Verlagstext:
This book is a history of European interpretations of the gift from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Reciprocal gift exchange, pervasive in traditional European society, disappeared from the discourse of nineteenth-century social theory only to return as a major theme in twentieth-century anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy and literary studies. Modern anthropologists encountered gift exchange in Oceania and the Pacific Northwest and returned the idea to European social thought; Marcel Mauss synthesized their insights with his own readings from remote times and places in his famous 1925 essay on the gift, the starting-point for subsequent discussion. The Return of the Gift demonstrates how European intellectual history can gain fresh significance from global contexts.
Stimmen zum Buch:
"Tracking the voyage of an idea - the gift - over land and sea, from liberalism to socialism, through social scientific and humanist scholarship, Liebersohn delivers an intellectual history that refuses to be confined to a continent or a discipline. European thinking about the complicated reciprocity of the transfer of presents offers something no less richly complex in return: reflection on cultural practices of giving and receiving are presented here always as negotiated exchanges within and between worlds. This book is a gift."
Scott Spector, University of Michigan
"Masterly commanding disparate traditions of thought, Harry Liebersohn traces with elegant concision the back story of Marcel Mauss's celebrated essay on The Gift. Moving as easily across centuries and national boundaries as he does scholarly disciplines, he reveals the over-determined genesis of a seminal idea that is still ramifying well into our own day."
Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
/ AUS DEM INHALT: / / /
Acknowledgments pix
Introduction p1
The Crisis of the Gift: Warren Hastings and His Critics p9
Hastings and the Gift on Trial p10
Edmund Burke on Hastings's Corruption of the Gift p16
James Mill's Emancipation from the Gift p19
Ghulam Hussain on Britain's Refusal of the Gift p23
Liberalism, Self-Interest, and the Gift p27
Hobbes and the Voluntary Gift p29
Mandeville's Rejection of the Gift p31
Adam Smith on Modern Liberality p35
Friedrich List, German Economics, and the Turn to History p40
Karl Bücher and the Making of Economic Anthropology p44
Bücher and the Return of Gift p53
The Selfless "Savage": Theories of Primitive Communism p61
Adam Ferguson and the Rude Republic of Virtue p63
Lewis Henry Morgan on Kinship and Community p65
Engels and Marx on Primitive Communism p86
Anthropologists and the power of the Gift: Boas, Thurnwald, Malinowski p95
Franz Boas and the Kwakiutl Potlatch p97
Richard Thurnwald and Banaro Marriage p104
Bronislaw Malinowski and the Kula Ring p122
Marcel Mauss and the Globalized Gift p139
The Community of the Gift: Mauss and Durkheim School p140
The Anthropology of the Gift in Oceania, the American Northwest, and Europe p151
The Politics of the Gift and the Crisis of Postwar Europe p158
Conclusion p165