Month: July 2020

Marcel Mauss’ Curious Indian Gift

Ishaan Jajodia

I wrote only yesterday of Marcel Mauss’ book, The Gift, which has an intriguing section on the gift in ancient India. It was insightful, but left a sense of incompleteness that could not be fully gauged, until the realisation dawned upon me that the issue was hiding in plain sight, and oftentimes the most obvious — and appropriate, in this case — solution is always lying in plain sight.

In his study of ancient India, he refers to the Mahabharata, a Sanskrit epic of some antiquity and of more considerable length. But Mauss did not address the question of the gift and of sacrifice in that small yet integral part of the Mahabharata — the Bhagavad Gita — that is the religious and philosophic centrepiece of the entire epic. His analysis of the Indic system, particularly that of the Vedic tradition and the epics that follow them, are deep-reaching and show erudition, but the lacunae are serious, and it is my contention to only expose one part of the umbra to light. “The epic and the Brahmin law still survive in the old atmosphere,” Mauss argues. “presents are still obligatory, things have special powers and form part of human persons.”1

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  1. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002), 72. ↩

Self-Interest as a Moral Maxim

Ishaan Jajodia

Economists have moral compasses that are suspect to being overruled by any variety of unrelated concepts: utility, loss, advantage, opportunity cost, maximisation, and so on and so forth. They claim to be disciples of the market, astute learners whose educations piqued in one area, and one area only. It is suprising, then, for an economist — much less a former banker — to be spotted using that dreaded word, ‘moral,’ which has caused many an economist unspeakable terrors. The man responsible for that is Raghuram Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and popular economist.1

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  1. Raghuram Rajan, ‘Pursue Self-Interest by Helping Other Economies Too’, Financial Times, 7 July 2020, July 7, 2020 edition, sec. Opinion, https://www.ft.com/content/cf12c2ad-616f-4c11-936f-d8ac1b0880bb. ↩

The Curse of the Gift

Ishaan Jajodia
Endymion
Anne-Louis Girodet, The Sleep of Endymion, 1791. | Was Endymion’s gift of eternal beauty a fatal curse as well?

Marcel Mauss’ The Gift is an extraordinary book, one that contends with the common yet defeatist and fatalist line of thought that results in self-regulating markets and the ‘invisible hand’ of the market.1 Mauss’ anthropological project is not just that: it lays bare a particular conception of the gift that Mauss sees. As we shall see, there are issues with this conception, but on the whole, the gift seems to be a particular contrivance of his with implications for the way in which we construe our socioeconomic relations and question the existence of a market unfettered from man. Mauss’ is out to prove that in most archaic societies, “exchange and contracts take place in the form of presents; in theory these are voluntary, in reality, they are given and reciprocated obligatorily” (3). His theory goes into remarkable detail about the operations of what he calls ‘potlatch’ in communities still extant around the world, but also examines how the ‘potlatch’ evolved from its primitive form to the more complex concepts we know today in the form of the market. Mauss’ book is rich, and I borrow liberally from it, at least in its descriptive form.

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  1. All inline citations  are from: Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, Routledge Classics (London: Routledge, 2002). ↩

Short Note #3: Change

Ishaan Jajodia

Change refers to the slow, measured process by which laws are passed and conventions and norms come into being. It represents a sceptical attitude toward revolution in general: change is necessary, but revolution is not. Advances in science and technology can change the skin of society, but on the inside, much stays the same. This scepticism about outward change does not imply a craving or preference for stagnation, but a cautious outlook toward things in general, and a marked indifference to the new-fangled for its own sake.

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Short Note #2: Duty and Obligation

Ishaan Jajodia

There are two kinds of obligations with which we are concerned here: legal and moral obligation. Both are important in the context of the polis. Legal obligation is concerned with the observance of the law, broadly understood, in both letter and in spirit. Moral obligation, which we shall refer to as ‘duty,’ relates to broader questions of right and wrong and with hierarchy in general. Legal obligation is important, especially when the polis is ruled in accordance with a series of non-arbitrary rules, codified into laws, which are sovereign over the polis. Both these forms of obligation, in the context of the polis, find their articulation in Marcus Tullius Cicero’s treatise, On The Commonwealth.

