Abundance, Generosity, and the State

4

RECIPROCATIONS

We have stressed the sacrificial nature of donations. They are made without any expectation of a return or yield. The donor truly abdicates money and other material goods for a transcendent cause. However, in practice, donations very often do involve various sorts of reciprocation. This is most notably the case in friendship and in family life. But reciprocation is also manifest in various hybrid and ambiguous cases, in which donations are mixed with market exchanges or are partially tit for tat. In what follows, we will study some of these complications.

Over the past century, under the influence of Marcel Mauss and his disciples, the concept of reciprocation has held center stage in the academic literature on gifts, including the economics of giving, altruism, and reciprocity (see Kolm and Ythier 2006). Maussian anthropology outlined a social philosophy of tit for tat. It asserted that all social relations are and should be rooted in reciprocation. From this point of view, genuine gifts do not exist at all. They are figments of the human imagination. In the real world, all social relations are based on various forms of reciprocation. They always involve a tit for tat, even if the persons involved fancy to believe otherwise.

Mauss proposed that scholars embrace this basic fact and its implications. Tit for tat is fundamentally different from the neat and finite contractual relationships that seem to spring from private property. Tit for tat is never neat. It is inherently ambiguous. It is never finished. It is therefore never possible to state precisely who has a claim on what or who is obligated to whom and to what extent. All contracts are embedded in a context of (often collective) obligations that are inherited from ancestors and bequeathed to the rising generation. It is therefore impossible to get even with anybody, to settle once and for all any mutual claims and obligations. And that is exactly how things should be.

Now, we agree that not all claims and obligations have a contractual origin. Moreover, there can be no doubt that ambiguous gifts exist and are rather pervasive. Anyone with a modicum of life experience will also readily confirm that tit for tat is more often than not cloaked in the mantle of genuine generosity. The social philosophy of tit for tat is therefore intellectually appealing. It has the rough charm of a brutal truth that dispels long-cherished illusions about selflessness and benevolent altruism. It seems to clear the way for honest human relations.

However, before we hasten to embrace it lock, stock, and barrel, we should ask a preliminary question: Is it true that clear-cut contracts and genuine donations do not exist at all? Does the Maussian case hold water? In what follows, we shall draw a line between reciprocation and donations. They must not be confused, not even in cases such as friendship and family life, where they are bound together. Rightly understood, reciprocation does not contradict the sacrificial nature of donations. Quite to the contrary, the particular sort of reciprocity that is found in friendship and in the loving relationships between family members can only be understood against the background of genuine sacrifice.

We shall start off by considering sequences of donations that have been misread by the champions of the social philosophy of tit for tat. This will be followed by a closer look at three prototypical social relations—friendship, family, and liberal arts—which are rooted in reciprocation. Then we shall discuss cases in which genuine gifts are deliberately mixed with market exchanges before concluding with a discussion of the Maussian theory of gifts.

DONATION SEQUENCES

The intended beneficiaries of a donation are not always the real or ultimate beneficiaries. A donee usually benefits from the gift he receives, but he is rarely the only beneficiary and not necessarily the ultimate one. For example, if James, the hardworking father of a family of five, receives an unexpected inheritance from a distant aunt, then he is the immediate but not necessarily the ultimate beneficiary. The inheritance might relieve him of the necessity to earn money income. But if he then spends more time relieving his wife, so that she can spend more of her own time educating the children, then the ultimate beneficiaries of auntie’s largess are the children.

In economics, the problem of distinguishing between the immediate and the remoter effects of a given cause is called the problem of incidence. It is an important problem in various areas of economics; for example, in the theory of taxation (see Böhm-Bawerk 1914; Rothbard 1970; Salin 2020). If the government increases the corporate tax rate, then the true incidence of the tax hike is not on the corporations themselves, but on their owners, employees, customers, and suppliers. For example, the owners of monetary capital would try to avoid investing in a firm subject to the tax hike. They would rather invest their capital in a venture that is taxed less. As a consequence, among the victims of that policy are also the customers, as well as the employees and suppliers, on whom the firm’s owners would have spent their money in the absence of the tax hike.

The distinction between the intentional effects of a donation and its unintentional effects is similarly important for a proper understanding of the widespread phenomenon of sequences of donations. Indeed, one of the consequences of genuine gifts is to instill in the beneficiary feelings of gratitude and love toward his benefactor. The beneficiary will therefore likely wish to express these feelings, and the most appropriate way to do this is through expressive gifts. Such gifts are, in turn, likely to increase in their beneficiary (the initial benefactor) similar feelings of gratitude and love. Hence, there will be further gifts and still further gifts, without any logical end to such a sequence.

