The Gift (14 page)

The town of Münster had suffered a series of tribulations (the plague, an economic recession, heavy state taxes), and a good portion of its citizens converted to the new Anabaptist creed and took control of the town. They expelled both Catholics and Lutherans. The bishop of Westphalia, the town’s nominal ruler, laid siege to it with an army of mercenaries. The citizens held the bishop off for almost a year, surviving on communal stores of food and clothing. To the faithful it seemed clear that Münster would soon become the new Jerusalem. As an initial ceremonial act, marking their control of the town and the start of the new age, the Anabaptists burned all written records of contracts and debts.

In 1842, more than three hundred years later, the German anarchist Wilhelm Weitling took the Anabaptist leaders as his inspiration in writing a proclamation: “A time will come when … we shall light a vast fire with banknotes, bills of
exchange, wills, tax registers, rent contracts and IOUs, and everyone will throw his purse into the fire …”
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Thirty years later we find the Italian anarchist Enrico Malatesta acting on Weitling’s idea. In 1877 he and a band of compatriots took to the woods near Naples and began to move from town to town, abolishing the state as best they could. As the historian James Joll describes it,

We do not know if they also threw their purses into the fire.

These are all stories of a struggle between legal contract and what might be called “contracts of the heart.” Anarchists, like the Anabaptists before them, have always sought to declare null and void those unions that do not carry with them a felt cohesiveness and therefore tend toward coercion. It is a rare society that can be sustained by bonds of affection alone; most, and particularly mass societies, must have as well those unions which are sanctioned and enforced by law that is detached from feeling. But just as the Roman saw the
familia
divided into
res
and
personae
, the modern world has seen the extension of law further and further into what was earlier the exclusive realm of the heart. Law has sought to strengthen those bonds that in former times were secured through faithfulness and gratitude, however indeterminate these may have been. But the law is limited in its ability to
bring people together and secure order. Not only does law tend to shed the emotional and spiritual content of a total social phenomenon, but the process of law requires a particular kind of society—it requires, to begin with, adversaries and reckoning, both of which are excluded by the spirit of gift exchange. Because the spirit of the gift shuns exactness and because gifts do not necessarily move reciprocally (and therefore do not produce the adversary roles of creditor and debtor), courts of law would be rightly perplexed as to how to adjudicate a case of ingratitude. Contracts of the heart lie outside the law, and the circle of gift is narrowed, therefore, whenever such contracts are converted to legal relationships.

These stories, at any rate, from Anabaptist to anarchist, reflect a felt and acted-upon belief that life is somehow diminished by the codification of contract and debt. The opposition has been not only to those codified debts that secure the position of class, but to any codification that encourages the separation of thing and spirit by abandoning total social phenomena to a supposedly primitive past and thereby enervating felt contract. The burning of written debt instruments is a move to preserve the ambiguity and inexactness that make gift exchange social. Seen in this way, their destruction is not an antisocial act. It is a move to free gratitude as a spiritual feeling and social binder. If gratitude is, as Georg Simmel once put it, “the moral memory of mankind,” then it is a move to refreshen that memory which grows dull whenever our debts are transformed into obligations and servitudes, whenever the palpable and embodied unions of the heart— entered into out of desire, preserved in gratitude, and quit at will—are replaced by an invisible government of merely statutory connections.

I should now state directly a limitation that has been implicit for some time, that is, that gift exchange is an economy of small groups. When emotional ties are the glue that holds a
community together, its size has an upper limit. The kinship network Carol Stack describes in the Flats numbered about a hundred people. A group formed on ties of affection could, perhaps, be as large as a thousand people, but one thousand must begin to approach the limit. Our feelings close down when the numbers get too big. Strangers passing on the street in big cities avoid each other’s eyes not to show disdain but to keep from being overwhelmed by excessive human contact. When we speak of communities developed and maintained through an emotional commerce like that of gifts, we are therefore speaking of something of limited size.
*
It remains an unsolved dilemma of the modern world, one to which anarchists have repeatedly addressed themselves, as to how we are to preserve true community in a mass society, one whose dominant value is exchange value and whose morality has been codified into law.