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Short Note #1: The Importance of Politics

Ishaan Jajodia

To know man fully is to know first what politics is. Aristotle’s arguments for the importance and primacy of politics still maintain their vitality today. They go as follows.

For Aristotle, “nature … makes nothing in vain” (Politics, 1.2, 1253a8–9). Everything that arises from nature has an end, a telos. Man’s telos is determined by Aristotle by the possession of faculties of speech that go beyond expressions of “pleasure and pain” (1253a12). The Epicureans would like to reduce most things to pleasure and pain, but Aristotle does not: he restricts them to the domain of animals, not humans. Humans use their speech to express more complex ideas; for example, “man alone possesses a perception of good and evil” (1253a16). Man’s ability to converse has an end, and it cannot be realised in solitary existence.

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Adam Smith’s Hidden Debt to Thomas Hobbes

Ishaan Jajodia
Hobbes Leviathan Frontispiece
Detail from the frontispiece for the first edition of the Leviathan (1651) by Thomas Hobbes; lead etching by Abraham Bosse.

Adam Smith and Thomas Hobbes are not usually mentioned in the same sentence together, much less positively. But this is a key line of argument in Joseph Crospey’s book, Polity and Economy, which subtly examines and points out the links between the two canonical thinkers.1 Crospey, a student of Leo Strauss, and later co-editor with Strauss of their edition of the History of Political Philosophy, wrote the book early in his academic career, and although he added a mini-biography of Smith in a later edition, did not change the first four chapters that comprise this deep-reaching analysis of Smith.

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  1. Joseph Crospey, Polity and Economy: An Interpretation of the Principles of Adam Smith (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957). ↩

Who was Adam Smith?

Ishaan Jajodia
Smith
A statue of Adam Smith at the old University of London Premises | Wikimedia Commons

Jesse Norman’s book on Adam Smith, Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters,1 is the coming of age of a new ‘tradition’ of interpreters of Adam Smith, a project that began first with the editors of Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith and has reached significant proportions today. Like Norman, thinkers in this tradition look to examine Adam Smith in all his richness, seeking to expose for posterity their theory of a unified Adam Smith. In some parts, they have been successful, especially when it comes to Smith’s own personal life, but in others, particularly relating to that of ‘das Adam Smith problem’, the project has left gaping holes and bridges built on substandard foundations. Norman’s book is emblematic of this approach: although Norman is a Conservative M.P., there is very little that is conservative in his mode of analysis and experience that he brings to the book, which he cleanly divides into three parts: Life, Thought, and Impact.

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  1. (London: Penguin Books, 2019). ↩

The Deterministic Conceit

Ishaan Jajodia
Roma
A Map of Ancient Rome at the Museo della Civita Romana | Jean-Pierre Dalbéra on Flickr | Were the romans bumbling idiots who had no agency, or were they determined completely by ‘spontaneous order’?

Friedrich Hayek is best known for his scathing polemic against central planning and socialism, The Road to Serfdom, which has in recent years become the gospel for libertarians, many of whom are seen thumping it around as the Bible of their creed whilst pulling wool over their eyes at Hayek’s mentions of national insurance and the like. Hayek’s advocacy for free markets, however, takes on a new incarnation in his advocacy for self-regulating markets as a result of spontaneous order, and not of human creation and intention in and in itself. “Spontaneous orders,” the economist Steven Horwitz writes, “are the products of human action but not human design …. [the] unintended consequences of various human actors’ pursuit of their own purposes and aims.”1 Such a line of thought is present, though not explicitly stated, in The Road to Serfdom, that markets out to be left alone, but later progressions in Hayek’s age resulted in what one may only call desultory philosophising about the nature of economic activity, most befitting an economist, not a philosopher of politics.

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  1. Steven Horwitz, ‘From Smith to Menger to Hayek: Liberalism in the Spontaneous-Order Tradition’, The Independent Review 6, no. 1 (2001): 81–97, 82. ↩