Alfred Marshall
Marshall was Keynes’ Cambridge teacher; his synthesis of the marginalist revolution, Principles of Economics, was the standard English textbook for decades. As a cooperative socialist, he considered that equalizing marginal utility in society would be a radical redistributive measure. He had a Hegelian theory of the history of the welfare state; but, apart from Principles, he was best known for his contributions to industrial economics and foreign trade. Talcott Parsons nominated Marshall—with Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto—as a key figure, a generation earlier than the others, in the replacement of evolutionism with The Structure of Social Action (1937). Unlike Foucault and in line with Coase, Marshall defined economics as ‘both a study of wealth and a branch of the study of man’.
I now draw attention to a handful of major works by specialists in economic subjects whose example may serve us in our attempts to grapple with the epistemology of formal economics. The point is to devise more effective approaches to the historical situation we face. Their authors all flourished in the first half of this century; they saw deeply enough into their own times to generate ideas that are relevant to our own. Each work, a creative synthesis, inspired a distinctive analytical approach to understanding economy. If we familiarize ourselves with this intellectual history in a more than superficial way, we may have more secure grounds for making claims on universities and governments to support our own synthetic efforts.
Max Weber
The ‘Battle over Methods’ (Methodenstreit) was waged principally between Gustav von Schmoller in Berlin, the dean of historical economists, and Carl Menger in Vienna, one of the founders—with the Englishman, William Jevons and the Swiss, Léon Walras—of marginalist economics around 1870. This was the clearest manifestation of the conflict between recognizing the cultural specificity and historical limitations of economic knowledge and the new orthodoxy's claim to being a species of universal reason, no longer even limited to the operations of the market (as was political economy, "the science of trade"). The argument hinged on whether the ancient Greek economy was like or unlike modern economies. Weber put the dispute to bed by pointing out that we would not be interested in the Greeks if they were not different, and we could not understand them unless they were fundamentally the same. It is not a matter of same vs. different, but rather of a Kantian or Hegelian dialectic, sameness-in-difference and vice versa.
His General Economic History was compiled posthumously from notes made of a lecture course he gave in Munich during 1919-1920. Part IV deals with ‘The origin of modern capitalism’. An admirably balanced account distinguishes between speculation—an irrational belief that one is going to win—and cumulative attempts to reduce the uncertainty of profit-making by rational calculation in areas such as book-keeping, industrial technique, controlling workers, slavery, colonialism, free trade, bureaucracy, and the modern state. The final chapter is a more comprehensive and succinct version of his famous thesis concerning the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, pointing to the Reformation's secularization in the Enlightenment and the socially disastrous death of religion in the ‘Age of Iron’, the nineteenth century.
Although Weber's field is European history, his focus is mainly on England from the seventeenth century, without ever making the distinction explicit. Marx and Engels already reached a similar position. He does not seek to weigh the relative influence of successive phases of western economy—medieval cities, the Renaissance and Reformation, mercantilist colonialism and the industrial revolution. This is a methodological weakness, and we must rectify it. He does, however, emphasize the novelty of industrialization as distinct from the earlier period of mercantile colonialism and refuses to follow Marx (1867 Part 8, ‘Primitive accumulation’) in assigning causal significance to capital wealth in that period. This remains one of the great points of contrast for any who would reconstruct what is essential and what secondary in modern economic development.
Weber's contribution to social thought is supposed to be well-known in the English-speaking world. Unfortunately, the Parsons version with which we are familiar (see below) is almost unrecognizable to most German scholars and is perpetuated by American commentators who flourish at the expense of original texts that are readable only with great difficulty. My own enterprise depends on Weber’s massive precedent. He saw the need to explore the dialectic between universal reason and the cultural history of western civilization. He rejected the Victorian assumption that human society can be understood exclusively in rational terms. He insisted that all knowledge is relative to time, place, and the investigator's purpose. He sought to unify the study of political power and economic analysis. His subjective sociology of understanding (Verstehendesoziologie) was always situated in an objective structuralist history of the widest comparative scope. No-one struggled harder to reconcile the contradiction between science and politics. He was a pessimist and depressive; but then Germany of early last century was not an easy place to live in.
Thorstein Veblen
Marx first drew attention to the importance of machines in modern economic development. A Scandinavian Midwesterner, Thorstein Veblen, half a century later and with the robber barons operating right under his nose, saw how machine production could be hijacked by financial speculators. He recognized the extraordinary implications of the recent legal fiction that treats huge corporations as if they were individual persons with the natural rights of ordinary citizens. At the same time, he revealed how ‘captains of industry’ were able to pile up personal fortunes at the expense of society's real interests while hiding behind this fiction. He was derisive of the intellectually backward and self-serving platitudes of th6e economics profession, proposing instead to remake economics as the study of institutions, notably, John Commons' Institutional Economics (1934) and Clarence Ayres' The Theory of Economic Progress (1944).
Veblen saw a fundamental contradiction between the social discipline imposed by machine production and the motives of businessmen who controlled the industrial system through their ability to make money by selling. Businessmen will promote any useless activity if it brings a profit; they do not care about production or livelihood as such. In consequence, power in industry passed from the factory floor to the financial managers at head office. The cultural system of business enterprise originated in seventeenth-century England, which he described as ‘an isolation hospital for technology, science and civil rights’. Its foundation is the institution of private ownership—Locke’s idea that free labour should own the product of its workmanship or ‘natural rights’.
