Monopoly

I’m just back from the Oxford Political Thought Conference — and great fun it was too. One of the things I managed to do in Oxford was to meet up with Chris Brooke of the “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html in his palatial college rooms. Just over a year ago Chris and about the board games: me about “playing Monopoly in the old GDR”:http://junius.blogspot.com/2002_12_15_junius_archive.html#90066036 and “he about”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2002_12_01_archive.html Bertell Ollman’s game “Class Struggle”:http://www.aardwolfgames.com/aardmakehtml.mv?look4=2985.00000&src=DETAILS . I was fortunate enough to find myself sitting next to Professor Ollman at lunch today and asked him about the game, and one of the things he told me was the Monopoly itself was originally conceived as an _anti-capitalist_ game by a follower of Henry George. The story of the game’s invention and its subsequent appropriation by Parker Brothers is “here”:http://www.adena.com/adena/mo/ (scroll down to list of articles) and “here”:http://www.washingtonfreepress.org//36/monopoly.html .