Scarcity or plenty? – Book Review

Lewis Hyde, The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2007; first publ. 1983)

Like Marcel Hénaff’s Le Prix de la Vérité (see forthcoming review), Hyde’s book is a reworking of the concept of gift, as analysed by Mauss (‘Essai sur le don’, 1923-24), Lévi-Strauss (Les Structures élémentaires de la parenté, 1949), and others.

In this case, Hyde focuses on the arts, making characteristically bold claims for the scope of his work. To give him his dues, The Gift is a a wide-ranging treatment of the topic. Beginning from the classic starting point in social anthropology, Hyde goes on to offer a detailed analysis of usury in the Christian West, including some good points with regard to Calvin and Luther. The latter, for example affirms ‘a scarcity of grace and gift’. Scarcity becomes a dirty word when Hyde contrasts it with plenty in this section. Furthermore, he identifies that in a gift-based system any surplus is passed forward to the recipient, while in usury the surplus is retained by the creditor.

There are also fascinating chapters on Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, and insights into the workings of political and business economics in 1970s and 80s Capitalism.

Certain themes recur throughout Hyde’s study. The most prominent of these is the grouping of money, Logos, and commerce over and against gift, Eros, and imagination. It is easy to see which grouping Hyde finds most attractive, and only in the final chapter does he begin to ask how the two groups can interact. It is here that more thinking is required, to see how the arts – and society at large – can reincorporate the idea of plenty into our scarcity-driven thinking.

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