Could the Church of Work—which today has Americans aspiring to sleep deprivation the way they once aspired to a personal knowledge of God—be, at base, an anti-democratic force? Well, yes. James Russell Lowell, that nineteenth-century workhorse, summed it all up quite neatly: There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and sav­ing it from all risk of crankiness, than business.

Quitting the paint factory: On the virtues of idleness