Exuberant, provocative, and as controversial as when it first appeared in 1880, Paul Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy is a call for the workers of the world to unite--and stop working so much! At once a timely argument for a 3-hour workday and a classical defense of leisure, The Right to Be Lazy shifted the course of European thought, going through 17 editions in Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and helping shape John Maynard Keynes's ideas about overproduction. It reminds us that the urge to work is not always beneficial, let alone necessary. It can also be a "strange madness" consuming human lives.