In the eyes of a superficial observer, who sees that A gives to B, then B to A, and so on, this sequence of events might very well be indistinguishable from ordinary market exchange or from tit for tat. He may come to believe that B transfers an economic good to A in reciprocation for another economic good that he has received from the latter. Accordingly, the reason why A has given to B is in order to oblige B to provide some sort of payment. We recognize here without difficulty the characteristic point of view that we have already met when discussing the question of customary gifts. It is the point of view of those who consider that there is no such thing as a genuine gift at all, but only tit for tat in the guise of a phantom called a gift.

What is the bone of contention? Tit for tat under the cloak of a gift does exist and is probably widespread. While it is impossible to know just how widespread it really is without looking into other people’s hearts, the fact itself is beyond dispute. But the salient issue is elsewhere. It concerns the question of whether there may be anything besides tit for tat. Are genuine donations possible? Is there such a thing as a genuine gift? In the light of what we have stated above, there cannot be the slightest doubt that the answer is affirmative. What remains to be done now is to pinpoint the error in the superficial interpretation of donation sequences.

The nub of the error is the failure to distinguish between the intentional and unintentional effects of gifts. There are indeed people who transfer property to others without the slightest intention of benefitting those others, but only and exclusively to oblige them to reciprocate. Such transfers are not genuine gifts. By contrast, the genuine donor gives without expecting any return. Yet his donation creates a new state of affairs, and this new reality is likely to prompt a reaction from the beneficiary.

For example, if the donation was designed to improve his material living conditions, and if it did have this effect, then the beneficiary will not fail to perceive the improvement. And just as he loves his life and his well-being, he cannot fail to similarly love the causes of his life and of his well-being. Therefore, his love will also be directed to his benefactor, especially if this benefactor is a genuine benefactor who acts without self-interest. And the beneficiary may wish to express this love, for the lover wishes the loved one to be happy and knowing that one is loved by others is conducive to such happiness. As a consequence, the initial benefactor and his beneficiary may very well develop a lifelong friendship which they repeatedly express through various forms of donations of time and material goods.

RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIPS

Some of the most important social relations are by their very nature rooted in reciprocation. This concerns friendship and family life most of all, but also the liberal arts to the extent that they are practiced in a professional context. In all these cases, it may seem to be difficult to disentangle genuine donations—genuine gifts—from the ordinary give-and-take. But as we shall see, these difficulties vanish once we come to a proper understanding of reciprocity, or rather of the different meanings that reciprocity may have.

Friendship

Any friendship, any loving interpersonal relationship, involves by its very nature some reciprocity. Friendships are made. There is no friendship between Peter and Paul unless Peter loves Paul and Paul loves Peter. Where there is no reciprocation, the friendship is unfulfilled (Wojtyla [1960] 1981, p. 85). But this reciprocity is very different from reciprocation in the sense of a tit for tat or market exchange. It is a give-give, rather than a twofold give-and-take. It is a happy correspondence rather than an arrangement for mutual benefit. Friendship might be initiated from one side—and to this extent it would be similar to an exchange, which may also be initiated by the seller or the buyer—but friendship differs in that it is initiated by an expression of love. It expresses unconditional devotion.

Love may be expressed by providing a service, and very often is. But a genuine love service does not seek a return. It seeks to communicate an inner disposition. And the person who reciprocates friendship does not return a service or a pleasant string of words in order to please. He responds by expressing his own love for the other.

The pure core of friendship is often embroiled in, and sometimes corrupted by, other aspects of a personal relation. Peter may be Paul’s business partner; he may be Paul’s employee, his employer, his father, or his teammate. Their friendship would then be part and parcel of a complex web of numerous partial bonds. It would be one dimension of their overall relation, but not the only one. This is why a superficial observer is likely to misinterpret the meaning of friendship. Seeing the strong presence of tit for tat, and knowing the corruption of the human heart, he would end up denying the very possibility of genuine friendship. He would hold that Paul gives his friendship in exchange for Peter’s friendship, and vice versa. As the spurious philosophy of tit for tat has it, there is no such thing as give-give. There is only give-and-take. But as we have seen, this conception is untenable, for love exists and the very point of love is to love without compensation.

