The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 5 Elementa Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives 3 (2023) 1-2 The Gift Edited by Francesco Fistetti Francesco Fistetti Editorial – What Is the Gift Paradigm? A Reading Guide 7 First Section Alain Caillé Recent Extensions of the Gift 13 Jacques T. Godbout The Enduring Relevance of Mauss’ Essai sur le don 41 Francesco Fistetti The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 57 Annalisa Caputo Ricœur, Gift and Poetics 79 Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa 57 The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” Francesco Fistetti Università degli Studi di Bari “Aldo Moro” (Italy) doi: https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-fisf fistetti49@gmail.com Abstract In this essay I argue that Marcel Mauss’s “Essay on the Gift” (1925) is not only intended to inaugurate a new paradigm on the terrain of ethnology and anthropology, but at the same time to make the gift a kind of novum organum of the social sciences and of moral and political philosophy itself. In the first part, I reconstructed the critique that M. Merleau-Ponty and C. Lefort have made to Lévi-Strauss’s “structuralist” reading of Mauss, and, in a second part, I emphasised the importance that M. Hénaff assigned to the ceremonial gift of traditional societies as an intentional procedure of public mutual recognition between groups. But, using some of A. Caillé’s indications, I explain that this device of mutual recognition and alliance, characteristic of the gift cycle (giving/receiv- ing/reciprocating) also applies in modern societies whenever legal-political institutions become sclerotized and lose their legitimacy in the face of new actors in political action (newcomers or new arrivals, to use the Arendtian category of natality in a broad sense). Keywords: convivialism; gift and hegemony; gift paradigm; new encyclopaedia of humanities; recognition. 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in front of Marcel Mauss The theme of the gift can constitute the axis of an epistemological revolu- tion that crosses longitudinally the human and social sciences (from sociol- ogy to economics, from political philosophy to ethics, from the doctrines of law to the psychological sciences, from literary criticism to theories of language). Moreover, this was, after all, Marcel Mauss’s project when he Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-fisf https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 58 published his Essay on the Gift (1925): rather than inaugurating a new paradigm on the strictly disciplinary terrain of anthropology, what was at his heart was to make the anthropological approach to modern society – and its rationality – a sort of novum organum of the human and social sciences. In the sense of being able to understand the differences between languages, traditions and forms of life where, as we know from Bruce Chatwin, they are in constant danger of being flattened and neutralised, and to know how to transform them into cultural exchanges, in which identities mingle, or even interpenetrate, without cancelling each other out (Chatwin, 1987). On the other hand, is it not globalisation itself, with its openness to the plurality of cultures, that is pushing towards an epistemol- ogy of complexity in which it is the status of disciplines, starting with med- icine, that needs to be reshaped? “Can medicine today – Adriano Favole, for example, asks – ignore the existence of […] other languages, as body ones, for instance? Could a medical science, in its aspiration to an universal efficacy of treatments, ignore the symbolic universes of witchcraft and pos- session and in general the culturally grounded languages of the body and illness?” (Favole, 2016). Maurice Merleau-Ponty was among the first to realise that, according to Mauss, the study of “the social ‘things’ themselves, in concrete form and as they are” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960, p. 102) must go beyond the traditional antinomies between individual and collective, on which Durkheim still insisted, and grasp in societies “more than ideas or rules […] men, groups and their different forms of behaviours” (p. 102). Merleau-Ponty emphasised the fact that the datum to which Mauss draws attention in explaining the scientific fertility of his heuristic principle of “total social facts” is a historically identified and determined datum, “it is constituted”, Mauss points out in a passage quoted by Merleau-Ponty, “by Rome, by Athens, by the average Frenchman, by the Melanesian of this or that island, and not by prayer or law by itself ” (p. 103). Merleau-Ponty did not miss the epistemological revolution implicit in Mauss’s anthropological approach, which pushes Western reason to “dilate” beyond its ethnocentric boundaries and, more importantly, urges it to get involved and self-define its hermeneutical categories in the light of the encounter with the other than itself. “In conceiving of the social as a symbolism”, writes Merleau- Ponty, Mauss “had provided himself with the means for respecting indi- vidual and social reality and a cultural variety without making one imper- vious of the other” (p. 116). It is not irrelevant to note in this regard that, while appreciating the conception of the social proposed by Lévi-Strauss’ structural anthropology, Merleau-Ponty warned, with a polemical subtext, albeit oblique to Lévi-Strauss, that “As a matter of principle, structure is no Platonic idea” (p. 117) and that “Structure does not deprive society of Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 59 any of its weight or thickness” (p. 118), as if to remind him of the need to respect the individual, the reality of the social and the variety of cultures “without making one impervious of the other” (p. 116), as if to remind him of the centrality of the Maussian heuristic principle of “total social facts” and the consequent imperative of the study of the “concrete form” (p. 102). Ethnology – Merleau-Ponty never tires of repeating – “requires us to transform ourselves” (p. 120), requires us to experience a journey outside of ourselves that leads us to construct no longer a universal from the top of a rigorously objective method, but, as it were, a lateral universal through which we can incessantly “see what is ours as alien and what is alien our own” (p. 120). Here we also find a valuable indication for developing the Maussian paradigm of the gift in the direction of a novum organum of the human and social sciences, if not a new encyclopaedia of the sciences tout court. It is where he invites us to relate to sciences such as psychoanalysis from a critical perspective that makes us realise that psychoanalysis “is our own witchcraft”, the therapist is the analogue of the shaman and transfer- ence is far from being “a purely objective method” (pp. 199-122). There- fore, Merleau-Ponty tasked anthropology for “broaden our reasoning to make it capable of grasping what, in ourselves and in others, precedes and exceeds reason” and, to this endeavour, he called upon all the other sciences to work, those he called “semiological” (p. 124) and, quoting Niels Bohr, the physical sciences themselves (p. 122). However, Merleau-Ponty did not follow Mauss in the direction of making the gift cycle as the axis of reuni- fication of human knowledge, for he was more concerned with reconciling the Lévi-Straussian lesson on the “profound nature of exchange