Like civilization, play requires structure and participants willing to create within limits. Starting with Plato, Huizinga traces the contribution of Homo Ludens, or "Man the player" through Medieval Times, the Renaissance, and into our modern civilization. Huizinga defines play against a rich theoretical background, using cross-cultural examples from the humanities, business, and politics. Homo Ludens defines play for generations to come."A happier age than ours once made bold to call our species by the name of Homo Sapiens. In the course of time we have come to realize that we are not so reasonable after all as the Eighteenth Century with its worship of reason and naive optimism, though us; "hence moder fashion inclines to designate our species asHomo Faber Man the Maker. But though faber may not be quite so dubious as sapiens it is, as a name specific of the human being, even less appropriate, seeing that many animals too are makers. There is a third function, howver, applicable to both human and animal life, and just as important as reasoning and making--namely, playing. it seems to me that next to Homo Faber, and perhaps on the same level as Homo Sapiens, Homo Ludens, Man the Player, deserves a place in our nomenclature. "--from the Foreward, by Johan Huizinga

    This offers the first broad treatment of the city in both its historic and its contemporary aspects.

    This book is his summation of a life-long passion. He considers the bullfight in all its mythological and sociological significances. The illustrations by Andre Masson were drawn especially for this book."

    

    Taking as its topic the promise and shortcomings of the democratic form of government, Tocqueville's great work is at or near the root of such political truths as the litigiousness of American society, the danger of the "tyranny of the majority," the American belief in a small government that intrudes only minimally into the daily lives of the citizenry, and Americans' love of political debate. Democracy in America is the work of a 29-year-old nobleman who, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, traveled the breadth of Jacksonian America to inquire into the future of French society as revolutionary upheaval gave way to a representative government similar to America's. In his magisterial Tocqueville in America, George Wilson Pierson reconstructs from diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts the two Frenchmen's nine-month tour and their evolving analysis of American society. We see Tocqueville near Detroit, noting the scattered settlement patterns of the frontier and the affinity of Americans for solitude; in Boston, witnessing the jury system at work; in Philadelphia, observing the suffocating moral regimen at the new Eastern State Prison (which still stands); and in New Orleans, disturbed by the racial caste system and the lassitude of the French-speaking population.

    Although he had a profound influence on the development of social philosophy, he published no books in his lifetime. Like Charles Peirce, Mead was a thinker of a high order who never gave his views a written, systematic presentation adequate to their importance.In this work Mead provides a philosophical approach to the relations between permanence and change. Incorporating remarkable treatments of time and perspectives, he analyses the central concepts of metaphysics and science, giving special attention to the way in which the physical world of science arises with the moving world of experience. Written from the standpoint of the social behaviorist, this treatise contains the heart of Mead's positions on social psychology.