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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 15

Jacques T. Godbout
The Enduring Relevance of Mauss’ Essai sur le don 43

Francesco Fistetti
The Gift Paradigm: Towards a Science of “total social facts” 59

Annalisa Caputo
Ricœur, Gift and Poetics 81

Second Section

Andreana Lavanga - Francesco Sulla
Praise as a Gift in the Relationship between Teachers 93 
and Their Students

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Anna Daniela Savino
The Gift of Desire: The “inner voice” between Neuroscience 105 
and Theory of Attachment

Various

Roberta Baldini - Maria Grazia Mada Logrieco
The Gifted Student: Gifts and Talents Development 125

Alessandro De Santis - Stefania Fantinelli
Digital Well-Being as a New Kind of Adaptation 135 
to the New Millennium Needs: A State-of-the-Art Analysis

Salvatore Iuso - Pia Marinaro
Education and Culture: Pluralism in the Age of Globalization 153

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15

Recent Extensions of the Gift
Alain Caillé
Université Paris Nanterre (France)

doi: https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-caia
alaincaille90@gmail.com

Abstract

In this essay, Alain Caillé reconstructs the “singular history of the MAUSS (Anti-
Utilitarian Movement in the Social Sciences)” from when in early 1980 a group of 
friends from different disciplines (sociologists, economists, philosophers, etc.) decided to 
found the “Bulletin du MAUSS” to counter the growing hegemony of utilitarianism 
and economism in the human sciences and in the philosophical disciplines themselves. 
The Bulletin would initially become the “Revue du MAUSS trimestrielle” from 1988 
to 1992 and from 1993 to 2022 the “Revue du MAUSS semestrielle” until its cur-
rent anglophone extension “MAUSS International”. The author takes Marcel Mauss’ 
definition of the gift as a “total social fact” and explains that the gift paradigm is a 
“translation operator” in the sense that it is continuously enriched in interaction with 
existing discourses. The theoretical operation that Caillé proposes is to explicate Mauss’s 
discovery by moving from a simple gift paradigm, based on the perspective of simple 
reciprocity between giver and recipient, to an expanded gift paradigm. In this way, it 
can dialogue with other paradigms and other currents of thought (theory of recognition, 
theory of care, theory of human development, etc.). And from here to a conception of the 
gift as “adonnement”, i.e. the commitment of human subjects to bring something new 
and unprecedented into the world.

Keywords: axiomatic of interest; extended gift paradigm; MAUSS’S epistemologi-
cal revolution; simple gift paradigm.

I am a well-bred boy. I was taught not that “the self is hateful”, as Pascal 
wrote, but that it should not be put forward, and that it is better to listen 
to others than to talk about oneself. My editor, however, encourages me to 
talk about myself with this book. I have already published many books, 
indeed, about thirty, some of which are about giving as well. “What is new 

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Alain Caillé

16

about this one? Why is it particularly important to you”, she asks? The 
question is legitimate and forces me to come out of my reserve. After all, I 
am now of a certain age, not to say a definite age, which authorizes me, in 
the hope of making the reader understand better what is at stake in this 
work, to briefly retrace the intellectual path I have followed for some fifty 
years. In retrospect, it seems to me that everything I have tried to think 
about for half a century (yes, time does fly) stems from my astonishment at 
the amazing contrast between the two disciplines in which I was trained 
and which gave me a doctorate, economics on the one hand, and sociology 
on the other. The certainty that animates the first of these two disciplines, 
at least for the majority of its representatives, is that human subjects are or 
must be considered as (more or less) rational calculators whose only aim is 
to maximize their individual interest. Sociology has a much more complex 
representation of humans. Too much so, perhaps. The sociology I favor, 
that of the classics, is multidisciplinary. When I was 23, I had the good 
fortune to be appointed as a sociology assistant at the University of Caen 
with Claude Lefort, the intellectual heir of the famous philosopher Mau-
rice Merleau-Ponty, and himself considered one of the main theorists of 
democracy and totalitarianism. The sociology we taught at the time was in 
dialogue with all the disciplines of the human and social sciences, anthro-
pology, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis and political economy. At the 
crossroads of all these disciplines, one text shone out: Marcel Mauss’ Essay 
on the Gift. Fascinating, disconcerting since the gift that he showed his 
readers with the help of a gigantic wealth of ethnographic materials, the 
gift that structured archaic societies, hardly resembles what the word gift 
most often and spontaneously evokes today: a radically disinterested ges-
ture, close to charity or sacrifice. Under his pen, it appears on the contrary 
as a “hybrid” act, charged with ambivalence, disinterested, yes in a sense, 
but just as much interested, both free and obliged. In any case, it is far 
from the figure of homo œconomicus that economists hold dear. By general-
izing his discovery, I gradually came to the conviction that the gift relation, 
as analyzed by Mauss, is the general form of relationship between human 
subjects insofar as they intend to consider themselves as persons recognized 
as such and valued in their singularity. It is an operator of recognition and 
singularization: I give you this, and not something else, because you are 
you and not someone else. This is enough to outline a vision of human 
subjects that is infinitely richer and more powerful, more general in any 
case, than that which inspires the dominant economic science. If we con-
sider that standard economic science is the crystallization of a utilitarian 
vision of the world – a vision, to put it briefly, that reduces all questions to 
a single one: “Of what use is it (for me)?” – then it is easy to see how this 

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conception of the gift is at the heart of an anti-utilitarian approach to the 
human and social sciences. “Anti-utilitarianism” is the banner under which, 
with my friends of the MAUSS (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste en Science 
Sociale), I have led and still lead all my scientific, but also ethical and polit-
ical, struggles. These, during two or three decades, were seen with a strange 
eye by my colleagues in various disciplines, most often skeptical and suspi-
cious but for occasional and punctual sympathies. Gradually things have 
changed. An international Colloquium organized five years ago at the Cha-
teau de Cerisy la Salle, a high site of intellectual exchange in France, 
allowed us to take the measure of this change. It brought together a good 
thirty renowned representatives of the social and human sciences – sociolo-
gists, but also anthropologists, philosophers, historians, geographers and 
economists – all of whom agreed on two crucial points in my view (Caillé 
et al., 2018). (1) The first is the idea that in the humanities and social sci-
ences, disciplinary specializations only have meaning and legitimacy if they 
are thought of as moments of a generalist social science that is too often 
lost from view. A generalist social science of which it is urgent to train … 
specialists (on the model of generalists in medicine). (2) The second point 
of agreement, to my great and happy surprise I must say, was, even among 
economists, that the urgency is to overcome the current scientific and 
political hegemony of economic science, and that this can only be done on 
anti-utilitarian grounds. But the agreement now reached on anti-utilitari-
anism does not imply an agreement on what I call the gift paradigm, i.e. on 
the idea that in order to understand our human and social condition in all 
its complexity, we must start from (or return to) Mauss’ discovery. After all, 
isn’t it logical to start at the beginning, in other words, with what we know 
or understand about the way primitive societies function? And this is where 
I come back to the question of my editor, Sylvie Fenczak. Why is this book 
important to me? For three sets of reasons. First of all, it seems to me that 
the conception of gift that I am presenting here has now come to full 
maturity and that it is worthwhile to make it known in its generality and 
its coherence to the general public. This conception has been developed 
little by little, in successive stages, from hypothesis to hypothesis. Each step 
has had its readers but very few of them will have had the time and the 
availability to follow the path step by step, book after book. And, if I am 
not mistaken, if the gift is indeed “the general form of the relationship 
between human subjects insofar as they intend to consider themselves as 
persons recognized as such and valued in their singularity”, then it is clear 
that the question of the gift, of its nature and of its modalities, is the most 
important thing for all of us. And, in fact, I and my friends have noticed 
that each time we have exposed our reflections to a wide variety of audi-

