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Games, Timepieces, and Businesspeople
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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“Business,” wrote a professor of marketing in 1929, “is the work of the world, humanity's chiefest task.” On the doorstep of the Depression, Prof. George R. Collins was selling business, by which he meant the business economy, an economic order based on the systematic management of money. I do not intend to enter the volatile controversy between Collins and those like Aldous Huxley who accused business people of being venal and crass. Rather, I intend to trace one likely path by which many in 1929 had come to regard business as a redemptive activity and the business person as a redeemer.
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- Copyright © 1977 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 George R. Collins, Outline of Business, 2 vols., New York, 1929, I, 8.
2 Roger Caillois, Man, Play, and Games, Glencoe, 1961 [1958].
3 On early clocks, see esp. Lynn White, Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change, London, 1962; Carlo Cipolla, Clocks and Culture 1300-1700, New York, 1967; Jacques Le Goff, "Au Moyen Age: Temps de l'Eglise et temps du marchand," Annales é. s. c. 15 (1960), pp. 417-33; idem, "Le temps du travail dans la ‘crise' du XIVe siècle: Du temps médiéval au temps mo derne," Le moyen âge 69 (1963), pp. 597-613. On usury see Benjamin Nelson, The Idea of Usury, 2nd ed.; Chicago and London, 1969; John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury, Cambridge, Mass., 1957; R. H. Tawney, "Introduction" to Thomas Wilson, A Discourse Upon Usury [1572] ed. Tawney, reprint: London, 1965 [1925]; Raymond de Roover, Business, Banking and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. J. Kirshner, Chicago and London, 1974; Idem, Money, Banking and Credit in Medieval Bruges, Cambridge, Mass., 1948. On contracts, see Johannes Nider, On the Contracts of Merchants [1468] trans. C. H. Reeves, ed. R. B. Shuman, Norman, 1966; Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, eds., Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, New York, 1955. On fortune, see Felix Gilbert, Ma chiavelli and Guicciardini, Princeton, 1965, Chapter 3; Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time, Cambridge, Mass., 1972, pp. 175-86.
4 Cf. Lynn White, Jr., "The Historical Origins of Our Ecologic Crisis," in his Machina Ex Deo, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1968, pp. 75-94.
5 See Nelson, Idea of Usury, Chapter 2; Martin Luther, "Trade and Usury" [1524] in Works, ed. H. T. Lehmann, Philadelphia, 1955, Vol. XLV, pp. 231-310.
6 See especially John Bossy, "Counter-Reformation and the People of Cath olic Europe," Past and Present 47 (May 1970), pp. 51-70; Walter J. Ong, "Ramist Method and the Commercial Mind," Studies in the Renaissance, 8 (1961), pp. 155-72.
7 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons, New York, 1958 [1904-05]. On the Weber controversy see Robert W. Green, ed., Protestantism, Capitalism and Social Science, 2nd ed.; Lexington, Mass., 1973; S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Protestant Ethic and Modernization: A Comparative View, New York and London, 1968.
8 Hugh Latimer, "Sermons on the Card," in his Sermons and Remains, 2 vols., Cambridge, 1845, Vol. I, pp. 8, 3.
9 Joseph Hall, "The Remedy of Discontentment" [1645] in his Works, ed. J. Pratt, 10 vols., London, 1808, VIII, 12.
10 See especially Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death From the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. P. M. Ranum, Baltimore and London, 1974; David A. Roberts, "Mystery to Mathematics Flown: Time and Reality in the Renaissance," Centennial Review 19 (Summer 1975), pp. 136-56; George Poulet, Études sur le temps humain, 3 vols., Paris, 1949-64, I, pp. xiv-xxii, 1-15.
11 Cf. F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling, New York, 1962, pp. 55-68, 81-97.
12 See John Ashton, A History of English Lotteries, London, 1893, and his The History of Gambling in England, London, 1898; Ian Hacking, The Emer gence of Probability, Cambridge, 1975; P. G. M. Dickson, The Financial Rev olution in England, London and New York, 1967, pp. 90-156, 486-520; Francis Baily, The Doctrine of Life-Annuities and Assurances, 2 vols., London, 1813, vol. I, pp. x-xxvii, on the history of earlier work; John S. Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel: The Lottery in America, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, pp. 1-59; D. V. Glass, "Two Papers on Gregory King," in Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History, Chicago, 1965, pp. 159-220; J. E. McGuire, "Force, Active Principles, and Newton's Invisible Realm," Ambix 15 (1958), pp. 154-208.
13 Cited in Jacob Viner, The Role of Providence in the Social Order, Phil adelphia, 1972, p. 46, also see all of Chapter 2.
14 "Business," Oxford English Dictionary, I, pp. 1205-06.
15 Ashton, History of English Lotteries, pp. 88, 178, 200, 208.
16 Fritz Redlich, "Academic Education for Business," in his Steeped in Two Cultures, New York and Evanston, 1971, pp. 199-212.
