Sheldon Richman

What Social Animals Owe to Each Other Sheldon Richman

These essays, written over the past 20 years, have a single underlying theme: namely, that we human beings, as social animals, need individual freedom to fully flourish. The equation is simple: individual freedom = social cooperation = individual and social flourishing. Many corollaries follow. To pick one, the freedom to choose with whom we will cooperate entails competition among those who wish to cooperate with any given individual. So the imagined conflict between cooperation and competition is a misjudgment. They are two sides of the same coin.