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ences, the general public, associative activists, managers, etc., they have 
met with an immediate response, as if they were finally putting into words 
what everyone feels more or less confusedly. This is because the question of 
the gift touches on life itself. But this book is not only for the general 
public. It is also intended for my colleagues in the humanities and social 
sciences. A certain number of them, as I have just said, recognize them-
selves in anti-utilitarianism. I would now like to try to convince them that 
the gift paradigm represents to date the most general anti-utilitarian for-
mulation – non-economicist if one prefers – and the one best able to dia-
logue with a whole set of other existing theoretical constellations, for ex-
ample the theories of care, or those of the struggle for recognition, pragma-
tist sociologies, the economics of conventions, connected history, anthro-
pology, etc. None of them, of course, is reducible to the paradigm of the 
gift, but each can be translated into its language, illuminating and nourish-
ing it in return. This is also true of one of the most promising advances in 
contemporary sociology, the theory of resonance developed by the German 
sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa, already world-famous for his 
Acceleration and now for his latest book, Resonance. Between the paradigm 
of the gift and the theory of resonance, there are strong … resonances. But 
in order to bring them out, to put the paradigm of the gift in effective 
dialogue with the constellations of thought that I have just named, we 
must go clearly and resolutely beyond what the discovery of Mauss alone 
allows us to think. It was necessary to make it explicit and to restore it in all 
its theoretical power against misleading or lazy interpretations. This is what 
I have done in my previous books on the gift. It was also necessary to show 
its links with the question of the struggle for recognition. But, beyond that, 
in order for it to take on its full philosophical or psychological significance, 
it is necessary not to limit the gift to relations between people and to extend 
it to the relationship of subjects to life, to nature and to creativity. This is 
what I propose to do here thanks to the concepts of “donation” and “ado-
nation”. 

Finally, under the name of convivialism, I have been trying for some 
years to contribute to the elaboration of a common language, at the same 
time theoretical, ethical and political, that can be shared by alternative 
intellectuals and civic activists of very diverse origins and ideological sen-
sibilities. The Convivialist Manifesto, published in 2013, which sets out a 
whole series of points of agreement, translated into a dozen languages, is 
now beginning to be known and appreciated in many circles. It is the result 
of collective writing. But a number of its central theses are inspired by the 
gift paradigm. Convivialists will find here the main lines of an anthropol-
ogy, of a vision of the human being, quite different from those that still 

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inspire the majority of existing political projects. Without an alternative 
anthropology, no other politics will be possible.

As I finish this foreword, I tell myself that yes, this book is important 
to me. More than all my previous ones, indeed.

1. Introduction to extensions of the gift domain

For nearly forty years now, the authors gathered around the Revue du 
MAUSS (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste en Sciences Sociales) have been 
working, each in their own way, to develop all the implications of the dis-
covery made by Marcel Mauss in his famous Essay on the Gift (1925), prob-
ably the most important text in the history of the social sciences as well as 
moral and political philosophy. This discovery could be summarized in a 
few words: social relationships are created and maintained by entering into 
the dynamics of what Mauss called the triple obligation of giving, receiving 
and returning. All this time, we have not ceased to be astonished and to 
marvel that this thesis, so simple in appearance, gives us so much to see, 
to think, to observe and to understand. However, we must now try to go 
beyond Mauss’ discovery while at the same time remaining faithful to it. 
This is what the present book proposes to do. But before explaining why 
and how, it will perhaps be useful to present a brief history of the journal 
La Revue du MAUSS, because it is unique and provides a good illustration 
of the fecundity of the spirit of the gift, of the “spirit of the given thing”, of 
its hau. This hau, explained by the Māori sage Ranapiri in a famous passage 
of the Essay on the Gift, that has become one of the most widely known and 
discussed concepts in the whole history of anthropology.

2. The unique history of MAUSS

The history of MAUSS begins in a modest way. In 1980, Gérald Berthoud, 
professor of Anthropology at the University of Lausanne, and I, then assis-
tant professor of Sociology at the University of Caen, attended a conference 
on the gift. We were surprised to find that almost none of the participants, 
economists, philosophers or psychoanalysts, referred to Mauss, and that for 
all of them, the gift could only be an illusion, since – as seemed obvious to 
them – only personal interest, more or less hidden, guides our actions. For 
my part, I was astonished at the same time by the economicist and indi-
vidualist trends (one spoke at that time of “methodological individualism”) 
that were affecting the social sciences, biology and political philosophy. We 

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Alain Caillé

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then decided, with a few friends from various disciplines, to create a sort 
of liaison bulletin between those who shared our surprise and concern. We 
called it Bulletin du MAUSS, which allowed us to kill two birds with one 
stone by criticizing, on the one hand, utilitarianism, which seemed to us to 
be the matrix of the economic drift we were denouncing, and, on the other 
hand, to pay homage to Marcel Mauss. Without having the slightest aware-
ness of it at the time, when we were only thinking of resisting economism 
with the means at hand, it was a powerful research program that entailed 
both a critical aspect – challenging utilitarianism and economism – and 
a constructive dimension (the elaboration of what we were going to call, 
some fifteen years later, “the gift paradigm”).

The means at our disposal were, to say the least, very limited, and 
they have remained so. Without the symbolic and financial support of any 
institution or research laboratory, we had to do everything by ourselves. 
The articles that we published in the Bulletin du MAUSS were simply pho-
tocopied, those that we wrote were typed on old typewriters that made 
stencils, we designed the covers (which did not last very long) with … 
decals, and the whole was printed in offset. I was helped in this by three 
young doctoral students in economics, Rigas Arvanitis, Cengiz Aktar and 
Ahmet Insel who distributed copies in the bookshops of the Latin Quarter. 
Rigas, who has since become more of a sociologist than an economist, was 
until 2020 the director of the IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Dévelop-
pement). Cengiz, professor at the Bahçesehir University of Istanbul, closed 
by Erdogan’s government, is in Turkey the best known advocate of acces-
sion to the European Union. Ahmet, former vice-president of the Univer-
sity of Paris I, creator of the Franco-Turkish University of Galatasaray, is 
the main columnist of the famous newspaper Cumhurryet, whose manag-
ing team is currently in prison. Both of them, together with three other 
well-known Turkish intellectuals, are behind the request for an apology to 
the Armenians for the genocide they suffered. Both are now banned from 
entering Turkey. Curiously, M. Thorel, the person in charge of the social 
science and philosophy departments of the PUF bookstore on the Place 
de la Sorbonne, took a liking to us and deposited stacks of our review 
near the cash register. Despite the cobbled-together appearance, which was 
puzzling even at the time, we were quickly read by a number of academics, 
particularly foreigners, who were intrigued, and wanted to see what was 
happening in France. From the very first issue we received the support of 
two great names in social science, who had sympathized with the declara-
tion of intent published in our first issue: the economist Albert Hirschman 
and the philosopher Charles Taylor. Good fairies, we surmise, had bent 
over our improvised cradle.