The Family

Arguably the most important forms of friendship are formed within families. Max Weber (1922, p. 195) famously argued that marriage is the most important foundation of the house community. Within that community, claims and obligations are not calculated and balanced. There, communism prevails as far as consumers’ goods are concerned.

In the Christian ideal marriage, the spouses’ sacrificial gifts to each other completely supplant all material and selfish motivations (see Wojtyla [1960] 1981, pp. 86ff.). It is true that the spouses are engaged in a division of labor, and they draw the greatest benefits from this cooperation. Typically, they are also drawn to each other by sexual appetites. But all these interested motivations should be sanctified by the deepest friendship, by spousal love. And the same ideal prevails with respect to filial relationships. Although children do contribute to the material output of the household from a certain age and are likely to tend to their parents in old age, these motivations to raise children should be sublimed, through friendship and love, into pure gifts.

It goes without saying that no human family can fully measure up to this lofty ideal. Real human beings are invariably torn by error, fleshly appetites, and vices. They do get married for selfish and material reasons, and they remain in the marriage bond for the same reasons. From a juridical point of view, marriage is a contract with random claims and obligations (contrat aléatoire). The spouses “exchange their vows.” When they appear in front of the priest, or in the town hall, they promise to love and support each other in good and bad times. It is not clear from the outset how much each of them will “get out of ” the marriage. They vow to let the dice fall as they will and to honor their own promises come what will.

All of this does not change the importance of the family as an ideal. This ideal serves as a guiding light in the dark nights of temptation and sin. But the fact remains that family relations, even within the nuclear family, are deeply ambiguous. They are ambiguous not in the sense that true gifts are impossible, but in the sense that no man is able to look into the hearts of others, and more often than not, it is quite difficult to discern one’s own heart (George Steiner [1989] has discussed this in a different context, the interpretation of art).

This ambiguity seems to be strongest between the spouses, because of the financial, economic, and sexual dimensions of their relationship. It is weakest in the love between parents and children. In dealing with the hapless infant, the handicapped child, and the frail, senile, and destitute elderly, pure love shines through most brightly. Filial love is emblematic of the love community that the family can and should be.

The Liberal Arts

Another important example that shows how genuine donations can be embedded in a context of ordinary give-and-take are those professions which revolve around the ultimate leisure goods of truth, justice, and beauty.

Teachers, researchers, medical doctors, lawyers, auditors, painters, writers, musicians, and various other professionals practice the liberal arts, which are defined in opposition to the minor or servile arts such as those practiced by masons, drivers, marketing directors, and CEOs. The difference is that a liberal art cannot be perfected without devotion to some ultimate criterion which is removed from the arbitrary will of a patron. It is therefore impossible to purchase a definite result. It is impossible to purchase salvation from a priest, victory from a football player, beauty from a painter or musician, or a favorable decision from a jurisconsult. In all such cases, it is competent effort that is sought and remunerated.

THE MANTLE OF PRICES

In chapter 2, we saw that prices may be disguised as genuine gifts. But genuine gifts may also be concealed under the mantle of prices. The donee may deliberately choose the hybrid, whereas he could also have chosen the pure form. Mises provides the following examples:

1. When, for humanitarian reasons, I do not buy pencils in the stationery store, but make my purchase from a war-wounded peddler who asks a higher price, I aim at two goals at the same time: that of obtaining pencils and that of assisting an invalid. If I did not think this second purpose worthy of the expense involved, I should buy in the store. With the more expensive purchase I satisfy two wants: that for pencils and that of helping a war veteran. (Mises [1933] 2003, p. 189)

2. The businessman who owns the whole firm may sometimes efface the boundaries between business and charity. If he wants to relieve a distressed friend, delicacy of feeling may prompt him to resort to a procedure which spares the latter the embarrassment of living on alms. He gives the friend a job in his office although he does not need his help or could hire an equivalent helper at a lower salary. Then the salary granted appears formally as a part of business outlays. In fact it is the spending of a fraction of the businessman’s income. It is, from a correct point of view, consumption and not an expenditure designed to increase the firm’s profits. (Mises [1949] 1998, p. 242)

Genuine gifts combined with genuine prices come in two hybrid forms. In some cases, such as Mises’s first example, the genuine gift is indeed combined with an exchange. The donor would have bought a pencil anyway but decided to buy it at a higher price (compared to alternative market prices) from a war-wounded peddler.In other cases, the gift is not combined with an exchange but simply takes the form of an exchange. If the businessman in the second example does not need an assistant at all but hires a distressed friend anyway, then he provides his friend with a pure gift and obtains nothing from the latter in exchange. More precisely, the businessman obtains nothing that he would pay for.

