Lewis Hyde on Gift Economies and Cultural Commons

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was Lewis Hyde ’s T he Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property . I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social…