Acting together binds us. Law gives that bond a constitution.
This section asks why that is so: why people who do something together form a bond that goes beyond mutual benefit, why this sometimes succeeds all at once, and why it so often fails.
The answer developed here starts from action itself. Whoever cooperates realises their aims not alongside those of others but through them. The aims of others become the form of one’s own. In the process a shared place emerges, where people act together rather than where they happen to be physically close. Online makes this especially clear, because the shared room is missing and yet a bond arises.
The pages are kept short. Each puts forward a thesis and argues for it, with an example and with the question of what follows for the law.
The pages
- What cooperation is: cooperation is more than exchange, because in it the aims of others become the form of one’s own.
- The click and its conditions: the sudden success of the interplay cannot be produced, but its conditions can be cultivated.
- Recognition: cooperation lives on mutual recognition as free persons, and online this recognition is achieved in its own way.
- Play: joy without a purpose creates trust, and those who play practise rules they give themselves.
- Conflict: where there is no conflict, one side has often stopped having aims of its own; what matters is whether the conflict leaves the participants standing as partners.
- Cooperation between adversaries: adversaries cooperate too, and this is the path from merely not fighting to a common order.
To see how these ideas hold up in practice, turn to Phases, Online and Law.