Leisure in America: A Social Inquiry by Max Kaplan

In the current debate over mass culture, perhaps no issue is more crucial than the presumed relationships between kinds of leisure and the quality of life in contemporary America. For America is taken to be the archtype of a mass culture, and the visible results of the first widespread democratization of leisure in human history have, not surprisingly, attracted the attention of social scientists and humanists alike.

Dr. Kaplan, who describes himself as a "humanist-social scientist," professes "a greater respect for the masses than is currently shown by the younger crop of social scientists, who (in my own opinion) have unwittingly been defending the values of a departed aristocracy and a feudal way of life." In his judgment, we have "no way of telling whether our nation is happier now than it was a century ago, and the decision cannot be made by editorials." On the other hand, he believes that "we have incontrovertible evidence that the people of our time have access to a wide variety of things, kinds of persons, ways of thought, and styles of life."

It is possible, Dr. Kaplan believes, that leisure may "prove to be a source of human identity and personal values which in former days were obtained from work and religion." This possibility rests largely on our ability to conceive "creative values" in a way that encompasses more than the arts, for "every person, in all ages, from all backgrounds, can set himself a challenge, a possibility of growth, by direct participation in creative values or as consumer and distributor of such values." The criterion seems to be the kind of rational choice that opens up an individual's intelligence and sensibility to a wider range and depth of experiences. Thus, "we may note a folk wisdom and an intellectual-educational tradition that holds that a nation with 50 million happy gamblers is not as desirable as one with 50 million Jims creating works of art."

Yet it is at least possible to argue that skillfully autonomous poker players are more "creative" than grimly therapeutic finger painters. In fact, the tension that exists in the cults of creative expression between competence and therapy is an ambiguity unresolved in Dr. Kaplan's analysis. At one point he argues that "we had better unlearn the professional's judgment of effort by the criteria of excellence that stems from a long tradition"; yet at another, he affirms: "The quality of creativity, broadly conceived, remains the paramount issue."

It would appear that his ideal for "building constructive leisure" is implicitly based on his own experiences with the Community Arts project at Champaign-Urbana where he asked: "Is there not, among all this effort, some real degree of aesthetic seeking, artistic growth, meaningful new interrelation of persons?" These are interesting and, for some kinds of people, important, leisure innovations; but it is often difficult to see the connections between such lively anecdotes and case studies and the general analysis of leisure attempted in this book.

The volume's twenty-two chapters are divided into five sections of unequal length: "Data, Methods and Issues of Leisure"some useful tables and definitions of leisure as a social relationship; "Relations and Variables in Leisure"-the variables of work, personality, family, social class, subcultures, community, the state, religion, and value systems; "Types and Meanings of Leisure"-sociability, association, games and sports, art, movement and immobility; "Processes of Leisure"-theory of social control, social roles, structure, and the modification of leisure experience; and a final chapter on creative values and prospects in the new leisure.

For a humanist with both respect and curiosity for the social sciences, there were several characteristics of the author's style that tended to inhibit assent: unseemly name-calling aimed at other traditions of social science-for example, the "imperialistic empiricists"; gratuitous methodologizing; painful neologisms-"vicinal proximity" for nearness; pretentious capitalizing"Nucleo-Hydro-Technico-Sputnico Age"; a tendency to substitute italics for evidence on important points; and a certain lack of integration between loosely strung summaries, lists of data, and barrages of rhetorical questions. In spite of these weaknesses, however, the book is valuable for the number of significant questions it raises about the ambiguities of the new leisure.

PATRICK D. HAZARD
Annenberg School of Communication
University of Pennsylvania