the intertwined histories of Zionism, secularism, and capitalism.

This chapter examines the vocational odyssey of the most famous humanist of the Italian Renaissance, Leon Battista Alberti, as he struggled to pursue a literary and creative life against the background (and sometimes obstacles) of his merchant natal family. It analyzes how he dealt with his vocational decision and aspirations in a variety of genres: a comedy (Philodoxus), dinner pieces (Intercenales), a treatise on the practical and moral features of learned professions (De commodis litterarum atque incommodis); consolatory and psychological dialogues (Teogenio, Della tranquillità dell’animo); his celebrated dialogue on the family (Della famiglia), in which he simulates paternal advice from his father and various surrogate fathers from within the family; and a treatise on vocational advice to the young (De iciarchia).

In the seventeenth century the Renaissance and Reformation inspired worldly ambitions and self-fashioning among Europeans. New opportunities, such as commercialization and exploration, along with new pressures such as mounting poverty and vagrancy in England, threatened communities and traditions. English adventurers sought their fortunes in Virginia and New England, but their loyalties to traditional duties to God and community varied widely. The lives, worries, and circumstances of Captain John Smith, explorer and self-promoter, and Robert Keayne, a prosperous Boston merchant, illustrate emerging ways of thinking about self-made fates among these colonists. Both pursued their worldly ambitions through incessant work, and they participated in an early stage of shaping the criteria by which Americans would judge successes and failures. They also expressed strong beliefs about fostering communities and working for them while they pursued their own ambitions. At the same time, and like their peers, they guarded the boundaries of inclusion in those communities, defining narrowly who could belong, who merited respect, and whose exploitation and destruction they felt was justified.

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.