The gift is never free, observed the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss. His point was that gifts—be they Christmas socks or a freshly killed goat—are always tied up with reciprocity, self-esteem and obligation.
Perhaps the unfortunate Gordon Brown had Mauss in mind when considering his recent offering to Barack Obama. Brown, the overeager suitor, out-spent and out-thought his American counterpart. His gift: a penholder made from timber from the anti-slavery sloop HMS Gannet, sister ship to HMS Resolute from which Obama's Oval Office desk is carved. It was a present rich in moral and historical symbolism. Obama, in return, handed Brown a DVD boxset, of 25 classic American movies. Thought to include both Singing in the Rain and Raging Bull, this was rich in a rather different symbolism; two films that represent very different approaches Brown might take to the recession.
As Gordon settles down to rewatch The Godfather, he may have cause to reflect on the underlying principles of a symbolic exchange that meant he could not refuse, but that left both leaders damaged. Several great thinkers have mulled the morality of flattery, gift-giving and hierarchy. But Brown can probably take most succour from Niccolò Machiavelli, whose shrewd advice was honed in the symbolically super-charged courts of the Italian renaissance.
In The Prince, Machiavelli counsels that generosity is self-defeating for a leader. Being generous in the right spirit means not wanting to get credit, he notes; otherwise it isn't true generosity. But this kind of true, quiet giving means the public may think of you as tight-fisted. Ensuring a giving reputation, then, means making grand gestures at great expense—but this runs the risk of emptying your coffers; and thus of taxing your people punitively to refill them. The result? You end up being mean to many more taxpayers than you were kind to the few who got the presents. Far better, Machiavelli argues, simply "to have a reputation for meanness" than to strive for grand gestures and "incur a name for rapacity." President Obama, a wise leader, has obviously taken the advice. His gift wasn't exactly free, but it certainly looked cheap.