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A few years later, we had gained enough of an audience for the publisher 
La Découverte to offer to take us under their wing. Thus began a second 
period of the journal. The Bulletin became La Revue du MAUSS, which 
appeared from 1988 to 1992 with a mouse-gray cover, and a much larger 
circulation. It was necessary to become serious, and this was fortunate – even 
if some regretted it – because the number of authors who were sympathetic 
to the journal increased considerably. So much so that it became tempting 
to publish their books. That’s when we had to revise our agreement with our 
publisher. In 1993, while continuing to benefit from distribution through 
the La Découverte network and under its label, we thus resumed our auton-
omy, assuming all the production costs of both the journal – which became 
La Revue semestrielle du MAUSS – and the collection of “La Bibliothèque du 
MAUSS” (The MAUSS Library), which was then launched and would go 
on to publish nearly seventy titles – and still counting.

What is interesting in this history, and why I thought it appropriate 
to point out some of its highlights, is that this scientific adventure devel-
oped without any institutional support. I don’t think there is any other 
example. If we have been able to hold on until now without deviating from 
the initial project, it is because it was not merely technical. The critique of 
economism, the reflection on the power but also the dangers and ambiva-
lences of the gift, all this speaks to many people who very quickly perceive 
what is at stake ethically, existentially and politically. This is what allowed 
us to reach a financial viability, obviously very precarious, but in the end 
sufficient to survive until now despite some delicate moments.

The other side of the coin, the downside, has been, for a long time, a 
certain academic invisibility. As we did not belong to any particular disci-
pline – anthropology, economics, sociology, philosophy, etc. – but to all of 
them, and as we did not claim to belong to any of the established schools 
(we even criticized them), it was almost forbidden to mention us in these 
different fields. And since we had no institutional identity, we did not fit 
into the usual identification systems, so people wondered what was behind 
it all. Some of the criticisms that were addressed to us (and occasionally 
still are) were of a rare indigence. They seemed to think – or pretended to – 
that since we were criticizing what I have called the axiomatics of interest – 
the monism of the explanation by interest – it was because we believed that 
human relations were based on charity and altruism. They were strangely 
oblivious of the fact that the gift studied by Mauss is an “agonistic gift”, a 
kind of war by the gift. A war that allows us to avoid war and conflict, but 
which nevertheless contains violence.

Gradually, however, suspicions have dissipated, and criticisms have 
become rarer. Even if, seen from the heart of each particular discipline, 

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the journal remains largely a USO, an Unidentified Scientific Object, it 
now enjoys fairly general respect and esteem. What is it that earns us this 
attention, even though we still have no means and no institutional support 
that would guarantee us a principled academic legitimacy? There are three 
factors which, I believe, are complementary: first of all, since we do not 
depend on any school or any established organization, we do not appear 
to be a threat to anybody. Symmetrically, the magazine has always chosen 
a radical pluralism, opening its pages to all opinions, including those most 
opposed to its own, betting that one can only progress by confronting 
opponents who must be considered to have the strongest arguments, and 
not by insulting them, or by pretending not to know them. Finally, and 
this is the decisive point I wanted to get to and which justifies this detour 
through the history of the MAUSS, the paradigm of the gift – the theoriza-
tion in social science and in political philosophy resulting from the discov-
ery of Mauss – does not contest the legitimacy of any particular school of 
thought. Each one seems to us to express a part of the truth and helps us 
understand effectively a dimension of human and social reality. But none 
of them makes room, or only in a very insufficient and debatable way, for 
the question of the gift, which is nevertheless essential if, as we said at the 
outset, social relationships are created and maintained by the gift. To each 
of the existing approaches or schools in the social sciences we say:

Yes, what you see and what you show is interesting, but wouldn’t it be even 
more interesting if you widened your field of vision to include the gift? And, 
by putting on the tinted glasses of the gift, wouldn’t you be led to have 
further insights into whatever you thought you had perfectly identified?

The paradigm of the gift, on the other hand, does not claim to possess any 
particular a priori truth. The gift, as discovered by Mauss, constitutes what 
he called a “total social phenomenon”. The concept, it is true, is uncertain 
and open to discussion. Let us simply agree that the archaic gift mixes 
dimensions at the same time economic, political, social and symbolic. I 
was saying just now that the various schools of the social sciences (and 
humanities) miss the essential reality of the gift. But, conversely, the para-
digm of the gift would remain impotent if it did not rely on them. Let us 
say, therefore, that it functions as an operator of translation. Or, rather, it 
develops its own discourse, but this discourse is constantly enriched by the 
translation it makes of other already existing discourses. In another field, 
that of political philosophy, one could say that convivialism, resulting from 
the reflections carried out within MAUSS, is inspired by the same logic. It 
presents itself as an operator of translation, but also of actualization and 
sursomption (Auhfhebung) of liberalism, socialism, communism and anar-

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Recent Extensions of the Gift

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chism. As an operator of translation, both actualizing and reaching beyond 
liberalism, etc.?

In order to accomplish this work of translation, however, so that the 
paradigm of the gift functions as a shuttle that allows us to weave together 
discourses or approaches to which it might seem foreign, we must go 
beyond Mauss’ initial discovery to give it sufficient generality. It is neces-
sary to proceed to extending the domain of the gift. And that is the whole 
purpose of this book.

3. Which gift?

Such an extension cannot take place without an indispensable clarification 
of the term “gift” itself. Few words, in fact, are as full of multiple meanings, 
ambiguity, ambivalence and uncertainty, few carry as many expectations 
and hopes, or, on the contrary, disdain and rejection, as the “gift”. Perhaps 
none. Yet, or precisely for this reason, it is indeed from here that we must 
start if we want to grasp some of the central questions of moral and politi-
cal philosophy, or of social science, without letting ourselves be discour-
aged by their infinite fragmentation into rival doctrines, disciplines and 
sub-disciplines. And to understand, more generally and more simply, the 
questions that we face in everyday life, the questions of life itself.

But is it on the word or on the practices of the gift that we must con-
centrate? One will be tempted by the latter, to grant primacy to the prac-
tice over the word, as the word does not exist in all languages. Not, in any 
case, with the same breadth of meaning as that found in Indo-European 
languages. But how can we observe the thing, the practices of giving, if we 
do not have a word that allows us to identify them by distinguishing them 
from those that do not have to do with giving? It is therefore essential, in 
order to break out of this circle, to start trying to see the uses of the word 
“gift” with some clarity. 

In French, as the linguist Lucien Tesnière pointed out, donner (to 
give) is, along with the verb dire (to say), the typical example of a “triva-
lent” verb, that is, a verb that necessarily puts three “actants”, in relation 
to each other, the giver, the receiver and the object given (Tesnière, 1959; 
Meng, 2015; Descombes, 2017). In French, we can give so many things – 
from the most precious gifts to the most violent blows, life, birth or death, 
a piece of flank steak at the butcher’s, a baguette at the baker’s, a kick or a 
hand, hope or regret, to see or to think, etc. – that “to give” plays a role that 
is almost as important as “to have” or “to be”. But, beyond the syntactic 
functions of the verb, one cause of the profusion of meanings attached to 

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the word “gift” is, of course, the crucial role it has played throughout the 
history of Christianity, a history of which we are the heirs, whether we like 
it or not. Christianity obliges believers to give (and to give themselves). 
To give out of love, without calculation, without expectation of return, in 
such a way that, as the gospel according to Saint Matthew says, “the right 
hand does not know what the left hand is doing”. With this injunction, 
giving appears to be simultaneously the effect, the mark and the proof of 
love. The gift and love thus seem indissolubly linked. Just as it is sometimes 
said (especially in the Anglo-Saxon world) that there is no friendship but 
only proofs of friendship, one could say that for Christianity only the gift 
bears witness to the reality of love.

