On the Meanings of Pleasure: Work, Ethics, and Freedom in the Hunza Valley

In much of the tradition of liberal thought, the time for pleasure is after work; pleasure, imagined in terms of consumption (Graeber 2011), is a consequence or reward for work rather than part of the experience of working. Freedom refers both to the terms under which one sells one’s labor and to the freedom to select among the many commodities one’s wages can purchase for the satisfaction of one’s needs and desires. But this view of pleasure has its critics. Adam Smith himself, before laying the groundwork for free-market thinking in The Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1976), developed in his