Author: Benjamin Hunnicutt An extraordinarily informative scholarly history of the debate over working hours from 1920 to 1940. aNew York Times Book Review For more than a century preceding the Great Depression, work hours were steadily reduced. Intellectuals, labor leaders, politicians, and workers saw this reduction in work as authentic progress and the resulting increase in leisure time as a cultural advance. Benjamin Hunnicutt examines the period from 1920 to 1940 during which the shorter hour movement ended and the drive for economic expansion through increased work took over. He traces the political, intellectual, and social dialogues that changed the American concept of progress from dreams of more leisure in which to pursue the higher things in life to an obsession with the importance of work and wage-earning. During the 1920s with the development of advertising, the gospel of consumption began to replace the goal of leisure time with a list of things to buy. Business, which increasingly viewed shorter hours as a threat to economic growth, persuaded the worker that more work brought more tangible rewards. The Great Depression shook the newly proclaimed gospel as well as everyoneas faith in progress. Although work-sharing became a temporary solution to the shortage of jobs and massive unemployment, when faced with legislation that would limit the work week to thirty hours, Roosevelt and his New Deal advisors adopted the gospel of consumptionas tests for progress and created more work by government action. The New Deal campaigned for the right to work a full time jobaand won. Work Without End presents a compelling history of the rise and fall of the 40-hour work week, explains bow Americans became trapped in a prison of work that allows little room for family, bobbies or civic participation and suggests bow they can free themselves from relentless overwork. [This book] is a sober reconsideration of a topic that is critical to Americaas future. It suggests that progress doesnat mean much if there is not time for love as well as work, and liberation is an empty achievement if the work it frees one to do is truly without end. aThe Washington Post Hunnicutt, with this excellent book, becomes the first United States historian to examine fully why this momentous change occurred. aThe Journal of American History Hunnicuttas achievement is to ask the questions, and to provide the first extended answer which takes in the full array of economic, social, and political forces behind the aend of shorter hoursa in the crucial first half of the twentieth century. aJournal of Economic History This thoroughly documented history [is] a valuable book well worth reading. aLibertarian Labor Review This is an important book in the emerging debate about alternatives to full employment. Hunnicutt is a skilled historian who is on to an important issue, writes well, and can bring many different kinds of historical sources to bear on the problem. aFred Block, University of Pennsylvania Work Without End is a disturbing but impressive indictment of both big business and the New Deal program of Franklin D. Roosevelt.... Hunnicutt presents an unusual but persuasive description of a successful conspiracy to deprive American workers of their vision of a shorter-hours work week and the individual and societal liberation which would flow from it. aLabor Studies Journal

The belief that Aristotles philosophy is incompatible with Christianity is hardly controversial today writes Craig Martin Yet for centuries Christian culture embraced Aristotelian thought as its own reconciling his philosophy with theology and church doctrine The image of Aristotle as source of religious truth withered in the seventeenth century the same century in which he ceased being an authority for natural philosophy In this fresh study of the complicated origins of revolutionary science in the age of Bacon Hobbes and Boyle Martin traces one of the most important developments in Western European history the rise and fall of Aristotelianism from the eleventh to the eighteenth century Medieval theologians reconciled Aristotelian natural philosophy with Christian dogma in a synthesis that dominated religious thought for centuries This synthesis unraveled in the seventeenth century contemporaneously with the emergence of the new natural philosophies of the scientific revolution Important figures of seventeenthcentury thought strove to show that the medieval appropriation of Aristotle defied the historical record that pointed to an impious figure of dubious morality While numerous scholars have written on the seventeenthcentury downfall of Aristotelianism almost all of those works have examined how the conceptual content of the new sciencessuch as the heliocentric cosmology atomism mechanical and mathematical models and experimentalismwere used to dismiss the views of Aristotle Subverting Aristotle is the first to focus on the religious polemics accompanying the scientific controversies that led to the eventual demise of Aristotelian natural philosophy Martins thesis draws extensively on primary source material from England France Italy Germany and the Netherlands It alters present perceptions not only of the scientific revolution but also of the role of Renaissance humanism in the forging of modernity