But what kind of love? We know that it is mainly through Greek that 
the gospels and the words of Christ circulated in Antiquity. The Greek 
language distinguishes three varieties of what we understand by love: eros, 
which is of the order of desire, philia, which is of the order of shared and 
reciprocal friendship, and agape, which designates unconditional and asym-
metrical love, that of, as Christianity would say, God towards his ungrate-
ful children. A love all the more beautiful and properly divine, moreover, 
since the children do not deserve it in any way. What model of love should 
the Church or the religious authorities encourage? Agape alone, or agape 
with a touch of philia, or even a touch of eros? It is around this question 
that many of the great theological debates that have taken place over the 
centuries have revolved. In the field of Catholicism, it is in the 17th cen-
tury, in France, with the quarrel known as “pure love”, that the debate was 
the most lively. Taking over peacefully, in a way, the debates on the nature 
and conditions of grace that had fueled the wars of religion and the related 
massacres in the previous century, it opposed the two greatest preachers of 
the time, Fénelon (1651-1715) and Bossuet (1627-1704).

Should one love God for his own sake or with a view to gaining heaven 
through a love for which God would be grateful? One must love him for 
himself, and without any personal interest, answered Madame Guyon, a 
mystic supported at the Court of Louis XIV by his pious mistress, Madame 
de Maintenon. Yes, but how to be assured of the purity of this love? By 
what one could call a test of love that Madame Guyon presents under the 
name “impossible supposition”. “Let us suppose”, she wrote, “that God has 
damned me for eternity, I should nevertheless love him with all my soul”. 
To which, at the risk of contradicting Saint Augustine (whom he defends 
too and following whom there are only very few predestined elected), 
Bossuet answered by attempting to reconcile self-interested love of oneself 
and disinterested love of God. He affirmed that to desire one’s salvation is 
to respond to the purpose for which God created us; eternal beatitude. In 

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short, we must love God because he only wants our good (Terestchenko, 
2000). He therefore wants us to be concerned about ourselves.

At the same time, however, the discussion changed its meaning and 
nature by placing at the root of all human actions not the obligation of 
love but the sinister reality of interest (Hirschman, 1977). Behind the most 
apparently noble sentiments, the Jansenist “Gentlemen” of the abbey of 
Port-Royal, wanted to see only vanity and self-love at work. “The self is 
hateful”, wrote Pascal, their disciple, who explained that the best calcula-
tion of interest, the most profitable, is to believe in God. In the same vein, 
La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680), the most forceful and best known of those 
who would later be called the French moralists, wrote, in the first sentence 
of the first edition of his Maxims:

Self-love is the love of oneself, and of all things for oneself; it makes men 
idolaters of themselves and would make them tyrants of others if fortune 
gave them the means […] It lives everywhere and it lives on everything; it 
lives on nothing […] and, as long as it is, it is willing to be its enemy. [And 
he specified:] Interest is the soul of self-love.

But already Hobbes (1588-1679) in England, in his famous Leviathan, 
which can rightly be considered to be the matrix of all modern political 
philosophy, had developed even darker views on human nature:

The passions which, more than all the others, cause differences of mind, are 
principally the desire, more or less great, for power, riches, knowledge and 
honor. But all these desires can be reduced to the first, that is to say, to the 
desire for power. For wealth, knowledge and honor are but various kinds of 
power.

Or again: 
Thus I put in the first place, as a general inclination of all mankind, a per-
petual and unceasing desire to acquire power after power, a desire which 
ceases only at death.

For two or three centuries, the exchanges between the French and the 
English, soon joined by the Germans, would continue on this theme, 
inaugurating what the writer Nathalie Sarraute would rightly call the era 
of suspicion. A suspicion that will affect all spheres of social or individual 
existence, all our acts and thoughts, always to be accused of impurity and 
conscious or, more likely, unconscious hypocrisy. Its great masters will be 
Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. And the object of suspicion par excellence will 
be the gift, and its supposed correlates, love, altruism, generosity, disinter-
estedness, etc.

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4. Political economy and sociology

The social sciences for their part were born in the same space of general 
suspicion that had been in place since Hobbes and the French moralists. At 
the end of the 18th century for political economy, at the beginning of the 
19th century for sociology. We can see perfectly what is at stake with this 
birth of the social sciences from the first pages of Adam Smith’s The Wealth 
of Nations (1776), which is generally considered to be the first book of 
scientific economics:

When a man has no other means of engaging them (his fellow men) to act 
according to his inclinations, (he) endeavours by every servile and fawning 
attention to obtain their good will. He has not time, however, to do this 
upon every occasion. In civilized society he stands at all times in need of the 
cooperation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce 
sufficient to gain the friendship of a few persons.

What is targeted here, in this denunciation of “servile attentions”, is the 
totality of the relations of gift and return through which one makes friends. 
Not only are these relations vile, we debase ourselves by cultivating them, 
but they take time. A lifetime would not be enough. The economic science 
that was born at that time was thus presented as the scientific invention 
that would allow us to save time. This time, which we have known since 
Benjamin Franklin, is money. But what is less well known is that to save it, 
what must be saved first, or even eliminated, is the gift.

This marks the end of all the questions about the different types of 
gift – or love – possible, about their combinations and their earthly or 
cosmic destiny, about what they can bring us here below or postmortem. 
It is a social order freed from all transcendence that will have to be built. 
It will obey only one motive, only one watchword: interest. The indi-
vidual interest or the sum of the individual interests whose composition 
will allow, according to the formula of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), 
the pope of utilitarian doctrine, to lead to the “greatest happiness of the 
greatest number”. The canonical formula of the new purpose for the 
world is given by Smith at the very beginning, again, of The Wealth of 
Nations:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the beer merchant, and the 
baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. 
We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love; and never 
talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

If we look closely, this formulation is not nearly as original and innovative 
as is often said. Three centuries before Christ, the Chinese philosopher of 

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the legalist school, Han-Fei-tse, had already written, in opposition to the 
Confucians: 

If a doctor sucks the boils […] of his patients, without being related to them, 
it is because he has an interest in doing so […]. The carpenter (who makes 
coffins) does not hate his fellow human beings, he only has an interest in 
their death. (Han-Fei-Ttse, 1999)

Or again:
Altruism excites hatred: self-interest ensures harmony. Animosity and con-
flicts set parents and children against each other, whereas it is enough to give 
fat broth to one’s workers to be well served. (p. 23)

And, finally:
A prince maintains his subordinates by calculation, as they serve him by 
calculation.

Thus, the common basis of their relationship is calculation […]. Calcu-
lation is therefore the only link between prince and subject. (p. 23)

Conversely, Adam Smith was much less of a champion of the rule of inte-
rest than is generally claimed. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, written be-
fore and revised after The Wealth of Nations, he places at the heart of human 
relations not interest but “sympathy”, which today we would call empathy.

Nevertheless, from this period, a new era begins, which even before 
becoming the era of suspicion will prove to be the era of the domination 
of the economy over all the other dimensions of social existence that had 
seemed primordial until then: religion, political power and the person-to-
person links sealed by gift relationships, whether in the domain of solidar-
ity and loyalty or that of subjugation to hierarchical superiors, nobles or 
priests. It is a society without gifts, without religion and without politi-
cal power that is beginning to be invented. Its only regulator and its only 
cement would have to be in principle material interest however it is calcu-
lated.

