The Social Stakes of Gambling in Early Modern London

Abstract

Simmel’s concept of “play” positions sociable behaviors such as gambling and flirting as abstract enactments of society’s “serious relationships.” Flirting, Simmel suggests, is a strictly formal, or “play” version of sex; gambling, in turn, is a “play” version of the economy. Gambling’s structures of profit and loss, of risk and reward, echo and indeed depend upon the practices that compose the “real” economy, but the point of gambling itself is essentially social; that is to say, gambling is communicative, interactive, full of struggle and pleasure and sorrow, and its purpose is rooted in these qualities. For Simmel, the sociability of gambling far outweighs its financial elements: “the true sportsman” is never really in it for the money.

Even when play turns about a money prize, it is not the prize, which indeed could be won in many other ways, which is the specific point of the play; but the attraction for the true sportsman lies in the dynamics and in the chances of that sociologically significant form of activity itself The social game has a deeper meaning—that it is played not only in a society as its outward bearer but that with its help people actually “play” “society.”¹

—Georg Simmel, “Sociability.”