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Walt Whitman's "Higher Progress" and Shorter Work Hours
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Walt Whitman's "Higher Progress" and Shorter Work Hours

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt
Walt Whitman quarterly review, Vol.26(2), pp.92-109
10/01/2008
DOI: 10.13008/2153-3695.1867
url
https://doi.org/10.13008/2153-3695.1867View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

Analyzes Democratic Vistas and other writings to demonstrate that part of Whitman’s conception of “higher progress” involved the attainment of freedom beyond basic necessities in order to gain “liberty’s ultimate challenge”—for “citizens to fill the purest of freedoms with activities that were complete in themselves”; goes on to track Whitman’s involvement in the movement to reduce working hours, increase leisure, and develop “labor-saving machines,” all of which formed “the obvious practical link between increasing material wealth and ‘higher progress’”; concludes by considering the influence of Whitman’s “higher progress” on John Maynard Keynes and on economists and historians of labor over the past fifty years.
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