Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-mkpzs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:50:43.107Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Gift: Its Economic Meaning in Contemporary Capitalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

François Perroux

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

‘Sale.—To buy and to sell, the aim of life.’

Gustave Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

This study is not devoted either to the institutions of mutual aid, philanthropy, or charity within modern capitalism, or to the donations individuals make to them.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 2 , Issue 6 , March 1954 , pp. 1 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © 1954 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Lord Beveridge, Voluntary Action, a Report on Methods of Social Advance, George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1949, pp. 420.

2 Definitions below, II.

3 We are speaking here of theories and doctrines, not of practices or policies.

4 Moliere, Act IV, Scene 3. ‘He, a merchant! That's pure slander, he never was that … as he was a very good judge of cloth, he went about choosing pieces everywhere, had them brought to him and gave some of them to his friends … for money.'

5 ‘ The Marshall Plan … is strictly a business proposition.' Declaration of the Administrator of E.C.A. before the annual convention of American bankers. The total of Marshall Aid to Western Europe (April, 1948-December, 1952) amounted to $13,812 million, of which gifts accounted for $10,991 million, say 79.5 per cent.

6 On this point, see Perroux, Le Plan Marshall ou l'Europe nécessaire au Monde, Paris: Librairie de Médicis, 1948.

7 The conditions of the movement, utilisation, and repayment of capital in international relations, according to classical theory.

8 Complementary effects in terms of actual goods and services, increase in production and in the over-all level of production in terms of goods and services.

9 About the Technical Assistance Programme, Mr. Dean Acheson said in a speech on 25 January, 1952: ‘It is not philanthropy that motivates us …. But there is a hard-headed interest in this programme.'

The government of the United Kingdom considers the Colombo plan as a contribution to the economic strength of the sterling zone. See The Colombo Plan, 2nd annual report…. October, 1953.

10 Speech of President Truman, 20 January, 1949. Speech of Mr. Dean Acheson, cited above.

11 Report for 1949.

12 Within fixed conditions.

13 The extreme type is the gift of the pelican.

14 ‘The most basic Law of economics, namely that one cannot get something for nothing.' R. F. Harrod, Towards a Dynamic Economics, MacMillan and Co. Ltd., 1948, p. 36.

15 ‘Esquisse d'une théorie de l'économie dominante', Economie appliquée, Nos. 2-3,1948, pp. 243 et seq.

16 Investments effecting a structural change in big businesses, combined public investments destined to reclaim a region, etc….

17 Preferably, according to objective criteria, or as much as possible, i.e., in terms of productivity.

18 They are intermingled with political decisions and use public controls which have no connexion with the operations of the market.

19 Examples in the current literature: the six stages described by Geoffrey Crowther, An Out line of Money, Thomas Nelson and Sons, Ltd., 1945, pp. 387 et seq.; the five or six stages of Stephen Enke and Virgil Salera, International Economics, Prentice Hall, 1947, pp. 637 et seq.

20 A rather unwilling tribute among the most unyielding liberals: they claim, as is well known, that considerations of structures are entirely negligible.

21 'Historical': not at all related to the more or less natural pulsings of the economy.

22 The monetary history of the Latin American countries offers some good examples.

23 The Gift, understood as it is above, is not in any respect a free credit-operation, from the community's point of view. From this point of view, there is no more any free capital than there is free beefsteak, inasmuch as capital and beefsteak are not free goods.

Then too, the gift reduces the offerings of investible funds on the lender's market.

Finally, in the collective operation which we have been envisaging, the International Maintenance Centre would receive in due time the contributions of the beneficiaries, but these would be calculated in the common interest and would not resemble the mechanical (except for corrections) service and repayment of international loans in their customary form.

24 It is abundantly clear that to this nucleus will eventually be added capital gains, speculative profits, etc.

25 Perhaps it is not exaggerated to see in this one of the sociological reasons why the gift-received is in demand and the gift-given is abhorred, among peoples where the rentier mentality is more widespread than the entrepreneur mentality. Demanding that acquired situations be financed, refusing to finance another's development: these are complementary attitudes.

26 Firms maximise profit, the seller of a service, his net income, the buyer of a product attempts to obtain the maximum of goods of the best quality while giving up the least possible in money, etc.

27 ‘Whatever may be the future of our society, whatever type of organisation it may adopt, we must foresee that the invariance of instincts will assure to it the permanence of devotion and of sacrifice. This propensity to love and to give oneself, which exists potentially in every man, widens and develops more or less well according to circumstances and perhaps accord ing to individual predispositions. I think that a pedagogy inspired by psychoanalysis would have an opportunity to favour the evolution of instincts which, at present, do not mature except in some of us.' Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1952), pp. 78-79.

28 Student and disciple of Pavlov, Le viol desfoules, Paris: Gallimard, 1938.

29 Traité du caractère (Editions du Seuil, 1946), pp. 332 et seq.

30 It can be designated in a formal and neutral way by the term' desire to give'.

For our (precise and limited) purpose, ‘disinterested' is considered as perfectly synony mous with ‘allocentristic', ‘altruistic', etc. We know that it is nothing of the sort: but we retain only the minimum necessary for the analysis presented.

31 ' The method of surplusses' of J. Duput and J. R. Hicks.

32 ‘The typical corrective measures' proposed by A. G. Pigou to attain the three fundamental conditions (maximum national income, regularisation of flows, equality in distribution).

33 ‘The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry', Economic Journal, March, 1907. This article, as is well known, is used and cited many a time in Book VI of his Principles.

34 Article cited, p. 26.

35 Ibid., p. 27.

36 p. 27.

37 Pp. 28, 29 and also 23.

38 P. 28.

39 Marshall insists on this point: the spirit he praises is not, if I may put it so, imagined: it is already present and active.

40 Principles of Political Economy, London and New York: Longmans Green & Co., 1929.

41 P. 749.

42 P. 748.

43 P. 750.

44 ' The common property of the species'.

45 Pp. 749-750.

46 P. 750.

47 '… I sincerely hope, for the sake of prosperity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it'.

48 If not the result.

49 We are not making any implicit reference here to the Theory of Games (Neumann and Morgenstern), nor to that of the formalisations of economics which it has already produced.

50 It was suspect, for other reasons, in preceding systems.

51 Worthy of study is the ‘ tip' to the submissive intellectual. One could distinguish the gratuity in money and the gratuity in kind. Also: the tip for the speech, the tip for the attitude, the tip for the written text. As La Fontaine already said:

'… and you who dedicate
To the Gentlemen of finance
Naughty books that are paid for very well.'

(‘L'avantage de la Science', Fable XIX, Livre VIII).