In the above cases, the hybrid serves the purpose of disguising the gift character of a transfer. Genuine gifts are dressed up in the mantle of prices. But why should a donor strive to disguise such a beautiful deed? In chapter 3, we saw that pure gifts might be shunned for various reasons; for example, because they are repugnant to the self-love of the beneficiaries. In later chapters, we shall argue that hybrids also serve to circumvent the law. Whatever the concrete explanation might be, we see here another illustration of Carl Menger’s insight that observable human behavior is a complex phenomenon influenced by many and different causes. Observation does not and cannot reveal all the causes that come into play in any concrete action. In order to understand these causes, introspection (in the case of one’s own behavior) or psychological analysis of another person’s intentions is necessary.

Market prices may serve as a mantle not only for genuine gifts, but also for tit-for-tat exchanges. A well-known example in the academic world is the invitation of guest professors to give classes and seminar presentations. Such guests are more often than not expected to reciprocate by inviting their host in turn. Consider the following hypothetical example. Professor Miller can invite guest professors to work with him at his university’s expense. There are two candidates, A and B. Candidate B is the better scholar and works in Miller’s field, but he has no budget to reciprocate the invitation. Candidate A, on the other hand, works in a different field but controls a budget for visiting professors; moreover, A’s university is conveniently located in a beach resort town. If Miller invites A, then A’s visit to Miller’s university will look like an exchange of scientific work for money. But under this mantle, Miller will initiate a barter trade.

In bureaucratic environments, cloaking tit for tat with market prices is a standard technique for circumventing legal restrictions. If Miller had been the director of his own firm, he would not have wasted any money on inviting an incompetent guest in order to get to the beach. Similarly, if Miller had been completely free to spend his research budget as he wished, he might have spent it directly on a trip to the beach. Professor Miller invites candidate A only because he is not free to use the research budget as he sees fit. He may not directly spend it on a trip to the beach and therefore seeks to reach his goal in a roundabout way.

GIFTS ACCORDING TO MARCEL MAUSS

In the early twentieth century, Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) and Marcel Mauss ([1925] 2010) studied primitive communities in order to obtain a deeper understanding of the universal foundations of all human societies. They found that the members of these primitive societies had very different conceptions of the meaning of exchange and gifts than members of developed industrial societies. Most notably there was no clear distinction between mine and thine. Mauss was especially intrigued by the fact that the inhabitants of that primitive world did not seem to know gifts as we like to imagine them; that is, free gifts that come without any obligation of compensation. He generalized these findings into an essay on the nature of the gift. Here he argued that Western societies should return to the good old days of the past. He made four related claims.

One, the conditions that he found to prevail in the primitive societies that remained at the outset of the twentieth century reflected a natural order. In such an order, there are no “free gifts” as we conceive of them today and there are also no exchanges such as we make today. All social relations are embedded in open-ended chains of claims and obligations that are rooted in custom. There is no such thing as a payment that would once and for all settle a claim. One consequence is that, even on a purely conceptual level, economic goods cannot be separated from the persons who previously held them in possession. Even goods that are exchanged are never completely separated from the men who exchanged them. All goods have an unbreakable bond—a Maori hau—with their previous owners. “Things sold still have a soul. They are still followed around by their former owner, and they follow him also” (Mauss [1925] 2010, p. 84). All payments, all transfers of goods, are part and parcel of an ongoing process that springs from ancient claims and obligations. This process has no beginning and no end. Claims and obligations live a perennial life of their own, disincarnated from individual choices and actions.

