ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that an analysis of leisure policy which elucidates the political context of state interventions in respect to leisure, and which thereby politicises a number of issues which have typically been framed in apolitical terms, is an important priority for the sociology of leisure. Common sense has seen leisure as an aspect of 'private life', a sphere of individual choices, which is not properly the object of public policy. The politicization of leisure, it will be argued, is one site in a broad politics of 'collective consumption', Castells's term for popular struggles which developed around the inadequacy of public housing and transport in the working-class suburbs of French cities. Finally, an analysis of the current fragility of popular support for the public services lead to a reconsideration of the 'relations of consumption' which have characterized the provision of recreational and other services within a bureaucratic framework.