and the symbolic”, governed by structural laws, with the Husserlian phenomeno- logical lesson of lived experience and the Marxian lesson on the historicity of cultures. Indeed, the openness to otherness, which was the foundation of an “oblique universality” (p. 135); or pluriversalism, as we would say today in the language of the Convivialist Manifesto, stemmed for him from the realisation that “frontiers between cultures are erased; for the first time, no doubt, a world civilisation becomes the order of the day” (p. 124) 2. Claude Lefort critic of Lévi-Strauss Moreover, a decade earlier, Claude Lefort – a pupil of Merleau-Ponty – had emphasised Mauss’s epistemological revolution as it is based on the study of “concrete” and “total social facts”. To Lefort, Durkheim’s nephew’s way of working appeared very close to the phenomenological method “when one sees Mauss”, he wrote, “striving to overturn the artificially erected bar- Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 60 riers between sociology and history or between sociology and psychology, and affirming a reciprocity of perspectives on a real in itself indefinable” (Lefort, 1978, p. 16). Towards Lévi-Strauss, Lefort, while pointing out his convergence with the latter on certain key points, such as the concept of hau, indicative of a physicalistic – “chosiste” – interpretation of exchange (pp. 20-21) 1, had been, unlike his master Merleau-Ponty, explicitly polem- ical. “The ‘real’ Mauss”, Lefort had argued, referring to the Introduction that Lévi-Strauss preface to Mauss’s miscellany of essays Sociologie et anthro- pologie, “which would inaugurate a new era for sociology, announcing its progressive mathematisation, we think was ‘constructed’ by the author of Elementary Structures of Kinship” (pp. 16-17) 2. And yet, Lévi-Strauss says of Marcel Mauss that he “might have been expected to produce the twenti- eth-century social sciences’ Novum Organum; he held all the guidelines for it, but it has only come to be revealed in fragmented form” (Lévi-Strauss, 1965, p. 45). It is then a matter of revisiting and resuming Mauss’s “ency- clopaedic” project where Lévi-Strauss’s logicist rationalism had interrupted it by channelling it into the framework of a “logic of relations” (p. 64) oriented, rather than to Mauss’s method, implicitly to the Principia math- ematica of N. A. Whitehead and B. Russell (1910-1913), and, explicitly, on the one hand to the formalism of phonology and structural linguistics of N. S. Trubeckoj and R. Jakobson and, on the other, to the discovery in psychology of the “unconscious mechanisms” of the mind made by Freud. Lefort had already observed that reading social life as a system of logical relations, which can be found behind the heterogeneous appearance of empirical operations, this leads to the cancellation of the concrete specific- ity of social phenomena themselves for the benefit of an “underlying reality” (Lefort, 1978, p. 49) that closely resembles the Kantian noumenon. “When one replaces”, he acutely noted, “the lived exchange, the experience of rivalry, prestige or love, with the thought exchange, one obtains a system 1 This reading of hau as a “mystical” link between things, common to Lefort and Lévi-Strauss, will be contested by Vincent Descombes in Les institutions du sens, “The Notion of Hau”, Descombes will explain, “is a juridical one. The thing is animate rather than inert not because the participants have an animistic conception of inert things but because things are integrated within the system of exchange” (Descombes, 1996, p. 256). 2 The passage from Lévi-Strauss’ Introduction targeted by Lefort is the following: “The Essai sur le don therefore inaugurates a new era for the social sciences, just as phonol- ogy did for linguistics. The importance of that double event (in which Mauss’s part unfor- tunately remained in the outline stage) can best be compared to the discovery of combina- torial analysis for modern mathematical thinking” (Lévi-Strauss, 1965, pp. 41-42). For an interpretation of the relationship between Lévi-Strauss and Mauss in defence of the former’s structural approach based on the analogical application of the rigorous method of linguis- tics to the “products of social activity” (Lévi-Strauss, 1965, pp. 38-39; Hénaff, 2008). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 61 of cycles of reciprocity between A B C D families: the concrete subjects of the exchange have disappeared. The plurality of consciousnesses is reduced to a plurality of symbols, i.e. it is erased”. “Sociality”, says the author, “is only real if it is integrated into a system” and by system he means the mathematical function. “Only he forgets that the system is obtained at the price of the negation of sociality” (Lefort, 1978, p. 22). Lefort’s thesis is very clear: Lévi-Strauss “moves away from a phenomenological analysis” and the “underlying reality” he gives us back is a “mathematical reality” (p.  21), not the historical dialectic of a struggle between human groups, not a “political anthropology” (as the subtitle of Les formes de l’histoire sounds) as the key to understanding the constitution of sociality – of the social bond –, especially since the modern era, in its radical indeterminacy and in its aporetic outcomes of the dissolution of the political in the dis- courses and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. It is not by chance that Descombes reaches by other means (that of Peirce’s triadic logic) Lefort’s critique of Lévi-Strauss, where he shows how Lévi-Strauss opposes a chain of causal explanations, aimed at the knowledge of unconscious psy- chic mechanisms, to Mauss’s “holistic” programme: “Mauss’s description fails to satisfy Lévi-Strauss simply because Lévi-Strauss seeks to go beyond simple description in order to come to an explanation” (Descombes, 1996, p. 252), founded, instead, on the historical-morphological study of “total social facts”. Lévi-Strauss’ rationalist programme shows all its limits here: on the one hand, the “logic of relations”, invoked by him, is much nar- rower than Peirce’s extended logic, which in the case of the exchange of gifts analysed by Mauss includes both the relations of people to things and the relations of people to each other (Eco & Sebeok, 1983; Maddalena, 2005; Bonfantini, Fabbrichesi, & Zingale, 2015) 3; on the other hand, the causal explanation, which thanks to its objectivity will no longer be “ideo- logical”, is resolved in the passage from the intentional dimension to a natural dimension, from “ideological facts” to “brute facts” (Descombes, 1996, pp. 240-241). Hénaff insists on re-proposing the objectivist and naturalist explanation of the gift cycle and its operations (to give / to receive  / to retourn), since he is convinced, like Lévi-Strauss, that Mauss has left us only “fragments” of what he announced as a novum organum of the social sciences. In his view, Mauss in the Essai approaches a rigorously 3 Peirce’s logic of relations goes far beyond the symbolic logic to which Lévi-Strauss seems to look. Referring to his conception of symbolism, Lévi-Strauss writes: “In fact, it is nothing other than Mauss’s conception, translated from its original expression in terms of class logic into the terms of a symbolic logic which summarises the most general laws of language” (Lévi-Strauss, 1965, p. 64). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 62 scientific approach, but fails to settle in the “promised land” he glimpsed. “In this essay, MAUSS seems – rightly – to be controlled” Lévi-Strauss continues, “by a logical certainty, namely, that exchange is the common denominator of a large number of apparently heterogeneous social activi- ties. But exchange is not something he can perceive on the level of the facts” (Lévi-Strauss, 1965, p. 45). But the “logic of relations”, to which Mauss would not have adhered, is, as we said, that of a mathematical nature elaborated in the first decade of the twentieth century by White- head and Russell in the Principia mathematica, rather than the triadic logic developed by Peirce and taken up again in polemical function by Des- combes against Lévi-Strauss. Hénaff reaffirms with Lévi-Strauss that exchange is to be understood as “the internal linking of the three terms” and, therefore, as “an original structure of reciprocity” and as “the totality of a relation that must immediately be understood as integrating the moments and elements that compose it: reciprocating is already implied in the receiving that follows the giving” (Hénaff, 2017, p. 63). The diriment of the question concerns the way of conceiving the category of total social fact: while Hénaff with Lévi-Strauss wants to bring this category back to a deeper plane of thought in which operations such as hau and mana rest on an unconscious unity (Lévi-Strauss, 1965, p. 58), Descombes, making use of Peirce’s triadic logic, considers the plane of “intentionality”, i.e. the his- toricity and concreteness of the social actors involved in the operations of giving/receiving/returning, to be indispensable. Hénaff traces with rich argumentation the thesis of Lévi-Strauss according to which in Mauss the unitary phenomenon of exchange is dismembered into three empirical operations separate from each other with the consequence that Mauss “strives to reconstruct a whole out of parts; and as that is manifestly not possible, he has to add to the mixture an additional quantity which gives him the illusion of squaring his account. This quantity is hau” (Lévi- Strauss, 1965, p. 47). But if the hau, as Descombes suggests, is a juridical notion, that integrates the exchange of things into the network of people (so that we are always in the presence of a third party and never of a chain of dyadic exchanges), it follows that the symbolism associated with the total social fact of the gift has an eminently historical character in terms of the forms in which it is realised, i.e. it brings into play specific human subjects or groups, bearers of equally specific cultures and traditions, who through conflict can come to peace and mutual recognition. Undoubtedly, Marcel Hénaff is right when he states that the exchange of gifts – begin- ning with the matrimonial exchange investigated by Lévi-Strauss in The Elementary Structures of Kinship – is a structure that holds together the terms that compose it, precisely because it limpidly exemplifies a triadic Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 63 relationship such as those described by Peirce. And, since it is a legal phe- nomenon, it refers back to a pact, an alliance and, therefore, to an institu- tion founded on a normative dimension, that is, on well-defined rules to whose respect the partners are mutually committed. But this is exactly what Mauss means when he emphasises the obligation to reciprocity inher- ent in the give/receive/reciprocate cycle and in the symbolic device of the alliance. The “obscurity” of this unitary structure that is the “total social fact” of the gift – which has to do with the genesis of society as a shared construction – dissolves as soon as we take hold of the great anthropologi- cal lesson that the ethnological investigation of so-called primitive societies delivers to us as an inheritance that could be described as imperishable. It consists in understanding the kind of “wisdom” that underlies “human evolution”, i.e. that our coexistence, although exposed to transformations that are hard to imagine, can only hold up and progress if we assume the vital principle that has so far secretly made it possible: the principle of “to emerge from self, to give, freely and obligatorily” (Mauss, 1965, p. 91). Breaking tribalisms, breaking the closures that social systems tend to estab- lish in order to self-protect themselves from the new and the different, putting the rules back into play by widening their field of application/ interpretation and including, where appropriate, new actors. This is the historical dialectic to which the principle of “coming out of oneself ” refers, which Mauss exemplifies in the Māori proverb: “Give as much as you get, all will be well” (Hénaff, 2018, p. 277). As for Lefort, Hénaff rightly observes that in his writings, one breathes the atmosphere of an “optimistic age of the dialectic” that is now “behind us”, while the triumph of history, which he praised in antithesis to the primitive societies that were blocked and “stagnant”, has resolved itself into the triumph of globalised financial capitalism, no less impanelled in “inflexible hierarchies and ferocious lock- ing mechanisms” (p. 218). However, it is precisely this scenario that Mauss anticipated when he lucidly diagnosed that “Homo œconomicus is not behind us, but lies ahead” (Mauss, 1965, p. 98). And it is precisely to the phenomenon of the globalisation of this anthropological figure that Mauss’s heuristic criterion of total social facts should be applied today from the perspective of the paradigm of the gift, i.e. of a theory that considers subjects – individual or associated – as actors/donors in their being in the world and entrusts to the “wisdom” of the principle of emerge from self, to give, freely and obligatorily, the challenge of building relationships of alli- ance and mutual coexistence. From this point of view, the paradigm of the gift wants to be something more than just a scientific theory alongside others and with interpretative pretensions superior to rival ones (a sort of inter- or meta-paradigmatic theory precisely because of its vocation to pro- Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 64 pose itself as a novum organum). It wants to embody, as we shall see in conclusion, a philosophy-world or a Weltanschauung that is up to the global age we have entered (and to which we can give the name of convivialism). 3. The experience of the foreign Hasn’t the generalised utilitarianism of the homo œconomicus, hegemonic today, become a symbolic device immanent to all aspects of common life, hasn’t it become a “thought without concepts”, which cannot exist, as Hénaff points out (Hénaff, 2012, pp. 199-210)? Is there not a symbolism of homo consumens (Z. Bauman), a social imaginary created by the hyper- modern rites of advertising and fashions (S. Latouche), a kind of religion of the market (J.