Two, this natural order has never ceased to exist. It has been partially supplanted by legal conceptions of Semitic, Roman, and Germanic origin. But since it is the natural state of affairs, it could not and cannot be abrogated.At present, it leads a subliminal existence. It lingers on under the surface of the official law. But it is returning to its former glory. Its major driving force is the burgeoning welfare state. In the words of Mauss:

All our social insurance legislation, a piece of state socialism that has already been realized, is inspired by the following principle: the worker has given his life and his labour, on the one hand to the collectivity, and on the other hand, to his employers. Although the worker has to contribute to his insurance, those who have benefited from his services have not discharged their debt to him through the payment of wages. The state itself, representing the community, owes him, as do his employers, together with some assistance from himself, a certain security in life, against unemployment, sickness, old age, and death. ([1925] 2010, p. 86)

He goes on:

All such morality and legislation corresponds in our opinion, not to any upheaval in the law, but a return to it. . . . Very soon they will be similarly associated in French social security schemes. Thus we are returning to a group morality The themes of the gift, of the freedom and the obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity and self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing in French society, as a dominant motif too long forgotten. ([1925] 2010, p. 87)

Three, the natural order of yore provides a normative benchmark for the assessment of modern legal orders, which arose in later periods and introduced the artificial separation between mine and thine, as well as the corresponding distinction between property law and the law of persons (p. 5).

Four, Mauss championed a return to what he believed to be the old, natural state of affairs. He considered that this return could build on the remnants of the old order, which had survived into the present day: “We should return to laws of this kind. Thus we can and must return to archaic society and to elements in it” ([1925] 2010, p. 88). “Thus, from one extreme of human evolution to the other, there are no two kinds of wisdom. Therefore let us adopt as the principle of our life what has always been a principle of action and will always be so: to emerge from self, to give, freely and obligatorily” (p. 91).

Mauss also drew various methodological conclusions from his findings. Most importantly, social reality could not be meaningfully divided into parts. Everything was related, bound up in a complex nexus of claims and obligations, past and present. This context could only be understood when social research focused on the analysis of total wholes, rather than on individual decision-making (see [1925] 2010, p. 102).

The Maussian point of view was mirrored in other intellectual and artistic movements of the early twentieth century that have shaped our present world. Fin de siècle intellectuals were convinced that modern times were decadent and that a genuine reform required a return not just to the conditions of a recent past, but to very ancient roots. In painting and sculpture, there was a quest for “primitive” forms and themes (Paul Gauguin, Pablo Picasso, and many others). In the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, a similar movement sought to overcome Roman formalism through a reinterpretation of Mass as a communal gathering (for example, by treating it as a meal rather than a eucharistic sacrifice and orienting the assembly concentrically rather than linearly). Similarly, economic reformers of the time sought to reintroduce corporatist labor relations to replace free contracts (the guild movement).

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the new philosophy of tit for tat enjoyed a remarkable success, especially among those who rejected the modern capitalistic economy. But is it solid? Let us highlight three of its major shortcomings, relating to the sheer logic of Mauss’s arguments presented.

First off, it is unwarranted to champion primitive social conditions as the sole benchmark for assessing the merits of a modern society. This is not to say that a return to such conditions is undesirable. But why is it more natural not to distinguish between mine and thine than to do so? It is spurious to argue that an older order must be better than a newer order just because it is older. Few people would argue that modern systems of transportation are inferior to the ones that prevailed in the glorious days of the horse and buggy or that cell phones should be discarded in favor of smoke-signal communication. Many good things need time to ripen. Why should the legal order be an exception?

Another flaw is to be seen in Mauss’s objection to the “cold, calculating mentality” (p. 61) and “tradesman morality” that the market order has allegedly given rise to (p. 83). Even if this were true, it would be unwarranted to assess the market order exclusively from the point of view of this or other deficiencies. A balanced overall judgment also needs to consider the advantages that a market order brings to the table. But Mauss would have none of this. He blithely disregarded the benefits springing from property law and contracts. In his account, modern legal institutions were forced upon mankind in a top-down revolution that brought nothing but rip-offs and conflict. He did not even consider the possibility that these institutions may have been, and were, introduced bottom up, that they may have been endorsed willingly precisely because they provided invaluable services to all parties involved. We have referred to the case of common resources, which provide very strong incentives for all members of the co-owner collective to privatize the resource before it is depleted. In chapter 6, we will present Carl Menger’s theory of the spontaneous emergence of institutions such as language, law, and money. Menger convincingly argued that law and exchange were not creatures of the state or of top-down decision-making. They grew from below, in response to very practical problems that ordinary people had to solve in their daily lives.

Third, we have to discard the idea, dearly held by all Maussians, that compassion and solidarity can only exist when they are based on open-ended tit for tat.As they see it, only such unbounded tit for tat is solidarity inducing.Market exchange, based on clear distinctions between mine and thine, and bound by a beginning and by an end, is held to be coldhearted and individualistic. The fizziness and messiness of open-ended tit for tat promotes trust, solidarity, and social cohesion, whereas market exchanges—through which deals are concluded—entail precisely the opposite tendencies.

