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This foreword provides an overview of demographic development during the past three centuries, as life expectancy and per-capita growth of GDP have increased dramatically. Due to the intense interplay between physiological improvement and technological advances, humans have increased their body size by more than 50% in the past two centuries, and the betterment of general sanitation, reduction of air pollution in the cities, and higher food intake have improved life expectancy. It is argued that demographers have consistently underestimated the impact of such improvements and, consequently, have underestimated gains in life expectancy. With more workers living longer and healthier lives, men in Western countries have four times more leisure than they did a century ago, and this trend will continue. This achievement has devastating financial implications for already overburdened social security systems and calls for a careful re-examination of social security to ensure future sustainability.

This concluding chapter provides a summation of the main findings of the book as a whole. Parks were much more important to the concerns of the aristocracy than has usually been suggested, and they had a strong, and often negative, effect on many rural communities and some urban ones. The central place of hunting in the creation of parks is emphasized, along with the significance of organized hunting as an expression of power and authority. It is also suggested that an interest in leisure, as expressed through the reservation of land for hunting, had an impact on the extent to which lords organized their estates in a commercial or market-focused way. The negotiations and confrontations that surrounded parks are shown to have been an important part of the early history of enclosure, a process that involved the shaping of social norms as well as of agrarian practices.

By giving to all as high an unconditional income as possible, is one not violating liberal neutrality by favouring leisure and sanctioning consumption? One would be if the taxation needed to fund the basic income could legitimately be seen as the extraction of part of the outcome of nothing but the workers’ effort. But it cannot. Reflecting on the message of efficiency‐wage theories of unemployment leads one to view it instead as a fee on the appropriation of assets very unequally divided between us: jobs.

The preceding chapters showed how ideas about morality, space, and place come together to create specific forms of leisure for more or less pious Shi'i Muslim residents of south Beirut. Choices about leisure activities and places are informed by different moral rubrics, as people negotiate social norms, religious tenets, and political loyalties. Pastimes and their settings are assessed according to ideas about where they are located and how their patrons behave—ideas built on assumptions about the relationship between morality and geography in the city. Yet how and where a person hangs out is also an expression of personal taste. This chapter brings taste into the picture and discusses how Dahiya's new leisure sites and practices are valued along with how judgments about class, morality, geography, and politics work together to produce ideas about taste and social hierarchy. It concludes by thinking through the question of whether changing leisure practices and spaces can lead to broader social, political, and urban change.

Brian Barry examines the idea that the demands of justice in a given society can be ascertained by interpreting the shared understandings of the meanings of the goods that are to be distributed. Focusing on Michael Walzer's claims regarding the meanings of such goods as money, health, and leisure, Barry argues that for meanings to determine the uniquely right distributions, the criteria of distribution need to be built into the meanings. He criticizes the implications of Walzer's theory for thinking about global justice.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at democratic accountability outcomes. The evidence strongly and broadly suggests that cohesive and competitive political parties and governments help reduce the risks of democratic delegation. Specifically, executive cohesion strongly and significantly reduces the risks of corruption and fiscal indiscipline. Party competition, on the other hand, reduces rent extraction and promotes general satisfaction with democracy. The rest of the chapter reviews the broader lessons of this study, with respect to parliamentary democracy, parliamentary governance, political institutions, and the gap between citizens and their political representatives.

This chapter considers who did and did not go to church (and why), at a time when the UK was at war at the beginning of the century. It notes various steps to bridge the gap between the classes — establishing ‘Settlements’ in big cities. It notes the problems of poverty but also the threat posed to the ‘Victorian Sunday’ by increased ‘leisure’. It examines the social gospel and different views on the nature and role of the state (for example, in relation to education). It observes the extent to which the male-dominated churches reacted to female militancy (Suffragettes). It notes the continuing struggles between the churches (and also within them) as well as interest in ‘unity’. It was time, some thought, to construct a new theology. The UK was itself in a political crisis which, in Ireland, had a religious dimension.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the popularity of the Bab al-Hara café in south Beirut, an area often maligned in the U.S. press as “the Hizbullah stronghold” and known in Lebanon as Dahiya. The café exemplifies many of the shifting features of leisure in south Beirut, and highlights many of the new ideas and practices of morality as well as geography that have emerged in this Shi'i-majority area of the city over the past decade. The chapter suggests that these cafés provide new spaces for leisure that are promoting flexibility in moral norms. The circumstances that both new spaces and desires for leisure provoke highlight tensions between religious and social notions about what is moral. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter explains the history of the Islamic milieu, and describes its changing relationship to Dahiya and a new generation of pious Shi'i Muslims. This history will provide an understanding of how political contingency, urbanization, economic mobility, and generational shifts have combined to produce an environment ripe for the development of leisure. It also considers transnational influences on leisure, and a general sense of the infitah, or “opening up,” of Hizbullah and Dahiya as conditions for these new leisure desires and sites. The most visible of these changes is of course Hizbullah's popularity along with its incorporation into the social and spatial fabric of Dahiya and Lebanon.

