From Homo Ludens to Homo Dominans: The Political Reification of Play and the Impossibility of Absolute Social Justice

Political order is not a deviation from human play but its institutional form. Human beings create arenas, accept and contest rules, occupy positions, generate differentiations, demand recognition, dispute outcomes, and transform temporary advantages into durable authority. Stabilised on a collective scale, this ludic structure becomes law, bureaucracy, taxation, policing, military force, data classification, and legitimacy. The state is therefore not merely analogous to a game; it is play reified into enforceable institutional reality. Cooperation does not abolish agonistic play; it forms collective players oriented towards an exterior. That exterior may be agonistic, as in an intentional opponent such as a regime, class, state, party, or cartel, or aleatory yet contestable, as in scarcity, disease, disaster, and other contingencies; death, however, marks the terminal horizon of worldly play. This distinction clarifies how authoritarian politics converts impersonal contingency into a personalised enemy. Revolution is understood as de-reification: the temporary liquefaction of a frozen rule-field rather than the end of political play. Absolute social justice is impossible within worldly politics because it presupposes universal victory, while victory is intelligible only through differentiation from non-victory. Political systems differ ethically and historically, but they share the formal structure of rule-bound distribution of position, access, victory, and loss. What remains possible is relative justice: lucid political play that limits power, remembers the non-ultimacy of political outcomes, and prevents play from becoming predation.