Is such a society, in which only individual interest would reign, viable? 
No, answers sociology, whose beginnings are classically traced back to 
Saint-Simon (1760-1825), father of Saint-Simonism, so important for the 
industrialization of France, and to his disciple Auguste Comte, inventor of 
the term “sociology”. From the beginning, sociology has seen itself as the 
Other of economic science, both its double and its rival. From political 
economy it borrows the aim of a purely objective and scientific analysis of 
social relations. But it objects that these cannot and should not be reduced 
to market relations alone, and that human subjects are infinitely more com-
plex than the sad and poor figure of homo œconomicus, on which the whole 
edifice of standard economic science rests (Laval, 2002). Of course, each of 

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the great names of the sociological tradition, Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, 
Weber, etc., will say this in a particular way, and with a different political 
aim: liberalism for Tocqueville or Weber, communism for Marx, republican 
socialism for Durkheim. But this opposition to economic reductionism, 
shared, supported and developed, in their great majority, by historians as 
well as philosophers and ethnologists, will remain a constant of the disci-
pline and of the whole of the social sciences until the 1970s and 1980s.

What happened then? A profound change in the relationship between 
the various social science disciplines. In those years, economists, who for 
two centuries had limited their object of study to market relations alone, 
began to apply their explanatory models to all social activities, to the 
family, to education, to politics, to religion, and so on. To put it another 
way, they set out to generalize the model of homo œconomicus and to turn 
economic science into the general social science that sociology, despite its 
initial ambitions, had failed to become. To do this, it is enough to state 
that in all our social, family, romantic, and professional relationships, we 
behave in all circumstances, consciously or unconsciously, as buyers and 
sellers, eager to buy at the best price and to sell at the highest possible price, 
even if we do not pay and are not paid always and everywhere in money, 
but in love, power, or prestige.

5. Marcel Mauss’ “Essay on the Gift” and MAUSS: 
a middle way

What surprised us then – flabbergasted us – my friends and I, who were 
going to create in 1981 La Revue du MAUSS (Mouvement Anti-Utilitariste 
en Sciences Sociales), was that this claim of the economists for hegemony 
met with broad support everywhere in the other social sciences. Every-
where, whether in sociology, in political philosophy, in biology (but less 
so in history or ethnology), the language of the economists, the theory 
of rational choice, alias the rational action theory, was being spoken. Or, 
more generally, what I have called the axiomatics of interest. The most 
influential book of the end of the 20th century in political philosophy, 
John Rawls’ Theory of Justice (1971), for example, is written entirely in this 
language. In a few years, this upheaval in the division of intellectual labor 
was to be followed by globalization, i.e.serial deregulations, the worldwide 
reign of markets and today, increasingly, that of financial and speculative 
markets. If we are only economic people, nothing should prevent us from 
trying to earn as much money as possible, by all possible means, as quickly 
as possible. That alone is important.

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The Revue du MAUSS has prioritized the scientific resistance to this 
economist groundswell  1. It is based, first and foremost, on the famous 
Essay on the Gift (1925), by Marcel Mauss, disciple and intellectual heir of 
Émile Durkheim, the primary inspiration of all French scientific ethnol-
ogy. Two lessons from Mauss, among many others, are absolutely essential 
for any serious academic struggle against the axiomatics of interest. The 
first is that “man has not always been an economic animal, coupled with 
a calculating machine”. The second is that early societies (let us call them 
that) were not based on the market or on contracts but on what Mauss calls 
the triple obligation of giving, receiving and returning. In short, let us say 
that they were based on giving.

On the gift? How many misunderstandings and counter-under-
standings, more or less well meaning, emerged around this question? How 
many lawsuits of intent have we had to endure for recalling Mauss’ essen-
tial empirical discovery! It is because at the time the very word “gift” had 
become almost unpronounceable, almost obscene. Pierre Bourdieu and a 
good part of the left denounced the ideology of the gift in the field of edu-
cation for a start. (In another sense, it is true, of the word “gift”, but which 
we shall see is not completely unrelated to the first.) Since we criticized the 
academic omnipresence of the axiomatics of interest, we were thought to 
believe, as I have already said, that we could explain human action by love 
and altruism (Lordon, 2006). That we were advocating a return to charity, 
or something of the kind. A few years later, in the opposite direction, by a 
sort of pendulum swing, we witnessed in the early 1990s a return in force 
of reflection on the gift in the philosophical field. And, more precisely, 
within the framework of the phenomenological tradition, inaugurated by 
Husserl and extended by Heidegger. Strangely enough, this philosophical 
return of the gift made it almost as unthinkable as its exclusion or repres-
sion.

In order to give full scope to Mauss’ discovery, we had to fight on two 
fronts, facing a double problem with the gift. The first is easily identifiable. 
It results from the omnipresence of the axiomatics of interest, which domi-
nated the whole of economics, of course, but also a large part of sociology, 

 1 Which, since the years 2000-2010, no longer presents itself exactly in the way I 
have just described, in a few words briefly and therefore in an excessively crude manner-
rather broadly. The dominant language in social science or in moral and political philoso-
phy is no longer that of rational choice theory, the lingua franca of economists, but that of 
deconstructionism or deconstructivism. It is about showing that everything is “constructed” 
and therefore deconstructable at will. It is not difficult, however, to see the elective affinities 
between homo œconomicus and homo deconstructivus; Marx and Engels said it perfectly in the 
Communist Manifesto. Under the rule of the market, “all that is solid melts into air”.

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biology (via sociobiology in particular), a branch of psychoanalysis, etc. 
If everything can be explained by interest, then the very idea of the gift 
vanishes. The gift can only be a mask of interest, conscious or unconscious, 
a way of “winning the good graces (of others) by flattery and servile atten-
tions”, according to Adam Smith.

But the phenomenological rehabilitation of the gift, radically opposed 
in appearance to the axiomatics of interest, was also to lead, under the 
guise of aiming to release the pure essence of the gift, to the conclusion that 
it cannot be of this world. “If I give, then I do not give”, wrote the world-
famous champion of “deconstruction”, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, 
meaning that if I know that I give, I see myself giving and derive glory or 
narcissistic satisfaction from it. I have an interest in it and, since I am inter-
ested in it, I am not a real donor. The gift thus appears for him as “the figure 
of the impossible” (Derrida, 1991). Did Mauss believe he had seen the gift 
in the first society? He was mistaken, said Derrida. There is no gift because 
there is a return, in the practices described by Mauss, and this return is 
expected or hoped for. What Mauss took for a gift is only an exchange. The 
true gift, to be such, should be absolutely disinterested, without intention, 
close to sacrifice. Another well-known philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion, went 
further (Marion, 1997), explaining that for there to be a gift (by which 
he means a “true” gift), there must be neither a subject who gives, nor an 
object given, nor a recipient of the gift. We will quickly understand the 
reason for such a disconcerting and, in fact, discouraging statement. To 
fully assess Mauss’ essential discovery, it is necessary to extricate oneself 
from a double “inexistentialism” (I borrow this useful term from Marcel 
Gauchet), from the two symmetrical statements which affirm that the gift 
does not exist. The first, which reduces the gift to one form or another of 
exchange, to a purchase; the second, which, returning to the doctrine of 
pure love, sees it to be a gift only where there is a radical sacrifice of the 
interests of the donor, and/or unconsciousness. And, therefore, does not 
want to see it anywhere.

It is important, however, to understand the reasons for the blunder 
of such sharp minds as Derrida or Marion (a blunder that was also partly 
made by that of the one we cancould call the second Levinas). On a strictly 
conceptual level, and if we do not stop at the ethical or political moti-
vations of the one or the other, it is due to a confusion between “gift” 
and “donation”, and also between “interest” (intérêt) and “interestedness” 
(intéressement). Confusion that applies to both inexistentialisms. Because 
one cannot obviously accomplish anything without any interest in what he 
one does, both discourses wrongly conclude to the impossibility of disin-
terestedness, of acting without a material or purely narcissistic interest. Let 

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us put it another way and say with Amartya Sen that one can be a rational 
fool.

