Gustavo Martínez

Most people spend much of their lives working simply to survive, while time free from work continues to diminish, leaving little control over how it is used. If this time were greater and legally guaranteed, it could be devoted to health, rest, hobbies, relationships, art, learning, sports, play, and participation in cultural life, allowing life to be preserved and enjoyed more fully. This article argues that leisure and the right to it should be considered central components of well-being. To support this claim, we first clarify the concepts of leisure and well-being. We then briefly examine Derek Parfit's three main characterized theories of well-being —hedonism, desire satisfaction, and the objective list—and ultimately relate leisure to the latter. On this basis, we present arguments for recognizing the right to leisure as a necessary condition for well-being and human flourishing.

The emergence and development of what could be called Critical Theory in Mexico is closely linked to the reception and development of Marx’s works in this country, especially the phase that transpired in a social and political horizon marked by events like the 20th Congress of the CPSU (1956) with its increasingly broad and systematic criticism of Stalinism, the beginning of the Sino-Soviet conflict, anti-colonial movements in the Third World (the Algerian war, for example), the Cuban Revolution, the Vietnam War, the student movements of the 1960s in Europe, the United States, and Latin America, and the far-reaching popular movements in the Southern Cone of this continent with the authoritarian excesses that violently deactivated so many of them. It was in that context that the reflections of most of the authors (not only Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, José Revueltas, and Enrique Gonzalez Rojo, but also Enrique Dussel and Bolívar Echeverría) who are at the center of the reflections in this text, emerged.

Today, Critical Theory is no longer tied to a specific place in the world. Rather, genuine developments of Critical Theories can be observed in many academic contexts around the world. The contributions collected in this book show that the various projects of Critical Theory have not always and not exclusively emerged from the reception of the so-called Frankfurt School, but that the successful global expansion of capitalist modernity has triggered developments of Critical Theories in many parts of the world as an appropriate academic and intellectual endeavor of critique. Whether or not the tradition of the Frankfurt School is followed, Critical Theories are always about an undogmatic reading of Marxist theory, the critique of global capitalist modernity, the question of how this critique should be normatively grounded and how different academic disciplines should complement each other in a common endeavor of critical social and cultural research. The book provides an overview of debates and variants of critical theories in selected countries.

El presente artículo tiene por intención principal dilucidar las distinciones y relaciones conceptuales que existen entre labor, trabajo y ocio, en el pensamiento de Hannah Arendt y Walter Benjamin, a modo de esclarecer cómo los posicionamientos de ambos autores contribuyen a la crítica de la concepción del trabajo moderno. Para ello, será necesario exponer los matices conceptuales de la obra de Arendt, a saber, la distinción entre trabajo y labor, con el fin de trazar las diferencias y puntos de encuentro con las reflexiones de Benjamin en torno a los cambios traídos como consecuencia del auge del capitalismo industrial y en la experiencia del ocio. Entre estos matices, esclarecimientos y contrastes, es preciso no solo destacar la importancia de la relación e influencia de ambos autores, sino su vigencia en las problemáticas sociales contemporáneas al respecto.