Notes
351 Notes Introduction 1. Simon Simonse, Kings of Disaster: Dualism, Centralism and the Scapegoat King in Southeastern Sudan (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992). 2. Norwood R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958). 3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). The Ambivalence of Scarcity “The Ambivalence of Scarcity” originally published in French as “L’ambivalence de la rareté” in P. Dumouchel and J.-P. Dupuy, L’enfer des choses: René Girard et la logique de l’économie, (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 137–254; translated by Mary Baker. 1. K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 56. 2. C. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, trans. Thomas L. Nugent (London: Colonial Press, 1900), 316. 3. J. Austruy, Marginalia (Proceedings of the Congress of French-Speaking Economists) (Paris: Sirey, 1969); cf. D. Flouzat, Économie contemporaine (Paris: PUF, 1972), 1:7 [translator’s note: our translation]. 4. L. Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977). 352 Notes 5. B. Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, ed. F. B. Kaye (1752; repr., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 6. J. M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion: Economic Possibilities for Our Grand-Children (1930; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1972), 381. 7. H. Lepage, Demain le capitalisme (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1978), 47. 8. P. Samuelson and W. D. Nordhaus, Economics, 12th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), 26. 9. Durkheim, in The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), argues that the first and most fundamental rule concerning the observation of social facts is to consider social facts as things. E. Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (1895; repr., Paris: PUF, 1981), 15. 10. L. Dumont, Homo aequalis: genèse et épanouissement de l’idéologie économique (Paris: Gallimard, 1977). 11. K. Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944). 12. M. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (Chicago: Aldine, 1972). 13. M. Sahlins, Tribesmen (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1968), 74. 14. Sahlins, Tribesmen, 74. 15. The mode of production has to be considered to include technological and economic means of production as well as production relations—in other words, relations among producers. 16. In this sense, we can also say that there is no scarcity in primitive societies. Since their production is adequate, there is no gap between needs and available resources. Contrary to classical economists who think that the only way of reducing the gap between needs and goods is to increase the real quantity of goods available, Sahlins uses ethnological documents to remind us that most of humanity has always preferred a different solution, which consists in limiting needs. Even though Sahlins’s attitude is by far superior with respect to scarcity because it eliminates the illusion of real quantity, we nonetheless have to reject it and go beyond it. This is because the ethnological solution—in other words, the Zen solution to the problem of scarcity—simply reverses the terms of the dilemma. The problem remains untouched. No more than Marx or Ricardo, Sahlins cannot explain the ambivalence or aporia of scarcity. He can only postulate that it does not exist, but this is also what classical economics does. Yet it is clear that to explain the aporia and ambivalence of scarcity, we have to abandon the concept of scarcity as a relationship linking people to things. We have to explain scarcity in terms of relationships among people. If the aporia and ambivalence of scarcity mean anything, it can only be this: scarcity cannot be a simple relationship between people and things. We thus have to distinguish the present hypothesis from that of Sahlins in that we reject what he accepts, namely, the classical definition of scarcity as the gap separating human needs from the quantity of goods and resources available. 17. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, 205. 18. Polanyi, Great Transformation, 46–47. 19. Theoretically, Chayanov’s Rule supposes a given relationship between the labor force (the number of workers) and the work (hours of work per member) done by a medium-sized family. In practice, this is never found, though the average does follow the rule. It seems that the variations in relation to the average are correlated with social position. Cf. Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, chapter 2. 20. Sahlins, Tribesmen, 4–13; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, chapter 5. Notes 353 21. R. Firth, Social...
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