Abstract
This chapter takes a look at the gift, in which academic interest has recently grown, especially after the release of Benedict XVI’s social encyclical Caritas in Veritate. It outlines a genealogy of the gift, briefly presenting the three main stages of its evolution: (1) the ceremonial gift, typical of the ancient world and found in the cultural anthropological approach that the French tradition later adopted (Mauss, Caillé, Hénaff, etc.); (2) the moral gift, which Aristotle first outlined to explain the emergence of the city; and (3) the personal gift, developed in the Middle Ages thanks to Christian Revelation and its corresponding idea of the person.
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Notes
- 1.
This point goes beyond the scope of this article. For an idea of economics in the ancient world, see: Scalzo (2014).
- 2.
Cfr. Mauss (2009). Although the original version is from 1924, Lévi-Strauss was responsible for its dissemination, having popularized Mauss’s work after his death in 1950. Currently, the Revue du Mauss, edited by the Mouvement anti-utilitariste dans les sciences sociales (M.A.U.S.S. http://www.revuedumauss.com), shows the evolution of leading intellectuals works on this matter.
- 3.
Original version: Anthropologie du don. Le tiers paradigme, Desclée, París, 2000.
- 4.
See also Godbout, J. (2000).
- 5.
Holism points to the fact that the totality of the social sphere, which preexists individuals and their actions, explains by default everything that makes up the individual parts of society. From the scientific point of view, it has taken the form of functionalism, culturalism, structuralism, etc. see: González (2013), p. 16.
- 6.
The exchange of useful goods developed in parallel, but it was not of great importance since these groups’ subsistence economies were, in principle, self-sufficient.
- 7.
- 8.
Hénaff gives an example with by hau and taonga. The spiritual hau always has to return to its origin, the motivation to give, while the giver, taonga, is omnipotent. He also gives an example with a kind of exchange called kula, which involves a 3-month journey by ship where one tribe goes to visit another resulting in a competitive exhibition and then exchange of precious goods called waygu’a takes place: precious necklaces (soulava) that are viewed as masculine, worn by women and move East to West are traded for bracelets (mwali) that are viewed as feminine, worn by men and move West to East. According to the trobiandés myth, mwali and soulava tend toward each other, as man tends toward woman. Exchange is a festive ceremony in which the giver is not seen as losing, but rather gaining. Moreover, he who gives more than he receives is superior. These differences in rank founded the social order. Denying the gift (not accepting it) was tantamount to spurning an invitation to alliance, which was equivalent to declaring war. The other example he uses is potlatch, one chief’s celebration to honor another that he considered a rival, which augmented the rivalry because the more ostentatious one celebration, the more ostentatious the reciprocal recognition had to be. See Hénaff (2010), p. 116–138.
- 9.
The typical example of this kind of justice is “an eye for an eye.”
- 10.
“Distributive justice is based on man’s ‘natural’ inequality, while corrective justice is concerned with the equality of man, which is instituted by ‘convention.’” Soudek (1952), p. 47.
- 11.
Aristotle’s sharp distinction between exchange value and use value may lead to a certain ambivalence on this point since the exchange value of a good does not correspond to its proper and peculiar use. However, Aristotle fails to say that the use of an object in exchange is “unnatural” (para phusin), precisely because using an object in a way other than its proper and peculiar use does not mean that this use is bad.
- 12.
It was Marx who first used the letters C and M (commodities and money) to represent the circuits by which Aristotle describes the various exchange forms. See Capital, I, 3 y II, 4.
- 13.
Without the notion of creation, the idea of the person is unattainable because radical contingency and the distinction between being and nothingness go along with it and, therefore, essence and existence cannot be distinguished. For a metaphysics of the person see: González (2006), Polo (1999) and Haya (1997).
- 14.
For other created beings, fulfilling that which they tend toward is necessary and completely determined by their nature. Their end is, therefore, a finite external consummation from an instinctive and unthinking tendency.
- 15.
Grace is necessary as a consequence of original sin. Before the fall, man knew that he should love God, his origin and the end towards which he tends, all of which freely united him to God.
- 16.
See also p. 95–105 y 596–597.
- 17.
As we saw, for Mauss, the gift system is the fundamental form in which human groups express relationships. It does not deal with giving, but rather with giving of oneself in whatever is given, which is the manifestation of personal being.
- 18.
“Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity, and intrinsic to it” (CiV, 6).
- 19.
I recognize that the scope of this thesis goes beyond the scope of this article and will be the subject of a future one. For now, it is enough to accept that the modern project is a deliberate attempt to eradicate the gift from social order based on an inaccurate anthropological conception. “Idealizing technical progress, or contemplating the utopia of a return to humanity’s original natural state, are two contrasting ways of detaching progress from its moral evaluation and hence from our responsibility.” (CiV, 14)
- 20.
In my doctoral thesis, The Origins of Modern Economic Rationality: An approach from the philosophy of economics, I analyzed how economic theory has evolved to eventually arrive at a dead end. See: http://hdl.handle.net/10171/23846.
- 21.
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Scalzo, G. (2017). A Genealogy of the Gift. In: Rendtorff, J. (eds) Perspectives on Philosophy of Management and Business Ethics. Ethical Economy, vol 51. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46973-7_3
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