The Work and the Gift considers how working and giving are taken foropposites and revealed as each others ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves forinstance to work f... » 

The Work and the Gift considers how working and giving are taken foropposites and revealed as each others ghostly shadow. We ask ourselves forinstance to work for a wage and a living dooming ourselves forever to thecurse of daily toil and yet we imagine the magnum opus or the oeuvre as alabor of love. We ask ourselves to give with no thought of return yet we stilltell ourselves to give only to the deserving and only where our giving will dosome good.Ranging from Marx and Derrida to Friedrich Hayek and Alvin Toffler ScottCutler Shershow here explores the predictions of political thinkers on both theleft and the right that work is fundamentally changing or even disappearingthe debates among anthropologists and historians about an archaic gifteconomythat preceded capitalism and might reemerge in its wake contemporary politicalbattles over charity and social welfare and attempts by modern and postmodernartists to destabilize the work of art as we know it.Ultimately Shershow joins other contemporary thinkers in envisioning acommunity of unworking grounded neither in ideals of production and progressnor in an ethic of liberal generosity but simply in our fundamental beingincommon. What results is a brilliant intervention in critical theory and socialthought that will be of enormous value to students of literary criticismanthropology and philosophy alike. «