Alienated Leisure: Reflections on <i>The Tourist</i>

The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class was published in 1976 and has been republished in multiple printings, editions and translations. The original English text has been continuously in print, unmodified from its first publication. This essay suggests that The Tourist can be read today as an account of baseline socio-cultural and economic conditions at the moment just before tourism began its rapid growth to become the world’s largest industry. Several enduring and unique qualities of the tourist commodity and tourist consumption are posited as reasons for the unconstrained growth of the industry. The essay further argues that new cultural models and psychoanalytic frameworks are needed for the analysis of capitalism’s shift from alienated labor to alienated leisure as its primary engine of profitability.