-C. Micah)? Therefore, Lefort’s political anthropology is still of great help to us where he makes us aware that the institutionalisation of social relations in modern societies – and a fortiori in planetary society – is inseparable from that system of collective representations that is ideology, which as demonstrated by the totalitarian regimes of the last century, tends to become “invisible”, to “dissimulate” itself in the lie of the state, to homogenise through the media every “exteriority” and internal division, continually feeding the phantasmal illusion of “a community in the cer- tainty of its cohesion” (Lefort, 1978, p. 318). We certainly cannot deny that symbolic devices of this kind – of manipulation/mystification/occulta- tion –, characteristic of ideological discourse, are at work in the same socie- ties organised around a central power we call the state with its legal-political and economic institutions. With the entry into Modernity, Hénaff explains, illustrating the difference with the ceremonial gift of archaic societies, mutual public recognition between groups – and of individuals them- selves – is entrusted to the procedures established by Law (Hénaff, 2012, pp. 199-210). So he is perfectly right when, with a wealth of arguments, in a perspective founded “in particular, with respect to the accuracy of the anthropological data and their philosophical interpretation” (p. 151), which we cannot go over here, he clarifies that the ceremonial gift of tradi- tional societies, in being an intentional procedure of mutual public recog- nition between groups, contains within itself an alliance, a pact, a conven- tion. “An alliance”, Hénaff continues, “takes up the social bond, encom- passes and transcends it into a political bond – that is, an intentional rela- tionship of association – and it embodies in every society the very emer- gence of the political” (p. 42). However, if we stop, as Hénaff does, to note that in state-type societies mutual public recognition “is performed and guaranteed by the law and the whole of the political and legal institutions, Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 65 which proclaim the dignity of our existence as citizens, subjects in law, and producers of goods” (p. 47), then we preclude ourselves from grasping the peculiarity of the Maussian paradigm of the gift. If this were the case, the latter would reach, by other means, in its ultimate outcomes the procedur- alist theory of democracy elaborated by J. Habermas or, according to dif- ferent declinations, by J.  Rawls, M. Walzer, Ch. Taylor and many others (Fistetti, 1992). Compared to these authors, however, the Maussian para- digm of the gift contains an epistemological surplus – which is also an ethical/political overhang  – represented by the disruptive status that the gift cycle can assume in the re-institutionalisation of social relations. In short, when juridical-political institutions become sclerotized, which is why the pact or alliance loses its original legitimacy in the face of new actors in political action (the newcomers or the new to use the Arendtian category of natality in a broad sense), at which point reopening the cycle of the gift means putting institutions to the “experience of the foreign” (épreuve de l’etranger: Berman, 1984). It may be the post-World War II generations advancing demands for the renegotiation of the social pact in terms of new rights (women, the disabled, homosexuals, etc.), or civic movements carrying general symbolic values such as climate justice and ecological transition, or ethno-cultural minorities. Re-opening the cycle of gift – to give / to receive / to return – means in these cases activating a process that goes beyond the logic of economic exchange, but also beyond the logic of political/symbolic exchange regulated by the Law  4. Here we are helped by the hybridity of the Maussian concept of gift, which has, as is well known, a dual aspect: interest/disinterest, obligation/freedom, eco- nomic calculation/generosity. Redefining the citizenship pact may also partly obey an economic calculation (e.g. the realisation that we cannot do without the immigrants’ labour-power), but in order to set such an ethical- 4 In a little masterpiece entitled La ville qui vient (The coming city) Hénaff pointed out that in all civilisations, the city represents a compendium mundi, a place of articulation between men and gods, earth and sky, the order of nature and the order of man’s activities. The idea of public space, therefore, goes far beyond the juridical-political dimension, as it includes religious and cosmological values that make the city a symbolic dispositif thanks to which “the city is constructed and organised to be in itself a world” (Hénaff, 2018, p. 42). With the advent of Modernity, the city becomes a formidable techno-social mega-machine, which is no longer the “analogical copy of the cosmos”, but a “techno-social melting pot in which the world is transformed”: the mixing of peoples and social classes, the interweaving of cultures produce the “first device for the exploitation of the biosphere”, the first great technological change from which all others will derive, including the industrial revolution itself (pp. 47-64). Finally, the city has progressively become a “network of networks”, a place where “the most diverse interconnections meet and overlap”, a “centre of decentralisations” (p. 73). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 66 political and legal process in motion, it is necessary to share a very strong democratic “passion”, feelings of solidarity towards the most disadvan- taged, a propensity to understand the different and the distant, i.e. true civic virtues (Aristotle referred to philia or friendship as a genuine bond between citizens of the democratic polis). The lesson that Mauss draws from the anthropological discovery of the gift as the “rock” on which all societies, not just traditional ones, stand is that the public space of modern democracies, in order to be active and effective, needs a moral infrastruc- ture that, in addition to the rights of individuals and groups, recognises above all the gifts of social cooperation, i.e. the fact that individuals and groups in their performance give something of themselves, their particular talents and their life-time. In a way, Mauss rediscovers on the ethnological and anthropological side one of Spinoza’s great teachings, that of the inti- mate connection between utilitas and virtue, since “the foundation of virtue is that endeavor itself to preserve one’s own being, and that happi- ness consists in this – that a man can preserve his own being” (Spinoza, 1954, IV, Proposition XVIII, Note, p. 202; Cristofolini, 2009; Toto, 2013). Of course, for Spinoza the determination to seek what is truly ‘useful’ requires that our affective life be illuminated by reason, that is, by an adequate understanding of ourselves and the world. Spinoza derives from this premise a very important political corollary, very close to the Maussian discovery that it is the gift that is the basis of the social bond. “From this it follows”, Spinoza continues, “that men who are governed by reason, that is to say, men who, under the guidance of reason, seek their own profit, desire nothing for themselves wich they do not desire for other men, and that, therefore, they are just, faithful, and honorable” (Spinoza, 1954, IV, Proposition XVIII, Note, p. 203) 5. Is it necessary to recall that at the end of the Essay Mauss draws “moral conclusions”, as stated in the first paragraph of chapter four, in which he affirms that “things still have a sen- timental value in addition to their venal value, assuming that there are only venal values” (Mauss, 1965, p. 83)? The connection between utilitas, virtue and politics is, therefore, very clear in Mauss’s eyes. We could enunciate his thesis as follows: the institutions of democracy are symbolic institutions (Hénaff ) or institutions of meaning (Descombes) not only because they incorporate formal procedures of mutual recognition sanctioned by law 5 It is worth recalling Proposition 71 of the Ethics: “None but those who are free are very grateful to one another”, from which the Demonstration: “None but those who are free are very profitable to one another, and are united by the closest bond of friendship […] and with equal zeal of love strive to do good to one another” (Spinoza, 1954, IV, Proposi- tion LXXI, p. 239). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 67 (constitutions, legal codes, etc.), but also because they presuppose mobilis- ing civic affections and passions. It is this anthropological background, historically determined but ceaselessly variable, that irrigates not only the sphere of economic production, but also the juridical-political institutions, in the sense that the link between utilitas, virtue and politics is not some- thing given in nature, but the outcome of power relations between social movements that are bearers of alternative and conflicting worldviews and projects for the construction of forms of coexistence. Therefore, if the mutual recognition of autonomous subjects as individuals endowed with inalienable rights is a specific achievement of modernity, it would be reduc- tive to deduce this conquest of modern times from a transcendental matrix, as Jean-Luc Nancy does when, through a circular and, therefore, fallacious argumentation, he makes the debt and credit relations typical of homo œco- nomicus descend from the human condition in general, from the notion of being-together borrowed from Heidegger’s existential analytics (Mitsein). “Sociality, community or collectivity”, he writes, “represent nothing more than the intrigue of language, recognition and mutual commitment. These three instances are not elements, but aspects of a condition which is that of being-together as the whole that is added to being but constitutes it” (Nancy, 2018, p. 32) 6. Which is the fallacious argument typical of classical economists who, as Marx pointed out, considered the categories of capital- ist society (capital, profit, interest, etc.) as “natural”, eternally existing cat- egories. 4. From Levinas to Mauss The Maussian theory of the gift thus contains a grid of concepts that, when made explicit, lead to integrating or redefining the classical conception of public space, both in the Habermasian sense of public sphere (Habermas, 1962), and in the reconstruction that Hannah Arendt proposed of it in her matrix aspects of the Greek polis (Arendt, 1958). With good reason, Hénaff reiterated that the public space of Western civilisation is “the civic 6 Nancy goes so far as to presuppose a “practical trading reason” – if one can call it that – in the Kantian sense in which reason is “practical”, i.e. through morality itself. Reason – understood as the human disposition – is itself engaged in commerce, it is also itself commerce: symbolic as much as material exchange. The symbol itself is formed in exchange and as exchange. The first trade is that of recognition. We used to speak of “com- merce” in the sense of “company/society” and also of carnal relationship (Nancy, 2018, pp. 37-38). As if to say: In the beginning, there was homo œconomicus (albeit, still in embry- onic form!). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 68 space of the Common Good” or, as we might also say, “a device of rela- tions regulated by certain norms”, in which “a reasoned agreement between the members of the city is made possible with regard to what concerns the definition of institutions, the formation of laws and their application” (Hénaff, 2018, p. 88). But when, with the entry into the society-world of globalised and financialised capitalism, this idea and this practice of public space, which we have inherited from our Greco-Roman tradition and from the Aufklärung, are eroded not only in their architectural dimension, but also in their political-institutional one, it is only the reactivation of the political as a cycle of giving/receiving/returning, realised as an agonistic challenge of generosity, that can introduce the shared construction of a new “common space” and a new “common world”. The most eloquent example is that of the so-called welfare state. To put it bluntly, without a set of philosophical, religious and socio-cultural values such as the dignity of the person, the equality of individuals beyond the diversity of race, reli- gion and culture, the belief in one’s own capabilities and life project, the desire to emancipate oneself from traditionalist prejudices and constraints, without this Weltanschauung common to parties that are ideologically very distant from each other, and even opposed to each other, the pluralistic and agonistic democracies of the post-World War II period would not have been possible. These values belonging to different symbolic universes nurtured the “conflicting consensus” (Mouffe, 2013) of the democracies of the “thirty glorious years” after World War II, creating collective and affective identifications that gave sap to universalist social policies and civic practices. As Seyla Benhabib would have put it (Benhabib, 2006), these cultural and affective values transformed the ethnos into the demos of post-World War  II democracies. Political conflict and mutual public recognition between social actors were fuelled by positive affections such as solidarity, a sense of social justice, the moral imperative to reach out to the less fortunate, empathy, and the responsibility to care for the other. Was it not this true virtue ethic, which has become almost part of a mass common sense, that mobilised an unprecedented civic and institutional commit- ment? Without such an ethic inclined to compassion, care for those in need, and openness to the other, there can be no alliance. An alliance is a commitment between unequal beings (by status, income, power) who commit themselves to recognising each other as equal in dignity and in mutual duties to be fulfilled, not a contract between formally equal sub- jects. The alliance, in order not to resolve itself in the Hegelian logic of servant/master subjugation, must bet on diversity, otherness, and differ- ence so that they translate into common and shared goods, into a form of coexistence in which, as Mauss states, it is possible to oppose each other Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 69 “without slaughtering each other” or “sacrificing each other”. There is no doubt that one or the other party can fail in their agreed duties in order to make their own will to power prevail. Therefore, in finding the balance – and such an undertaking succeeds only if there is the will to dialogue – lies the art of conflict management. Before Axel Honneth, Emmanuel Levinas had linked politics to “the struggle for recognition”: “Politics tends toward reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it ensures happiness. And political law concludes and sanctions the struggle for recognition. Religion is Desire and not struggle for recognition” (Levinas, 1961, p. 64; Honneth, 1992) to point out that the relationship with the other, in order to be authentic, must be, at least partially, asymmetrical, i.e. without reciprocity or, as Levinas puts it, it must be a “surplus”, which is “possible in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, responsibility, and sacrifice, which are the condition for equality itself ” (Levinas, 1961, p. 64). But if Levinas calls this “possible surplus” a “religion” by relegating the exchange of goods to the circle of the economic and consigning happiness to justice understood as legal-formal equality (the question