The German philosophical concept of Gegebenheit, translated into 
philosophical French as donation, accounts for the fact that “there is some-
thing rather than nothing”, that this something is there, as if it had been 
given, given by nobody to nobody in particular but given all the same, 
and that it must therefore be considered to be a gift. This conceptualiza-
tion is made possible, and almost self-evident, by the fact that in German, 
“there is” is said es gibt, “it gives”. Within this framework of thought it is 
obviously possible, and tempting for some, to imagine a great subject of 
the gift: God or an equivalent of God. But, as the physicist Laplace said 
to Napoleon, “we don’t need this hypothesis”, and everyone is free here to 
use it or not. Our phenomenologists abusively apply to the gift, that is to 
say to a relation between subjects, what could only be valid for donation, 
that is to say a relation without subjects. A fatal misunderstanding. Which 
does not prevent us from making use of this notion of donation in a more 
reasonable way. But before that, we must be interested in the gift itself, and 
study it in its human, very human, existence, without dissolving it either 
into barter, exchange, contract and market, on the one hand, or into char-
ity, altruism, sacrifice or donation, on the other.

It is to this task that La Revue du MAUSS was going to address itself. 
It is impossible to summarize here what has been thought and discovered 
through the more than fifteen hundred articles published since 1981, 
many of them rather long and substantial. Without counting the seventy 
or so books published in the framework of the collection “Bibliothèque 
du MAUSS”. Around the journal formed a whole informal international 
nebula of teachers, researchers, economists, anthropologists, historians, 
sociologists, philosophers, essayists, and other free and unclassifiable 
authors. Some of them are directly sensitive to the attempt to draw out all 
the implications of Mauss’ discoveries (or of authors in strong consonance 
with them, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude 
Lefort, André Gorz, Marshall Sahlins, Jan Huizinga, René Girard, Louis 
Dumont, etc.), others were simply attracted by a reputation for intellectual 
quality and respect for pluralism. Of the “gift paradigm’ that has gradually 
emerged from this work, of this commitment to observing social relations 
by asking how the triple obligation to give, receive and return functions in 
a specific way each time, I will only consider here a few elements.

Mauss explained that the terms used in the Essay on the Gift, “pre-
sent, gift, donation, are not themselves entirely accurate”, and immedi-
ately added: “We cannot find any other, that’s all” (Mauss, 1966, p. 267). 
Uncertain about the right name, he speaks sometimes of exchange-gift, 

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sometimes of gift-exchange to make us understand that the practices of 
the gift do exist within the framework of what it is possible to call the 
first societies (sociétés premières), and that they are not reducible either to 
exchange and barter, or to radical disinterestedness. Neither to egoism nor 
to altruism, if we prefer. There is a sui generis reality of the gift that cannot 
be explained by anything other than itself. What inspires the gift is “nei-
ther the purely free and purely gratuitous service, nor that of the purely 
interested production and exchange of the useful”. And he concludes: “It 
is a kind of hybrid that has blossomed there” (Mauss, 1966, p. 267). This 
is a way out of many of the quarrels about the essence of the gift. The gift 
is not made unconsciously, without expectation of return. One hopes that 
the person to whom one has given will give back, or rather will give in turn 
(to oneself or to another), but one is by no means certain of that. It is this 
dimension of uncertainty and gamble, this margin of play that character-
izes the gift between human subjects. The gift is not free, but there is a 
dimension or a share of gratuity within it, if only in the form of a margin 
of play between giving, receiving and returning.

Let’s be more precise. At the same time gift and exchange, exchange 
and gift, the gift as analyzed by Mauss, the agonistic gift, comprises a part 
of unconditionality and a part of conditionality, of giving and receiving, of 
do ut des. A part of unconditionality since it accepts the risk that the other 
does not give back. One is not obliged to give in turn, or only indirectly. 
It is this dimension of unconditionality that seals the alliance. For the gift 
is a covenant operator. It is what makes us friends rather than enemies. In 
this sense, far from charity, which will only appear much later, in its wake, 
with the birth of the great universalist religions, it is a properly political 
act. But if in the alliance one does not feel right, if, within the framework 
of the founding unconditionality, one of the parties feels wronged, then 
one begins to review one’s accounts so as to work it out and to settle the 
score. The regime of the gift is thus neither that of strict unconditional-
ity put forward by the supporters of pure love or pure gift, nor that of 
the general conditionality which only those who stick to the axiomatics 
of interest want to know. It is that of conditional unconditionality (Caillé, 
2000 [2006]). Or again, it obeys neither the sole interest for oneself nor 
the sole interest for others (“lovingness”). Made within the framework of 
an obligation, the social obligation to give, receive and return, it manifests 
its strength, its effectiveness, its power, only if it testifies to the freedom 
and creativity of the giver and if it leaves the receiver the freedom in return 
to give back or not to give back. To give back sooner or later, equally, on 
parity, or in subtly differing amountsless or more, etc. In the gift, as in any 
human action, there are four primary motives, organized in two crossed 

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pairs: interest for oneself (intérêt pour soi) and interest for others, (intérêt 
pour autrui) on the one hand, obligation and freedom-creativity (libercréa-
tivité ) on the other (Caillé, 2009).

This Maussian conception of the gift provides an assured starting 
point, both empirically founded and sufficiently clarified (in all its ambi-
guity), for both empirical research in the social sciences and analyses devel-
oped in the field of moral and political philosophy. To the former, it gives 
to see a social state in which law, economy, politics, religion, kinship and 
sociality are not yet disjointed and where the gift manifests itself as what 
Mauss calls a total social phenomenon (or fact). To moral and political 
philosophy it offers the possibility of considering a kind of original state of 
morality – what Mauss presented as “the rock of eternal morality” – and 
of politics.

But what does this have to do with contemporary societies? One of 
the great advances made by the MAUSS is to have shown that far from rep-
resenting a residual phenomenon, limited to Christmas or birthday gifts, 
for example, giving is still very much present today within the framework 
of primary sociality, the set of person-to-person relationships in which, 
from the family to friendship or the world of small groups, the personality 
of people matters more than what they do (Godbout & Caillé, 2000). And 
that even in the sphere of impersonal and functional relations which are, in 
theory, those which govern the world of secondary sociality (of the market, 
of business, of administrations, of science, etc.), where functional efficiency 
matters more than the personality of the persons who perform them, as 
the functions are in reality always accomplished by concrete persons it is 
largely the quality of the relations of gift and counter-gift which bind them 
that is the determinant of their functional effectiveness (Alter, 2009; Caillé 
& Grésy, 2014). From this discovery it is possible to deploy the paradigm 
of the gift in the most varied fields, from medicine to business, from sport 
to the family or the world of voluntary associations, etc. (Chanial, 2008).

6. From the simple gift paradigm to the extended gift 
paradigm

To give it its full scope, however, Mauss’ discovery must first of all be clari-
fied, made explicit and completed, but also extended and generalized. Par-
ticularly attentive to the richness and complexity of social realities, Mauss 
was excessively suspicious of all speculative conceptualizations. An enemy 
of misplaced abstractions, he is nevertheless a theorist of extraordinary 
scope, but many of his theories remain implicit, as if buried under the 

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abundance of factual material. Part of the work of MAUSS has consisted 
in making fully visible and explicit a whole set of Mauss’ theses, that were 
never clearly stated as such or not fully developed. Such is the case, for 
example, of the link between the gift and the struggle for recognition. That 
through agonistic giving, the rivalry to give, (which is the subject of the 
Essay on Giving), what is sought is recognition, appears as obvious in many 
passages of the Essay. By giving, I recognize the value of the donee (or his 
clan) and at the same time I affirm my own value (or that of my clan). But 
the evidence for this must be clearly formulated in order to ensure that 
the reflection on the gift is related to all the literature, so important today, 
which deals with the struggle for recognition. And, reciprocally, to enrich 
this debate, initiated in the wake of Hegel by thinkers such as Charles 
Taylor, Axel Honneth or Nancy Fraser, by showing how recognition is pri-
marily recognition of a gift (or a donation).

