The Return of the Gift

Review

"This lucidly written and insightful book follows the fortunes of the gift in European social thought from Thomas Hobbes through Marcel Mauss. Evoking fascinating life stories, intellectual traditions, changing economies, and war-torn worlds, Harry Liebersohn describes the waning of the idea of the gift among 19th-century political economists and its flowering among early 20th-century anthropologists. The Return of the Gift reminds us of the resources we have to make strangers into friends and to replace the calculations of the bottom line with the hopes for reciprocity." - Natalie Zemon Davis, University of Toronto

"Harry Liebersohn's The Return of the Gift is an important contribution to the genealogy of changing understandings of the gift in the human sciences, which both re-affirms the centrality of Mauss's 1925 classic essay and replaces it within the ebb and flow of a broader European discourse on the gift. Weaving in an unusual attention to the biographical dimension of European thinkers' encounter with the gift, it illuminates the return of the gift as a topic of systematic sociological reflection after a long period of relative oblivion in the nineteenth century. The result is a rich historiographical treatment, demonstrating that it is precisely when European societies were losing sight of the dynamics of reciprocal gift-giving in their own midst, that they had to 're-discover' it via their dealings both with distant societies and with new social problems of their own." - Ilana Silber, Bar-Ilan University, Israel

"Liebersohn has done an expert job illustrating the history of the idea of gift giving in Europe. Highly recommended." -Choice

"Liebersohn has bequeathed a major gift to historians interested not only in the genealogy of the gift in European thought, but in the wider history of solidarity. His book spans confidently across three centuries, multiple disciplinary traditions and national literatures, and several continents." -- Kenneth Loiselle, Trinity University

"...admirably concise, focused, and well written." -Andre Wakefield, The Journal of Modern History

Book Description

This book is a history of European interpretations of the gift from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century; it demonstrates how European intellectual history can gain fresh significance from global contexts.