17 John M. Roberts and Brian Sutton-Smith, "Cross Cultural Correlates of Games of Chance," Behavior Science Notes 3 (1966), pp. 131-44, would argue that the Western European popularity of games of chance would be indicative of uncertainty in early upbringing, environmental insecurity and anxiety about achievement and sex. I find rather that the increasing acceptance of games of chance is indicative of social and intellectual control of the uncertain. Leg islation against lotteries (declared illegal in England in 1826, legal in the United States only in Louisiana by 1878) would seem to run counter to my suggestion that games of chance were increasing in stature. But lotteries were closed down not so much for the essential act of gambling as for the "inev itable" problem of swindling with which they were plagued. The reform campaigns against gambling more often than not emphasized the absence of chance (fair deal, fair odds) in professional gaming houses and crooked lot teries. Respect for chance, for open risk, remained. Cf. Ezell, Fortune's Merry Wheel, pp. 204-70.
18 "Song on the Lifting of the Banner of the House of Buccleuch, at a great foot-ball match on Carterhaugh," Poetical Works (6 vols.) Paris, 1838, Vol. VI, pp. 335-36.
19 "The Age of Bronze," in Works, ed. T. Moore (17 vols.), London, 1833, vol. XIV, p. 267.
20 L. Defossez, Les savants du XVIIe siècle et la mésure du temps, Lausanne, 1946.
21 "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 56-97. See also Sebastian de Grazia, Of Time, Work, and Leisure, Garden City, 1962, pp. 181-95; J. C. Crowley, This Sheba, Self: The Concep tualization of Economic Life in Eighteenth-Century America, Baltimore and London, 1974.
22 Arthur H. Cole, with Dorothy Lubin, "Perspectives on Leisure-Time Business," Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, 2nd ser., I, 3, supp. (1964), pp. 1-38; John R. Betts, "The Technological Revolution and the Rise of Sport, 1850-1900," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40 (1953), pp. 231-56; Redlich, "Leisure-Time Activities," Steeped in Two Cultures, pp. 279-304; Henry Chafetz, Play the Devil: A History of Gambling in the United States from 1492 to 1955, New York, 1960, pp. 179-387.
23 A Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles, eds. Craigie and Hulbert (4 vols.), Chicago, 1944, vol. I, 367-68 and vol. IV, pp. 2323-25; O.E.D., XI, pp. 37-43.
24 The Man Nobody Knows, Indianapolis, 1924, preface, pp. 162-63, 179-80. Cf. James W. Prothro, The Dollar Decade: Business Ideas in the 1920's, Baton Rouge, 1959; Frederick L. Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's, New York, 1959, pp. 147-50; Thomas S. Hines, "Echoes from ‘Zenith': Reactions of American Businessmen to Babbitt," Business History Review 41 (1967), pp. 123-40.
25 Elbert Hubbard, II, ed., The Philosophy of Elbert Hubbard, New York, 1930, pp. 29, 30, 36, and, below, 34.
26 Diogenes; or the Future of Leisure, London, 1928, p. 65, cited in Foster Rhea Dulles, America Learns to Play, New York and London, 1940, p. 365.
27 Manners and Social Usages, New York and London, 1918, p. 300.
28 See Dom Cavallo, "Social Reform and the Movement to Organize Chil dren's Play During the Progressive Era," History of Childhood Quarterly 3 (1976), pp. 509-22; Bernard Mergen, "The Discovery of Children's Play," American Quarterly 27 (1975), pp. 399-420.
29 Outline of Business, vol. I, p. 22.
30 See especially Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, New York, 1948; Daniel Nelson, "Scientific Management, Systematic Management, and Labor, 1880-1915," Business History Review 48 (1974), pp. 479-500; Sam uel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, Chicago, 1964; Edna Yost, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, New Brunswick, N.J., 1949; Joseph Gore, "The Economy of Time Movement in Elementary Education," Paedagogica Historica 7 (1967), pp. 455-77.
31 C. W. Hackensmith, History of Physical Education, New York, 1966, pp. 379-463; Paul Klapper, Contemporary Education, New York and London, 1929, pp. 83-97; G. T. W. Patrick, "The Psychology of Play," Pedagogical Seminary 21 (1914), pp. 469-84. Historians have noted the ties between reg imented sport (gymnastic) drill between 1880 and 1930 and emphasis upon conformity in social as well as physical rhythms; educators in the 1920's argued that drill exercise was incompatible with the American democratic spirit. Cf. Eugen Weber, "Gymnastics and Sports in Fin-de-Siècle France: Opium of the Classes?" American Historical Review 76 (1971), pp. 70-98; George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews, New York, 1970, pp. 102-15.
32 American Magazine 105 (April 1928), cited in Prothro, Dollar Decade, p. 234.
33 Our Business Civilization, New York, 1929, p. 15.
34 White, "Historical Origins of Our Ecologic Crisis." Cf. Robert E. Neale, In Praise of Play: Toward a Psychology of Religion, New York, 1969.
35 Merle Curti, "The Changing Concept of ‘Human Nature' in the Literature of American Advertising," Business History Review 41 (1967), pp. 335-57; Stuart Ewen, Captains of Conciousness, New York, 1976.
36 "Renaissance man … Back in a business suit," Industry Week 166 (May 4, 1970), pp. 30-36; James B. Briscoe and Richard Gorton, "Wanted: Renais sance Manager," S. A. M. Advanced Management Journal 38 (July 1973), pp. 49-56.
37 A. fully annotated version of this essay will appear in Dimensions (Bu reau of Economic and Business Research, University of Florida).