In the same way, one should not hesitate to go beyond Mauss’ pro-
posal where it is clearly incomplete. This is the case with the theme of the 
triple obligation to give, receive and return. To have identified and named 
it represents a real scientific feat on the part of Mauss, which allows us to 
understand how, in the course of our existence, we find ourselves caught 
up in multiple networks of giving, in which we are alternately donors, 
indebted receivers, or donors in return, more or less freed from our debt 
of gratitude. But, on reflection, it soon becomes clear that this cycle could 
not function if it were not animated by a fourth moment (which largely 
escapes the register of social obligation because it refers to the fragility of 
the individual subject), the moment of the demand, whether this demand 
has been formulated explicitly or simply anticipated – guessed at – by the 
donor. What sense would there be in a gift that did not respond to any 
desire, to any need, yearning or expectation of the donee? The complete 
cycle of the gift is therefore that of asking (or demanding), giving, receiving 
and returning (DGRR). But this is the cycle that takes place when every-
thing goes well, i.e. when the gift functions as a shuttle braiding together 
all the threads that link the social actors together. Let us call it the symbolic 
cycle of giving, taking up the etymology of the word symbol: that which 
brings together. This symbolic cycle, however, exists only through its vic-
tory, often precarious and always to be renewed, over the opposite cycle, 
the diabolical cycle (which separates) of ignoring, taking, refusing, keeping 
(ITRK). With this precision, we begin to have an appreciable number of 
elements of a basic grammar of social relations (Caillé & Grésy, 2018). All 
of this is fully thinkable within the framework of what might be called the 
simple gift paradigm, which rests on the perspective of a norm of parity, or 
simple reciprocity between givers and recipients.

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In order for the gift not to hurt or destroy the recipient, rather than 
benefiting him or her, the recipient must be able to become a donor in 
turn. This is perhaps the primary lesson of the Essay on the Gift. But if we 
want the gift paradigm to be able to enter fully into a fruitful dialogue 
with other paradigms or currents of thought in philosophy and social sci-
ence, or better, to appear as their greatest common denominator, the one 
in which – I hope – all are likely to be translated, and derive more clarity 
from it, then we need to switch from a simple gift paradigm to an extended 
gift paradigm.

In order to bring the theories of the struggle for recognition into dia-
logue with the theories of giving, it does not seem essential to leave the 
simple gift paradigm, even if its extension brings new insights. However, 
it is impossible to remain with a notion of simple reciprocity if we want to 
enter into resonance with, for example, the theories of care, which are so 
important in contemporary discussions, and all the more so since, beyond 
the reflections on the relationship of care, solicitude or attention to others, 
care thinking orients the feminist debate in particular onto new paths: why 
and how are women traditionally assigned to care giving? The connection 
with the question of gift is obvious here. Even if some authors, precisely 
in order to avoid the assignment of women to what alienates them, try to 
think of care as work, it is clear, assuming that it can indeed be understood 
as work, that care can only be effective, helpful or curative, if it includes a 
dimension of gift. But this dimension of gift cannot be apprehended in a 
logic of simple reciprocity. What can the newly born child give back? Even 
more, what gift in return can we expect from a sick person at the end of his 
or her life, from an insane person or a bedridden old person, etc. (Chanial, 
2012)? The gift of care to them does not, however, lead one to leave the 
register of the Maussian gift, if one accepts to reason in terms of a general-
ized reciprocity. In such cases, what I give to those who are in no condition 
to ever be able to give back to me, I can hope that it will be given back to 
me by others if I find myself in the same situation as they are. This is a first 
extension of the domain of the gift.

This extension is insufficient, however, to begin to think about a 
whole series of other phenomena, which are nonetheless crucially impor-
tant. Do sportsmen and women, for example, at the time of a great match, 
not say that they have given their all, that they have “given everything”? 
But the same is true of the activity of the fervent artist or the austere sci-
entist, of the craftsman or the simple employee who “gives himself ” to his 
task, of the entrepreneur, the farmer or the executive who does not count 
their hours. And so on. All these implications are forms of a generosity that 
is not, or not directly, a gift to others. This is another type of gift. A gift to 

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the task at hand, to creativity, to the movement of life itself (Raynal, 2016). 
To becoming. I propose to speak of “adonation” (adonnement) 2 to desig-
nate this commitment to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt classified 
under the register of action, the capacity to make something new happen, 
something never seen, never heard, by which the capacity of humans to 
show themselves to others in their singularity, to become subjects, is mani-
fested. Pierre Bourdieu used the term illusio to designate more or less the 
same idea, but the use of such a term made sure to miss its object from 
the outset. The term illusio was intended to replace (most likely following 
criticism by MAUSS) the reference to interest, omnipresent in the first 
Bourdieu. He wanted to signify that one cannot engage in a given field 
of activity without being caught up in the game, without being in ludum 
(in the game). But the term illusio implies from the outset that all action 
is illusory. Abandoning the rhetoric of interest without having made the 
indispensable distinction between interest for (l’intérêt pour, the passionate 
interest) and interest in (l’intérêt à, the instrumental interest), or between 
interest and interestment, he reconduces the idea that any interest for an 
activity whatever it be is in the last instance only the mask of an instrumen-
tal interest. Jansenism not dead.

“The wind adonates (adonne), speaking of a sailing ship, when it turns 
in a direction favorable to travel, that is, when it comes more to the rear”, 
the French Dictionary of Maritime Terms tells us. We sail, we go forward 
when a favorable wind pushes us. But where does this wind come from? 
When was it born? What is its nature? It results from a gift, you might say. 
A gift for painting, for music, for mathematics, for soccer, tennis, skiing, 
for whatever. This is a new meaning of the word gift. We must take seri-
ously the similarities with the Maussian gift, as the poet-philosopher Lewis 
Hyde makes clear about the artist’s gift (Hyde, 1979). The artist is only 
fully such (at least before the appearance of artist-speculators) when he 
knows how to relate to the gift he has received in the same way that in early 
society, it was necessary to know how to return a precious good, with a 
surplus and above all not to keep it for oneself.

One can wonder at leisure about the origin of such gifts. But in one 
way or another, we can see that they refer us to a dimension of life that 
exceeds the sole field of intersubjective social relations, of the gift between 
humans. Starting with life itself, and all that accompanies it, the energy, 

 2 The word adonation does not exist in English, but neither does the word adonnement 
in French, where is only used the verb s’adonner. The best translation would be “dedication”, 
but I think it is useful to elaborate a semantic field as coherent as possible between gift (don), 
donation (Gegebenheit), adonation (adonnement) and donativity.