This line of argument echoes Émile Durkheim’s ([1893] 2013, pp. 12–16) contention that market exchange is by and large amoral and therefore worthless as far as community building is concerned. Social cohesion—Durkheim’s preferred catchword—simply cannot result from market activity. Although the profit-driven division of labor entails a solidarity between its members, this solidarity is morally worthless, because it does not help to integrate these members into a larger social body that is able to act (pp. xvii, 85). True solidarity and cohesion have to be brought into the market from outside, most notably in the form of suitable laws and regulations (p. 182 and passim).

However, these definitions of morality and solidarity are specious and reductionist. They are specious in that they reflect the point of view of a ruler, or would-be ruler, who appreciates other people primarily for their disposition to obey central authority. They are reductionist because it is manifestly not true that markets and firms as such are amoral or immoral. To be sure, business ethics are different from the ethics of the liberal arts and from family ethics. But this does not change the fact that business does have a distinct moral dimension. The British philosopher Harry B. Acton (1993, p. 56) has put this well:

It is absurd . . . to criticise the man of business for not exhibiting the devotion of a hard-working doctor, the sympathy of a schoolteacher, or the self-sacrifice of a soldier. His circumstances do not normally call for these virtues, but for foresight, honesty, reliability in keeping promises, and a readiness to accept the consequences of the risks he has to take.

Furthermore, it is not true that open-ended tit for tat—and the ambiguity and legal uncertainty that result from it—makes people more empathic, kindhearted, and caring. Quite to the contrary, it is precisely when people have to interact in a juridical limbo, in which claims and obligations overlap or are indistinguishable, that these qualities tend to vanish. These conditions favor greed and avarice and benefit the pushy and the strong at the expense of the meek and the weak (see Schoeck [1966] 1987, chap. 9; 1970). After all, the purpose of property rights is to protect not the strong but the feeble.

Finally, it is not true that free gifts—genuine gifts—do nothing to enhance solidarity. When the difference between payment and gift is clear, charity is based on truth. It is the free gift that makes donors and donees responsible and unites them in a communion based on mutual understanding and appreciation.

Some contemporary research in psychology seems to bolster the claims of Durkheim and Mauss. For example, Piff et al. (2012) found that “higher social class predicts increased unethical behaviour.” Piff et al. asked the participants of their study to classify themselves as lower, middle, or upper class and then asked them whether they broke the traffic laws, stole, lied in negotiations, and cheated in competitive situations; how often they did so; and whether they had a favorable attitude toward greed. It turned out that the lower-class individuals in their study tended to be less immoral than the upper-class individuals. These results seem to indicate that immoral behavior is either a cause or a consequence of wealth, or both a cause and a consequence of it. Similarly, Stellar et al. (2012) argued that a higher social class predicts a reduced emotional response to suffering. Upper-class people tend to be more indifferent to the pain of others than lower-class people. In their study, too, economic success turned out to be causally related to amoral and immoral attitudes and behavior.

However, empirical studies of this kind do not contradict our contention that clear-cut property rights are favorable to empathy, compassion, and actively caring for others (also see Habermann 2017). They do not even demonstrate any general implications of social status or wealth. What these studies do show is that in the current interventionist world, in which property rights are infringed in numerous ways, those who make it to the top of society often seem to be even more indifferent and unethical than others. As we shall see in part three, this is fully in tune with the conclusions of economic theory. Monetary interventionism, to name just this obvious case, makes it possible to amass great wealth not through savings and working hard to serve others via market exchange, but through government bailouts and credit from the printing press.

Whatever the flaws of his conceptions, Mauss was right on track in observing that in our world, social relations are not fully based on private-property rights, but on a whole variety of norms, sometimes of very ancient origin, which exist side by side with modern private-property systems. The introduction of property rights was not a one-point event that switched social relations from primitive to modern conditions in one mighty stroke. It is an ongoing process.

When individual private-property rights replace communal property (such as the commons), there are not only winners, but also losers, especially in the short run. Furthermore, it is not always obvious which goods can be owned, how they can be appropriated, and to what extent. Scholars and practitioners still struggle to answer these questions today, as any cursory glance at the contemporary debates around environmental law, intellectual property, and maritime rights reveals (see for example Block and Nelson 2016). Moreover, and most importantly, the process of capital accumulation drives technological change, which constantly brings to the surface new problems related to the definition of property rights.

