Paul Lafargue (Cuba 1842 - Paris 1911) was the son-in-law of Karl Marx (he married his daughter Laura, with whom he committed suicide in 1911 to avoid old age). This small book (published in 1880) caused embarrassment among socialists and divided them. It caused embarrassment because it was written by Marx's son-in-law and went against the slogans of the labor movements of that time, which were 'Jobs for all!' etc.

It divided them because some believed it was opposing the labor movements (which focused on securing jobs for workers) while others were excited by the radical way in which it demanded 'human life' for the worker. The book is accompanied by a short Appendix by the translator, which details the reactions of the socialists and later the communists to the book and presents some thoughts on the 'problem' of free time and the ways in which it is addressed in Western societies.

As Lafargue writes: 'A bizarre madness possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization reigns. This madness is the love for work, the deadly passion for work, which reaches the point of exhausting the vital forces of the individual and his descendants. In order to provide jobs for all the idlers of today’s society, for the industrial apparatus to develop without limit, the working class must infinitely expand its consuming capacities. If the working class, uprooting from its heart the distorted passion that governs it and distorts its nature, stood up to forge a steel law that would prohibit everyone from working more than three hours a day, the Earth would feel a new world being born upon it'...