
























































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 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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59

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 

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Francesco Fistetti

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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 

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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-

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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). 

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

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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).

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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 

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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-

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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, 

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

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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).

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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). 

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(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!). 

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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 

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“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. 

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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).

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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 

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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). 

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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 

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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.

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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-

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

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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).

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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), 59-79. doi: 
https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-fisf

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https://doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2023-0102-fisf
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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