This chapter discusses the three types of major players—political, religious, and economic—involved in producing and controlling leisure sites in south Beirut. All three types of players are conceiving leisure spaces, and to varying extents, feel responsible for ensuring that their customers abide by particular moral norms. On the political front, the Hizbullah plays a wide variety of roles in creating leisure for the Islamic milieu, ranging from directly producing sites to co-opting existing sites to, most commonly, facilitating and supporting private entrepreneurs who abide by what are perceived to be appropriate moral standards. On the religious front, the importance of following a marja' (religious scholar), and indeed even knowledge of the term and institution, has increased considerably since the 1980s. On the economic front, leisure in south Beirut is predominantly a private sector phenomenon. Almost all the cafés and restaurants are owned and managed by private and independent entrepreneurs, often in partnership ventures.

Prior to 2000, Dahiya had a few pizza places scattered along some of its commercial streets that functioned like the local man'oushe and fast-food stands. With the introduction of the Internet in Lebanon, businesses providing access appeared across Beirut, including in Dahiya. Initially, Internet access was incorporated into the “amusement centers” where young men played pool and computer games. Eventually, some of these gaming centers became small cybercafés, providing Wi-Fi along with wired desktop computers, food, and drinks. Over time, they attracted an increasingly mixed clientele of youths. This chapter provides a geographic analysis of these new leisure sites, mapping them onto Dahiya's streets and neighborhoods, and comparing their architectural design and aesthetic features.

Cafés are places where people are essentially forced to take a stance on the morality of specific activities, not only by choosing whether to partake, but also by passively accepting others' participation in their presence. Because many of the moral “rules” about the sorts of things one can do in a café—like listen to music or smoke argileh—are not clear-cut, cafés require people to navigate complex moral terrain in order to have fun while feeling good about themselves. This chapter takes up a number of these debatable activities in order to show how more or less pious Shi'i Muslims, especially youths, employ moral flexibility in their discourses and practices of leisure. In some cases, people negotiate among different rubrics of morality, while in others they choose to ignore particular tenets or disagree about the accuracy of a rule in the first place.

This chapter considers the ways in which pious Shi'i Muslims navigate and inhabit moral leisure places in different parts of the city. It argues that new moral leisure geographies are changing pious people's spatial experiences both within Dahiya and between Dahiya and Beirut. It begins with those who feel more comfortable remaining within their neighborhoods, and how this preference confines and territorially limits their spatial and leisure experiences. It then examines the urban experiences of those who prefer to venture outside the familiar to inhabit other city spaces that share their moral norms. Next, it shows how moral leisure facilitates new urban experiences in Dahiya and Beirut by promoting street life as well as public interactions. It concludes with reflections about how the city is being reshaped by the spatial practices of youths living moral leisure.

Lifestyle migration is a diverse and lesser known form of migration, which despite its acceleration over the last decades in numbers, scope, and impact, has only recently been the focus of research. Nevertheless, the permanent, temporary, or seasonal settlement of large numbers of foreign residents moving abroad for lifestyle reasons raises important questions about its regulation at a global level, particularly around political rights, welfare resources, and responsibilities for individuals and localities in an international arena. The chapter begins to map out the scale and locations of this phenomenon and shows the very fragmented nature of governance, even within the European Union. It considers why this is the case, and relates the fragmentation to the particularities of leisure migration (as a form of mobility often conflated with tourism) and the historical contexts under which it has emerged. Finally, The chapter examines the arguments that support or resist multilateral regulation, ranging from minimal improvement to more comprehensive governance.