Abstract
The dualism of play and social action is supported by common sense and by a peculiar ethic of work. It is enforced by certain social factors in modern industrialized societies and acknowledged by the methodology of the social sciences. The marginality of games and play is a social fact. But is it also an irreducible fact?
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References
John von NeumannZur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele, Mathematische Annalen, 100, 1928, pp. 295–320.
The conjecture that such calculation ought to be possible had been stated by Leibniz in 1710. He described also clearly the difference between games of chance and games of strategy. See for a summary of the early history of games Oskar Morgenstern, Spieltheorie, Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften ( Göttingen, Vandenhoek, 1956 ).
F. J. J. Buytendijk, Het spei van mensch en dier als openbaring van levensdriften (Amsterdam, 1932 ). German translation: Wesen und Sinn des Spiels ( Berlin, Wolff, 1934 ).
See, for instance, Helmuth Plessner, Spiel und Sport, in his collected essays Diesseits der Utopie ( Düsseldorf-Köln, Diederichs, 1966 ), pp. 160–162.
Helmuth Plessner, Lachen und Weinen (Bern-München, Francke, 3d. ed., 1961), pp. 100–106.
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society ( Chicago, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1934 ).
Johan Huizinga,Homo Ludens (Leiden, 1938 ). English translation under the same title published by Beacon Press, Boston, 1955.
Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, in: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen, Mohr, 1934), vol. 1, p. 69.
Friedrich Oetinger, Partnerschaft ( Stuttgart, Metzler, 1953 ).
Alfred Schütz, Collected Papers (The Hague, Nijhoff, 1962), vol. 1, p. 83.
Schönbach, Dissonanz und Interaktionssequenzen, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 18, 1966, pp. 253–270.
Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness ( Pittsburgh, Dusquesne Univ. Press, 1964 ).
Eric Berne, Games People Play (New York, Grove, 1964).
Albert Camus, The Rebel ( New York, Vintage Books, 1961 ), p. 4.
Games, p. 51.
Thomas S. Szasz, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (New York, Basic Books, 1965). The quote is on p. 58.
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life ( New York, Double- day, 1959 ), p. 22.
Presentation, p. 80. For the “quote” see: John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (New York, Wiley, 1964), p. 53.
This holds also for Goffman’s other references to Von Neumann: Presentation, p. 16. See also his essay “Fun in Games” in: Encounters (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1961 ), p. 35.
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© 1970 Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
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Grathoff, R.H. (1970). Introduction: Social Action and Play. In: The Structure of Social Inconsistencies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3215-5_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-3215-5_1
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