Cooperation over Coercion: The Importance of Unsupervised Childhood Play for Democracy and Liberalism

Steve Horwitz

I have a new working paper at SSRN on the role of unsupervised childhood play in enabling children to learn the skills and attitudes central to democracy and liberalism. It expands on a section of Chapter 8 of my forthcoming book Hayek's Modern Family.

Here's the paper's abstract:

Abstract:  Unsupervised childhood play is how children learn the sort of informal rule-making and rule-enforcing that is so critical to a liberal society’s attempt to minimize coercion. It is a key way that children learn the skills necessary to engage in social cooperation in all kinds of social spaces within the market and, especially, outside of it. We learn how to problem solve in these ways without the need to invoke violence or some sort of external threat, which enables us as adults to cooperate peacefully in intimate groups as well as within what Hayek called the Great Society. A society that weakens children’s ability to learn these skills denies them what they need to smooth social interaction, and undermines their ability to participate in what Tocqueville called “the art of association.” Losing the skills learned in unsupervised play makes coercion more likely by threatening our ability to create and sustain the rule-governed relationships that are at the core of liberal societies. If we parent or legislate in ways that make it harder for children to develop these skills, we are taking away a key piece of what makes it possible for free people to generate peaceful and productive liberal orders.

Comments

[Erwin Dekker]

This makes me think of the work of the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga - Homo Ludens. Huizinga a contemporary of Hayek, argued that play was important in the formation of norms and rules (including law). Just a brief passage from my dissertatation:

The rules of the game, like cultural norms, are not fixed forever and always, but some stability and observance of them is necessary for the game or the market process to function. Like Hayek, Huizinga emphasizes that such rules emerge from human interaction. They do not merely civilize by teaching the importance of rule-abiding behavior or the process of competition, but also because rules and norms of for example ‘fair-play’ emerge in the process.

The link is, also made by either Hayek or Bartley in Appendix E of the Fatal Conceit