Mauss was also right in highlighting the instrumental role of the welfare state in engineering the backlash against private-property rights. Today, social relations are more often than not a messy mix of different forms. Certain forms (such as the genuine gift), despite all appearances, are vanishing because the preconditions for their existence (clear-cut property rights) are in the process of being wiped out.

Modern man is free to adopt a legal framework that mirrors primitive conditions. Mauss and his present-day followers might very well succeed in turning our civilization around. But a return to primitive social relations would not facilitate human flourishing. It would be a drastic impediment to the production of material goods. It would promote conflict, strife, and war. It would throw women back into slavery.And last but not least, it would deprive mankind of the joys that come with gifts and other gratuitous goods.

In a Maussian economy of gift swapping, genuine gifts would be impossible. They would be inconceivable. There would be no standard by which one could distinguish a gift from a non-gift. All activities would be somehow and to some extent (but not clearly and definitely) services rendered in compensation for other (equally indefinite) services received. It would be impossible to break out of the rights-obligations nexus. Gifts become conceptually possible, and can be experienced, only in civilizations that are built on the distinction between mine and thine. This is why Malinowski, to his astonishment, found no free gifts in the primitive societies on the Trobriand Islands near New Guinea at the outset of the twentieth century.

Unfortunately, Mauss and his followers drew the unwarranted conclusion that free gifts do not really exist anywhere. Glorifying a return to primitive conditions, they paid an enormous disservice to civilization. It is only when each person’s obligations are clearly defined, as they tend to be in an economy based on the principle of private property, that it becomes possible to do something beyond and in excess of one’s obligations. Only then do genuine gifts become conceivable. Only then does true gratuitousness become a reality.

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He adds in a footnote: “Such overlapping of the boundaries between business outlays and consumptive spending is often encouraged by institutional conditions. An expenditure debited to the account of trading expenses reduces net profits and thereby the amount of taxes due. If taxes absorb 50 per cent of profits, the charitable businessman spends only 50 per cent of the gift out of his own pocket. The rest burdens the Department of Internal Revenue” (Mises [1949] 1998, p. 242).

In late Scholastic price theory, most notably in the writings of Juan de Medina, such gifts were known as donatio admixta. See Chafuen (2003, p. 92). They seem to be at the heart of what Benedict XVI calls “hybrid forms of commercial behaviour,” which he would like to see developed on a greater scale as a way of “civilizing the economy” (2009, sec. 38). Exchange-gift hybrids remind us that social phenomena typically have multiple causes. They are “complex” in Menger’s (1883) sense.

Below we shall generalize this consideration. Bureaucratic management, itself a fruit of government interventionism, tends to blur the distinctions between market exchange and gifts.

The following passages are mostly quoted from the concluding remarks at the end of Mauss ([1925] 2010). Köpping (2002) is right when he points out that these conclusions provide the key to properly understand Mauss’s theoretical system.

“This morality is eternal; it is common to the most advanced societies, to those of the immediate future, and to the lowest imaginable forms of society” (Mauss [1925] 2010, p. 89).

For a critical assessment of primitivism from an anthropological point of view, see Sandall (2001).

For a comprehensive discussion of Mauss’s theory from an anthropological and political point of view, see Sahlins ([1974] 2017, chap. 4, pp. 134–67).

The late Mary Douglas put this very clearly: “There should not be any free gifts. What is wrong with the so-called free gift is the donor’s intention to be exempt from return gifts coming from the recipient. Refusing requital puts the act of giving outside any mutual ties. Once given, the free gift entails no further claims from the recipient. According to Marcel Mauss that is what is wrong with the free gift. A gift that does nothing to enhance solidarity is a contradiction” (Douglas 2002, pp. ix f.).

Derrida (1991), a radical Maussian, argues that all gift giving, by the inner logic of the act, entails a reciprocal obligation, even if this obligation is expressis verbis excluded by the donor and the beneficiary. We have commented on the underlying fallacy. For a more detailed discussion along with occasional comments on Derrida, see Marion (2002, 2011).

See also Olivi ([1295] 2021, I, pp. 69–79); Keller (1912); Rand (1964); Sternberg (1994); Barry (1991, 1998); Hülsmann (2008b); Bouillon (2011); Rhonheimer (2015); Eabrasu (2018); Hoppe (2021).

See Mises (1969), pp. 87–107).