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the rhythm, the grace or its lack, the graceful or its absence. And, following 
them, charisma, inspiration, power, etc. It is here that we must reappropri-
ate the concept of donation by putting it back on its feet, as it were. As we 
have seen, philosophers of phenomenological inspiration lead us astray by 
proposing to think of the gift with a model of donation as a gift without 
subject and without intentionality, thus making the gift by and between 
humans unthinkable. On the other hand, it is essential to recognize that 
an infinite number of things, the most precious without doubt, are as if 
given to us: life, as I have just said, but also nature, the cosmos in all its 
diversity, and even in a sense the plurality of cultures, of forms of life, and 
everything that we receive as an inheritance. All of this, even the totality of 
the history of art, music, literature, science, technology, etc., is in a sense 
given to us, far beyond what our friends or relatives can pass on to us, all 
those of whom we are the direct beneficiaries or legatees. Even if this gift 
is the gift of no one, of no subject (or else of an infinite and indeterminate 
multitude of subjects), even if it is not strictly speaking addressed to us, we 
must nonetheless consider it as such, as a gift, recognize it, feel gratitude 
for it, because we cannot live fully without it. I therefore propose, instead of 
thinking of the gift as a donation without subject, to think of donation (with-
out subject) as a quasi-gift.

7. Applications of the gift paradigm

This is why sport, which multiplies the gift contained in the game (or 
the game contained in the gift), has become the world’s first, if not only, 
religion. The only world religion, together with that of consumption, 
whose hold on us would be difficult to understand if we underestimated 
the imaginary relationship it induces to “donation”, and which incites us to 
devote ourselves to the realm of goods or brands.

In the field of art, one will speak about inspiration. The interest of 
thinking about gift, adonation and donation, together in their interde-
pendence, is to allow us to treat subjects that are often approached with 
emphasis, in a more or less mystical mode, without falling into mysti-
cism in our turn. As we have seen, the Maussian conception of the gift is 
modest, resolutely claiming its “mediocrity”, as against those who conceive 
of it only as identical to pure love. I sketch some features of what a modest 
conception of art might look like. In the field of art, one often speaks 
of inspiration. This implies, I argue that it is important not to see in the 
artist a pure genius, that is to say the recipient of a gift without equal, 
without how and without why, i.e. as a unique elect, chosen by a superior 

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instance, giving to the humanity an equally unilateral gift of his work, that 
no return could equal. It is necessary on the contrary to think of the artist 
maintaining a relationship of gift and counter-gift in response to the gift 
that he received, the one that authorizes him to devote himself to art, and 
partaking as much as others in gift relations with fellow kindred.

Let us say it again differently. The notions of adonation and dona-
tion make it possible to break with sociologism, the reduction of human 
facts to social relations only, without needing to break with sociology or, 
more generally, with social science and philosophy. It is here that the prox-
imity with the approach followed by the German sociologist-philosopher 
Hatmut Rosa in his book Resonance appears most clearly. Refusing to split 
the sociological and philosophical approaches allows us to reintegrate the 
question of the good life into sociology. When do we live well? When 
we are in, or enter into, resonance not only with others but also with the 
world, answers Rosa. This formulation is right and telling. What remains 
to be explained is what creates resonance or makes it possible. And this 
is where it seems to me that the paradigm of the gift takes over. As we 
explain in Œil pour œil, don pour don. La psychologie revisitée, the condi-
tion of felicity (of resonance, if one prefers) in human relationships lies in 
the capacity to know how to ask as well as to give, to receive or to give in 
return. Not too much, not too little, and in a good way. This is what true 
and well-understood generosity consists of, which I propose to call “dona-
tivity 1”. But the recognition that arises between the partners in giving is 
only fully satisfying if it opens onto something else, by giving each one the 
feeling of participating in and of life itself. If it bears witness to one form 
or another of creativity, then I call it “donativity 2”. Donativity 2 puts us in 
relation with donation through one or more adonations.

As I suggested at the beginning of this introduction, the reason why 
some people approach the gift with so much distrust or difficulty, if the 
notion smells almost of sulphur or faggots, is because it almost inevita-
bly refers to religion. The religion that is coming back so violently today, 
whereas we thought it was almost at the end of its life ten or twenty years 
ago, and that the social sciences have so much difficulty to think about. The 
religion which is par excellence the domain of the gift, the adonation and 
the donation in their most extreme and tightened conjugation. I try to show 
how by taking these notions in the right order, in their right articulation, 
the domain of the religious (of religion and religiosity) becomes thinkable. 
And, with it, that of its therapeutic effectiveness. For religion heals and 
cures – sometimes – as medicine or psychotherapies also try to do.

Another notion difficult to handle, undoubtedly because it maintains 
a more or less close relationship with both the gift and religion, is power. 

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This power, Mauss showed, goes to those who are in the position of a 
unilateral giver, who make gifts that the recipients are not able to return. In 
the same way, the divine entities evoked by the universalist religions, make 
gifts incommensurable to those that the humans could make in return. 
This is why they have power over them and why they subject humans to 
heteronomy. Thirsting for emancipation and autonomy, social science 
or philosophy reveal themselves in the end as uncomfortable in front of 
power as in front of the gift or religion. We don’t really know what power 
consists of, but it represents for social science and philosophy only what 
we should denounce and from which we should free ourselves in order to 
finally reach autonomy. And the reaction is more or less the same when 
faced with authority and charisma. It is urgent, I believe, to get out of 
these denials and to situate these different notions in relation to each other, 
avoiding above all confusing power with domination, as is almost always 
the case. Here again, it seems to me that the extended gift paradigm allows 
us to move forward.

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Caillé, A., & Grésy, J.-E. (2014). La révolution du don. Le management repensé à la 
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Riassunto

In questo saggio, Alain Caillé ricostruisce la “singolare storia del MAUSS (Movimen-
to Anti-Utilitarista nelle Scienze Sociali)” da quando, all’inizio del 1980, un gruppo 
di amici provenienti da diverse discipline (sociologi, economisti, filosofi, ecc.) decise di 
fondare il “Bulletin du MAUSS” per contrastare la crescente egemonia dell’utilitarismo 

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e dell’economicismo nelle scienze umane e nelle stesse discipline filosofiche. Il Bulletin 
sarebbe diventato inizialmente “La Revue du MAUSS trimestrielle” dal 1988 al 1992 
e dal 1993 al 2022 “La Revue du MAUSS semestrielle” fino alla sua attuale estensione 
anglofona “MAUSS International”. L’autore riprende la definizione di Marcel Mauss 
del dono come “fatto sociale totale” e spiega che il paradigma del dono è un “operatore di 
traduzione” nel senso che si arricchisce continuamente in interazione con i discorsi esi-
stenti. L’operazione teorica che Caillé propone è quella di esplicitare la scoperta di Mauss 
passando da un paradigma del dono semplice, basato sulla prospettiva della semplice 
reciprocità tra chi dona e chi riceve, a un paradigma del dono allargato. In questo modo, 
può dialogare con altri paradigmi e altre correnti di pensiero (teoria del riconoscimento, 
teoria della cura, teoria dello sviluppo umano, ecc.) E da qui a una concezione del dono 
come “adonnement”, cioè l’impegno dei soggetti umani a portare nel mondo qualcosa di 
nuovo e inedito.

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How to cite this paper:
Caillé, A. (2023). Recent extensions of the gift. Elementa. Intersections between Philosophy, 
Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 3(1-2), 15-41. doi: https://doi.org/10.7358/
elementa-2023-0102-caia

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	Elementa_3-2023-1-2_00b_Sommario.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

	Second Section
	Praise as a Gift in the Relationship between Teachers and Their Students
	The Gift of Desire: The “inner voice” between Neuroscience and Theory
of Attachment

	Various
	The Gifted Student: Gifts and Talents Development
	Digital Well-Being as a New Kind
of Adaptation to the New Millennium Needs: A State-of-the-Art Analysis
	Education and Culture: Pluralism
in the Age of Globalization