of the Third), Mauss, Durkheim’s nephew and pupil, takes a much more impervious, but theoretically more fruitful path. Reciprocity is not to be understood as the alternative or the opposite of Levinas’ “possible surplus”, but as its integration, as the other side of the same coin  7. For Mauss, this is precisely the self-obligation of the gift, its ancipitous status of obligation and freedom. An incipit status means that what Levinas separates – ethics as an asymmetrical relation- ship with the Face on the one hand, and the question of the Third as a reciprocal pact between contracting parties considered equal on the other – Mauss, on the other hand, holds it together by playing out within differ- ent temporal contingencies now the register of reciprocity (of the mutual recognition of equals sanctioned by shared rules), now that of ethical self- obligation towards newcomers who demand recognition. Mauss’s spirit of the gift is not oblateness as a noble religious tradition has transmitted it to us, it is not the disqualification or putting reciprocity out of play, but in the modern age it is the willingness on the part of the dominant institu- tions – state, associations, organisations  – to renew the cycle of giving/ receiving/renewing every time the demand for recognition from new social 7 In this, Hénaff ’s critique of the Levinasian conception of reciprocity as a concept confined to the sphere of contract and exchange of equivalents is a point-of-no-return. Levinas’s community is “a community of pure dissymmetry and unilateral recognitions: a boundless nonclosure […]. The ethical bond is and remains beyond the political realm, situated as it is on a level impervious to symmetry” (Hénaff, 2012, p. 74). But ethics is that “surplus” required by the contenders to renew the covenant of living together, when the latter breaks down due to the emergence of new demands for recognition. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 70 actors arises. To paraphrase a Habermasian expression from Knowledge and Interest (Habermas, 1973), the spirit of the gift is in modern societies the “emancipatory interest”, which goes beyond the “instrumental” or “stra- tegic” interest, since it impels subordinate subjects (be they individuals or associated with human groups) to be recognised as public subjects of an organised community or as parts of a demos that understands itself neither as an ethnically defined identity nor as a set of rational agents moved exclu- sively by their own self-interest. But it understands itself as a community of subjects willing to reopen the cycle of giving/receiving/returning, whenever the institutional system is subjected to the test of otherness. 5. Gramsci, Mauss and Sen: concrete freedom In order to better understand the dialectic between reciprocity in the legal- political sense and ethical self-obligation, we are helped by Amartya Sen’s reflection with his distinction between “functionings” and “capabilities” 8. The “capabilities” approach, precisely because it looks not so much at goods or resources as at people’s basic capacity to “function” in a certain way in the democratic space and to give concrete content to their freedom, emphasises the contingent dimension of the pact and the need for it to be open to the other, where reciprocity in the observance of rules and ethical obligation towards those who will legitimately claim to be part of it in the future are both constitutive elements of democratic coexistence. On the other hand, it may seem a coincidence we do not know how coinciden- tal, Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks had reflected on the same example, illustrated by Sen, of suffering hunger to clarify the concept of concrete freedom linked to the objective conditions of life of the subject and his actual “possibilities” of choice. “Possibility”, writes Gramsci, “means lib- erty. The measure of liberty enters into the concept of man. That there are objective possibilities of not starving to death has its importance, it seems. But the existence of objective conditions, or possibilities, or liberty is still 8 As is well known, by “functioning” Sen means what a person may want to do or want to be in life. They concern basic needs and desires (such as being sufficiently nour- ished and not suffering from avoidable illnesses), as well as needs and activities of a high and complex nature (such as being able to participate in the political life of the community or having self-respect). By “capacities” (or “capacitations”) Sen means all the possible combina- tions of functioning that each of us is able to enact in our life contexts: “Capability is thus a kind of freedom: the substantive freedom to achieve alternative functioning combinations (or, less formally put, the freedom to achieve various lifestyles)” (Sen, 1999, p. 75). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 71 not enough: one must ‘know’ them and know how to make use of them. Man, in this sense, is concrete will, that is, the effected application of the abstract will or vital impulse to the concrete means that realise this will” (Gramsci, 1975, p. 1338). What is worth noting is that Gramsci attributes the “ability” to realise the conditions of concrete freedom to man’s political “capacity” to “transform” and “direct” other men, i.e. to associate in order to live together. This calls into question the politics of alliance as the crea- tion of shared conditions of life in common and at the same time ethics as the realisation of the individual personality. In this sense, he states that “man is essentially ‘political’, since the activity to consciously transform and direct other men realises his ‘humanity’, his ‘human nature’” (p. 1338). In short, the alliance is not an immutable datum or a result guaranteed once and for all, but is itself an “agonistic” activity, which renews itself recur- rently, based on historical circumstances and the re-interpretation of the values that generated it. In a word, the alliance must always be interpreted with respect to a parallelogram of power relations (with their respective symbolic and value universes) between social actors, including those that gradually appear on the scene, and, therefore, as an ever precarious point of equilibrium. It is no coincidence that in order to describe the uncertain and problematic nature of the alliance, Mauss takes as his model a situation that Gramsci would call a clash of hegemonies – and Honneth a struggle for recognition  – when he writes that in relations between rival groups, “there is no middle way: one trusts completely, or one mistrusts completely” (Mauss, 1965, p. 104). Coming to terms, then, is a wager, a challenge, a risk, and presupposes the gesture of “laying down one’s arms” in order to renegotiate and redefine existing rules and values. The cycle of giving always begins again in this way: self-obligation to risk the gift of alliance and mutual trust. The phase of political democracy that we experienced after World War II (the so-called “thirty glorious years”) perfectly illustrates the “agonistic” essence of the alliance. The negative side effects associated with this historical-political cycle of democracy, which in part Tocqueville had already foreseen as an inevitable consequence of a mimetic passion for equality (clientelism, passivity, narcissistic consumerism, political disaffec- tion, fiscal crisis of the state, etc.) or a narcissistic conception of equality (the “state’s” own “political” and “social” values, etc.), were the result of the “agonistic” nature of the “political” alliance or of a narcissistic conception of individual rights, it does not detract from the fact that modern democ- racies have been not only the outcome of power relations in the conflict between capital and the labour movement, but at the same time a decli- nation of the Maussian spirit of gift, the expression of an “emancipatory interest”: an alliance, as Mauss put it, in which the contracting subjects Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 72 gave up something, “gave” themselves to each other “without sacrificing” (where “sacrificing” is equivalent to the cancellation of all self-interest). But if, as then happened with the triumph of neo-liberalism, over attachment to the common good prevails a complex of affections such as self-interest, the desire for easy personal enrichment, narrow proprietary individualism, the outcome will be the hybris of the logic of homo œconomicus that will invade all institutions and all spheres of life. And on the political level, the regression from demos to ethnos, to the tribalisation of collective identities (Prosperi, 2016). Individual, civil, social and economic rights will also be dragged into an egotistic and nihilistic drift, to which no dutifulness on the part of social subjects and actors corresponds. Instead of citizens shar- ing, out of their singular differences, the same public space and a common ethos, we will have consumers and customers, subjects of oligarchic democ- racies, if not autocratic regimes. The ineluctable downside of this option, which may even be ideologically passed off as a rational choice (here again Lefort’s warning on the mechanisms of the functioning of ideological dis- course returns), will be that of stirring up the sad and violent passions of envy, hatred of difference, mass narcissism, scapegoating, racism, sexism, nationalism, terrorism, etc. (Bodei, 1991; Pulcini, 2001). Certainly, trust and openness to the other entail exposure to the risk of checkmate. “Two groups of men who meet can only either draw apart, and, if they show mistrust towards one another or issue a challenge, fight – or they can nego- tiate” (Mauss, 1965, pp. 104-105). If there is no willingness to risk the “experience of the foreigner”, if those who previously recognised them- selves in a pact of citizenship close themselves off in defence of their public space as if in a fortress, rejecting what Mauss calls the “law of hospitality” (p. 104), they will turn the pact into a fetish, into a theological dogma not susceptible to revision or further enlargement. The consequence can only be war, mutual hostility, the servant/master relationship, or “volun- tary servitude” as the other side of the “steel cage” of an economic-political power that tends to be homogeneous and unopposed. In a word, the risk is that the demos will regress to the level of the ethnos with the result of a democracy without a demos or with a people conforming to the description of the classics, from Plato to Machiavelli, from Thucydides to Hobbes, from Tocqueville to Ortega y Gasset, from Croce to Canetti: a mass of individuals obeying irrational drives, prey to demagogues and barkers. In this framework, which is that of post-Fordist financial capitalism, Mauss’s diagnosis that homo œconomicus is in front of us and not behind us takes on renewed relevance (Aime, 2013). Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 73 6. A new philosophy-world It is precisely in this context – which is that of a planetary society domi- nated by globalised capitalism – that it becomes meaningful to take up the Maussian project of a novum organum for humanities and social sciences that has the gift cycle as its gravitational centre. I refer to a more articulate discussion of this theme that I have developed elsewhere (Fistetti, 2017). On the other hand, it can be said that the critical work of MAUSS has been moving in this direction since its inception (Caillé, 2014). Here I would like only briefly to try to move MAUSS’s line of research critique of generalised economism forward. In fact, in Mauss’s perspective, it cannot be accomplished by limiting itself exclusively to the plane of scientific argumentation, but must be transferred to a new vision of life, to a civic philosophy, to a conception of living-together and being-in-the-world such that it is innervated in beliefs, habits and social practices that are alterna- tive to the dominant ones. On this terrain we find the Spinozian theme of the affections and passions in their relationship with politics and, to use Machiavelli’s formula, with “civil living”. When Mauss emphasises at the end of the Essay that the transcultural wisdom of the gift consists in being able to invent a form of coexistence in which “to oppose without slaughtering each other”, we cannot forget that as a militant socialist, a friend of Jaurès, he devoted a considerable part of his time to the founda- tion of production and consumption cooperatives (Mauss, 1997). In this political and trade union commitment he saw the construction of forms of community life that not only raised the “social” level of the economy, but also strengthened, we might say, the power of action of individuals, i.e. the feelings of “loyalty”, “industriousness”, “respect” and mutual esteem of citizens (Mauss, 1965, pp. 106-108). Associationist socialism – of Eng- lish inspiration, to which Mauss looked sympathetically – represented for him the ideological referent of a political praxis of this kind. Now, on the horizon of the global age, in order to defeat the hegemony of generalised utilitarianism, it is necessary to oppose a philosophy-world – or, as Gram- sci would say, a philosophy of praxis – which, far from proposing itself as a complete theoretical system, brings together the instances, affections and socio-cultural values common to the various social movements of resist- ance and struggle against globalised capitalism in view of a post-neoliberal world. And that, above all, is concerned with placing at the centre of the critical debate new forms of social organisation aimed at restoring momen- tum to the democratic ideal, once it has been ascertained that the myth of the unlimited growth of the productive forces and with it the illusion of the homo faber of finding a technical solution to the global risks to which Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 74 humanity is exposed is now unfeasible. As if the catastrophes of techno- logical progress could be escaped by unlimitedly increasing its intrinsic logic without changing the direction of travel (Dupuy, 2004). Of course, it matters little whether this worldview is called convivialism or by any other name. What is essential is that it embodies a widespread culture, a common sense in gestation, a collective consciousness in fieri that walks on the legs of concrete social subjects. For this to happen, it is best not to lose sight of Mauss’s lesson, namely to link the horizontal dimension of movements criticising the generalised economicist model with the vertical dimension of the re-institutionalisation of public space so that the reopening of the gift cycle produces both the legitimisation of new social subjects and the renormalisation of the economic, which has been completely deregulated following the triumph of financial capitalism (Pennacchi, 2015). It is barely worth recalling the enormous importance Mauss assigns in the Essay to law as an instrument of institutionalisation and re-institutionalisation of social relations. Thus, a civic philosophy aimed at scanning the lexicon of a possible new world in the making and experimenting its translatability into concrete practices of coexistence here and now. References Aime, M. (2013). Dono, dunque siamo. Otto buone ragioni per credere in una società solidale. Torino: UTET. Arendt, H. (1958). The human condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Benhabib, S. (2006). Another cosmopolitanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berman, A. (1984). L’épreuve de l’étranger: culture et traduction dans l’Allemagne romantique. Herder, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hölderlin. Paris: Gallimard. Eng. transl. by S. Heyvaert, The experience of the foreign: Culture and translation in romantic Germany. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992. Bodei, R. (1991). Geometria delle passioni. Milano: Feltrinelli. Bonfantini, M., Fabbrichesi, R., & Zingale, S. (2015). Su Peirce. Interpretazioni, ricerche, prospettive. Milano: Bompiani. Caillé, A. (2014). 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The sign of three: Holmes, Dupin, Peirce. Bloom- ington, IN: Indiana University Press. Favole, A. (2016). La bussola dell’antropologo. Roma - Bari: Laterza. Fistetti, F. (1992). Democrazia e diritti degli altri. Oltre lo Stato-nazione. Bari: Palomar. Fistetti, F. (2017). Convivialità. Una filosofia per il XXI secolo. Genova: Il nuovo me langolo. Gramsci, A. (1975). Quaderni del carcere, Vol. II. Torino: Einaudi. Gramsci, A. (1995). The philosophy of Benedetto Croce. In Further selections from the Prison Notebooks (pp. 498-524). Eng. transl. by D. Boothman. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Habermas, J. (1962). Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Neuwied - Berlin: Luchterhand. Eng. transl. by T.  Burger & F. Lawrence, The structural transformation of the public sphere: An Inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989. Habermas, J. (1968). Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Eng. transl. by J. J. Shapiro, Knowledge and human interests. Boston: Polity Press, 1971. Habermas, J. (1973). A postscript to Knowledge and human interests. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 3(2), 157-189. Hénaff, M. (2008). Claude Lévi-Strauss, le passeur de sens. Perrin: Paris. Hénaff, M. (2012). Le don des philosophes. Repenser la réciprocité. Paris: Seuil. Eng. transl. by J.-L. Morhange, The philosophers’ gift: Re-examining reciprocity. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Hénaff, M. (2017). Au risque de soi. Parler, donner, attester. La Revue du MAUSS, 50(2), 64-84. Hénaff, M. (2018). La città che viene. Roma: Castelvecchi. Honneth, A. (1992). Kampung um Anerkennung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag. Eng. transl. by J. Anderson, The struggle for recognition: The moral grammar of social conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Lefort, C. (1974). Esquisse d’une genèse de l’idéologie dans les sociétés modernes. Textures, 8-9, 3-54. Repris dans C. Lefort, Les formes de l’histoire. Essais d’anthropologie politique (pp. 481-482). Paris: Gallimard, 1978. Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et inf ini. Paris: La Haye. Eng. transl. by A. Lingis, Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Uni- versity Press, 1969. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Francesco Fistetti 76 Lévi-Strauss, C. 1965 (1950). Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss. Paris: PUF. Eng. transl. by F. Baker, Introduction to the work of March Mauss. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987. Maddalena, G. (2005). Introduzione a C. S. Peirce, Scritti scelti (pp. 9-44). Torino: UTET. Mauss, M. (1902-1903). Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie. Eng. transl. by R. Brain, A general theory of magic. London - New York: Routledge, 1972 (2001). Mauss, M. (1925). Essai sur le don. Paris: PUF. Eng. transl. by W. D. Halls, The gift: The form and reason for exchange in Archaic societies. London - New York: Routledge, 2002. Mauss, M. (1997). Écrits politiques. Paris: Fayard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1960). Signes. Paris: Gallimard. Eng. transl. by R. Mc Clarey, Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. Mouffe, C. (2013). Agonistics: Thinking the world politically. London - New York: Verso. Nancy, J.-L. (2018). Cosa resta della gratuità? Milano: Mimesis. Pennacchi, L. (2015). Il soggetto dell’economia. Dalla crisi a un nuovo modello di svi- luppo. Roma: Ediesse. Prosperi, A. (2016). Identità. L’altra faccia della storia. Roma - Bari: Laterza. Pulcini, E. (2001). L’individuo senza passioni. Individualismo moderno e perdita del le game sociale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri. Pulcini, E. (2011). Invidia. La passione triste. Bologna: il Mulino. Sen, A. (1999). Development as freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. Sen, A. (2000). Lo sviluppo è libertà. Milano: Mondadori. Spinoza, B. (1954). Ethics. Edited with an Introduction by J. Gutmann. New York: Hafner Publishing Company. Toto, F. (2013). Amicizia, gelosia e gratitudine nell’Etica di Benedetto Spinoza. In Consecutio temporum. Hegeliana/Marxiana/Freudiana, 2(4), 270-287. Riassunto In questo saggio sostengo che il “Saggio sul dono” di Marcel Mauss (1925) non solo in- tende inaugurare un nuovo paradigma sul terreno dell’etnologia e dell’antropologia, ma allo stesso tempo fa del dono una sorta di novum organum delle scienze sociali e della stes- sa filosofia morale e politica. Nella prima parte, ho ricostruito la critica che M. Merleau- Ponty e C. Lefort hanno mosso alla lettura “strutturalista” di Mauss da parte di Lévi- Strauss e, in una seconda parte, ho sottolineato l’importanza che M. Hénaff ha assegnato al dono cerimoniale delle società tradizionali come procedura intenzionale di riconosci- Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 77 mento pubblico reciproco tra gruppi. Ma, utilizzando alcune indicazioni di A. Caillé, spiego che questo dispositivo di riconoscimento reciproco e di alleanza, caratteristico del ciclo del dono (dare/ricevere/ricambiare), si applica anche nelle società moderne quando le istituzioni politico-giuridiche si sclerotizzano e perdono la loro legittimità di fronte a nuovi attori dell’azione politica (nuovi arrivate o nuovi arrivati, per usare la categoria arendtiana di natalità in senso lato). Copyright (©) 2023 Francesco Fistetti Editorial format and graphical layout: copyright (©) LED Edizioni Universitarie This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. How to cite this paper: Fistetti, F. (2023). The gift paradigm: Towards a science of “total social facts”. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 3(1-2), 57-77. doi: https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-fisf Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives – 3 (2023) 1-2 https://www.ledonline.it/elementa - Online ISSN 2785-4426 - Print ISSN 2785-4558 https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-fisf https://www.ledonline.it/elementa Elementa_3-2023-1-2_00b_Sommario-PROVV.pdf Editorial What Is the Gift Paradigm? A Reading Guide First Section Recent Extensions of the Gift The Enduring Relevance of Mauss’ Essai sur le don The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” Ricœur, Gift and Poetics