Bertrand Russell’s essay In Praise of Idleness was first published in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, a period of global economic crisis. It might seem distasteful to promote the virtues of idleness at such a time, when unemployment was rising to a third of the working population in some parts of the world. For Russell, however, the economic chaos of the time was itself the result of a set of deep-rooted and mistaken attitudes about work. Indeed, he claims that many of our ideas about work are little more than superstitions, which should be swept away with rigorous thinking. Russell distinguishes between two kinds of workers: labourers and supervisors. To these, he adds a third group of non-workers – the leisured landowners who depend on other people’s labour to support their own idleness. According to Russell, history is littered with examples of people working hard all their lives and being allowed to keep just enough for themselves and their families to survive, while any surplus they produce is appropriated by warriors, priests and the leisured ruling classes. And it is always these beneficiaries of the system, says Russell, who are heard praising the virtues of ‘honest toil’, giving a moral mask to a system that is manifestly unjust. And this fact alone should prompt us to re-evaluate the ethics of work.