The nineteenth-century rationalization of leisure time and the related boom of amusement parks, cinemas, and other mass-cultural sites of leisure activities are directly related to the contemporary rationalization of labor time. Time spent away from work had the double benefit of pleasing social reformers and scientific managers who promoted leisure as part of a productive system of work, rest, and play.

Audrey Anable, from Time: A Vocabulary for the Present, 196

What is at stake here is not the right to idleness but the dream of another kind of work: that is, a gentle movement of the hand, slowly following the eyes, on a polished surface. It is also a matter of producing something other than the wrought objects in which the philosophy of the future sees the essence of man-the-producer being realized, at the price of losing some time in the ownership of capital.

Rancière, Proletarian Nights