The Philosophers' Gift: Reexamining Reciprocity

"Marcel Hénaff asks why the gift has become a topic of such intense interest among philosophers of ethics. Might the idea of the gift as a figure of absolute generosity be a lament about the absence of just institutions? Hénaff asks philosophy to relinquish its idealism in favor of what a more empirical anthropology teaches about the functions of giving in creating the social and institutional conditions necessary for being together among strangers. This book is his gift to politics."-Rosalind C. Morris, Columbia University

"A significant contribution to debates on the gift that have played out within continental philosophy."-Ryan Coyne, University of Chicago


Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation.

When it comes to giving, philosophers love to be the most generous. For them, every form of reciprocity is tainted by commercial exchange. In recent decades, such thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Henry, Marion, Ricoeur, Lefort, and Descombes, have made the gift central to their work, haunted by the requirement of disinterestedness.

As an anthropologist as well as a philosopher, Hénaff worries that philosophy has failed to distinguish among various types of giving. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, he shows, is central to ceremonial giving and alliance, whereby the social bond specific to humans is proclaimed as a political bond. From the social fact of gift practices, Hénaff develops an original and profound theory of the relationship between self and other, whether that other is an individual human being, the collective other of community and institution, or the impersonal other of the world.

Marcel Hénaff (1942-2018) was Distinguished Research Professor of Literature and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. His books in English include Sade: The Invention of the Libertine Body, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, and The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy.

Jean-Louis Morhange's prior translations include Pascal Baudry's French and Americans: The Other Shore.