By the time that anarchism emerged as a political philosophy, the idea of contract had been significantly enlarged. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theorists of “social contract” had extrapolated from the atomic unit of individual bond to that urcontract in which individuals join together to form the state. In Thomas Hobbes’s version—to take the most striking example and the strongest opposite pole to anarchist theory—before there was “society” there was a “state of nature” in which separate persons knocked about like flies in a hot room—only worse, as they tended to kill one another. In Hobbes’s natural history, man was driven by egocentric desires (chiefly, ambition, avarice, pride, and the fear of death—any apparent altruism being quickly traced back to
self-interest). Luckily, these disparate individuals found a shared value in their fear of death, and reason led them away from the state of nature toward the securities of social life. Unluckily, reason was not as strong as human passion, and because the passions were antisocial, the social life that reason suggested had to include an absolute authority with sufficient power to keep men “in awe.” Hobbes set his state on these four legs: selfishness and the fear of death, reason and the awe inspired by authority.

A recurrent feature of social contract theory was an imagined gap between the primitive and the civilized man. Hobbes’s primitive isn’t someone you’d want to live with. Dominated by brutish aggression and the “perpetual and restless desire of Power after power,” he lives in a condition of constant war, knowing no orderly social life and neither shared nor private property, only theft. He is different in
kind
from the civilized man, and that difference leaves a mark on Hobbes’s politics because it simultaneously requires contract to join men together and dictates the form of that contract. Hobbes begins his politics with a fantasy about history in which a chaotic aboriginal past is replaced by civilization, the shift being marked by an imaginary moment in which men agree to give up their right to exercise private force in favor of instituting public power. Through this essential clause, social contract brings man out of nature and into civilization. But note that the contract is required precisely because man cannot be trusted to behave without it. So there is always, at least in Hobbes, this mixture of distrust and law which leads, as Marshall Sahlins has pointed out, to a paradoxical politics in which “the laws of nature cannot succeed outside the frame of contrived organization … Natural law is established only by artificial Power, and Reason enfranchised only by Authority.”

The anarchist begins his politics on a different note and comes to a different resolution. Anarchism did not become ar
ticulated as a political philosophy until the modern state had become a political reality in the nineteenth century. Even then anarchism was not a politics per se but more of an application of ethics to political thought. Anarchist theory is like an aqua regia applied to the state and its machinery to see how much might be stripped away before people begin to suffer more than they do under law and authority. The anarchist begins with the assumption of man’s good nature, contending that law itself is a “cause” of crime. He feels a kinship, not a gap, between the modern man and his predecessor “in nature.” The Russian Peter Kropotkin makes a good example here because he had actually visited tribal groups. Born into a noble family and educated at military schools, Kropotkin was a confirmed rationalist and serious scientist, recognized as a geographer in scientific circles. In his early twenties he had participated in an expedition to Central Asia. James Joll’s remarks on the trip touch the same points we are addressing here:

We need not decide whether it is Hobbes or Kropotkin who sees the real primitive. Kropotkin is arguably closer, if
only because he’d actually been in the field (while Hobbes never got farther than France), but his reports do give off a slightly romantic air. A fully shaded view of tribal life had to wait for the emergence of ethnography as an empirical science.
*
These early pictures of primitives are better described as expressions of temperament rather than political science or ethnology. One temperament feels kinship with the aborigine while the other feels distance; one temperament assumes generosity while the other assumes a lust for power; for one our passions are social, for the other they are selfish (by the nineteenth century the Hobbesian temperament was reading Darwin for his accounts of conflict, while what Kropotkin remembered out of Darwin was the story of the blind pelican whose comrades kept him supplied with fish). One temperament assumes that goodwill underlies social life, while the other assumes egotism (and so must add reason and authority to derive society).

The two temperaments diverge at their base over the roles
of passion and reason. Hobbes knew no
social
passions. He speaks of his declaration that life in nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” as an “inference from the passions” against which “reason suggests convenient articles of peace… called the laws of nature.” For this temperament, reason derives law as a check to passion, and social life emerges only as each man is somehow convinced to inhibit a part of himself. So Hobbes is led to base social life on restraint, to separate the governed from their governors, and to rely on law (with all of its functionaries, the police, the courts, the jails) to ensure order.

It is this double conceit—first, that passion will undo social life and, second, that coercion will preserve it—that anarchist theory and the traditions of gift exchange call into question. The former imagines and the latter stand witness to a social life motivated by feeling and nonetheless marked by structure, durability, and cohesion. There are many connections between anarchist theory and gift exchange as an economy— both assume that man is generous, or at least cooperative, “in nature”; both shun centralized power; both are best fitted to small groups and loose federations; both rely on contracts of the heart over codified contract, and so on. But, above all, it seems correct to speak of the gift as anarchist property because both anarchism and gift exchange share the assumption that it is not when a part of the self is inhibited and restrained, but when a part of the self is given away, that community appears.