Idle Hands Are the Devil's Work, or Playground?

In the seventeenth century, there were these houses of confinement that popped up all over europe. These large institutions presented as if they were medical spaces for taking care of the sick and those deemed mad at the time. But fuko says it was actually sites for the moalization and pathologization of what he calls idleness. The people who are idle, i e not economically productive, had to be literally confined. So you see that pathologiation slash moralization in religious discourses around laziness and leisure.

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