The system of market competition laid down in the eighteenth century (especially by Adam Smith) was based on this attitude. The spirit of pecuniary gain that motivated the speculative operations of modern businessmen—slavishly endorsed by the economics profession—-cannot be reconciled with the material and social needs of machine industry. Veblen predicted that the idea of economy as free market competition is a transitory halfway house on the road either to socialism based on machine production or to a new barbarism, dynastic politics conducted along medieval lines, with war and games the principal occupations of the ruling class.
This was not the message that twentieth-century Americans wanted to hear, and Veblen's institutional economics was swiftly side-lined to the margins of academia. The field he sought to establish scored some notable subsequent successes, especially when the Great Depression destroyed American workers’ faith in ‘free enterprise’. In 1940, institutional economists outnumbered the neoclassical variety by 3 to 1 in American universities. They remain a significant if marginal undercurrent of American social science today. But Veblen’s fundamental critique of orthodox economics as a mathematical mystification of an outmoded preindustrial ideology is now largely forgotten.
His The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) on conspicuous consumption is better known today because, after whatever social progress the last century made out of its conflicts, we have returned to the plutocrats’ Gilded Age that ended in three decades of world war and economic collapse.
Vladimir Lenin
Marx’s view was that industrial capitalism revealed for the first time the economic logic of society by making the system of wage-labor predominant; and this made economic analysis possible. In Capital Volume 1, Marx showed that capital accumulation can take one of two forms: ‘absolute surplus value’ is squeezing profit out of workers by making them work harder for little (the feudal method); and ‘relative surplus value’ is profit derived from making their labor more efficient. The latter path, substituting machines for human work, is the progressive way. The prospects for a communist alternative rested on the contradictions of centralizing acculmulation and production through industrial capitalism.
The German and Russian Social Democrats—communist in all but name—had to work out a socialist strategy appropriate to countries with large surviving peasantries. Karl Kautsky, the German SDP leader, believed that Marxism’s disparagement of the peasantry as an outmoded class could be politically disastrous. In The Agrarian Question (1899) he argued that the persistence of small farmers in Germany was a systematic feature of that country's capitalist economy. Any mass movement could not expect them to wither away, but must decide whether to leave them out or to forge an alliance between them and the urban proletariat. Lenin devoted three years of his life (1896-1899) to a similar theoretical and empirical examination of how applicable Marx's generalizations from the English case were to conditions in an even more agrarian economy, Russia's.
The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) is, in my view, the best book on economic development from behind ever written. It anticipates all the central issues confronted by Third World economies in the last century and pursues its analysis with a rigor that has never been matched since. He was aided in this by the accumulation of an amazing record of rural conditions following Alexander II’s reforms of local government as part of emancipation from serfdom in 1861. Communities (zemstvo) were reorganized as market-oriented cooperatives whose activities were recorded statistically with a scope and precision that has never been matched since. Lenin is unique among Marxists after Marx in taking dialectical method seriously enough to alter the master's concepts when faced with an intransigent historical reality that Marx himself never considered. Indeed, his opponents, the Narodniks (populists), claimed support from Marx himself for their view that Russia could make a direct transition to communism without an intervening capitalist stage.
The book’s subtitle is The Formation of a Home Market for Largescale Industry. Lenin hoped to demonstrate that capitalism was already well entrenched in the Russian economy. This was obscured by the survival of a large number of ‘peasants’ in the countryside whom he regards as a sort of agro-proletariat by virtue of their dependence on wage labor for part of their income. Moreover, a lot of manufacturing, although fundamentally capitalist in its organization, was carried out in rural areas. This meant having to reformulate Marx and Engels’ notion of the proletariat as a class lacking all forms of property except in their own labor-power. Lenin concludes in an extraordinarily interesting final chapter (pp. 557-607) that the Russian home market stands ready to support an evolution to the level of large-scale industry that would make a strategy of proletarian revolution feasible under Russian conditions.
Lenin admits that he may have made too much of the intensification of industrial and agrarian capitalism in the Russian heartlands while neglecting what most commentators stressed at the time—the geographical extension of the national economy into various hinterlands, notably Siberia and the Black Sea area. There is an intellectual honesty about this work that transcends any political teleology. It deserves to stand as a model of analytical enquiry into the continuing contradictions of western capitalist expansion into non-capitalist peripheries.
Parsons
Talcott Parsons set out to discover the intellectual foundations of the revolution in European social science in the early twentieth century. He wanted to synthesize his results for the purpose of creating a new American sociology. The result of his labrs was The Structure of Social Action (1937). The merit of this work is that it represents an early attempt to do exactly what we need to do now—to use intellectual history when developing a new approach to economy and society. If that stage succeeds, we might then devise a strategy suitable for its reproduction in world history.
The first paragraph of Parsons' book concludes “Spencer is dead. But who killed him and how? This is the problem”. Herbert Spencer's synthesis of John Stuart Mill's political economy and Charles Darwin's evolutionary biology underpinned right-wing orthodoxy in Britain and America around 1900. It still survives in vulgar neoliberalism, originally known as Reaganomics or Thatcherism. Its catchphrase was ‘survival of the fittest’, drawing on the obvious parallel between natural selection and market competition. Yet, by the 1930s, this naive apologia for capitalism could find no respectable takers in the western academy. How did that come about? Parsons' answer was that Victorian utilitarian evolutionism had been killed off by European social democracy—with marginalist economics mending the rupture between England and the continent.
His four leading assassins were Alfred Marshall *who popularized the new label, economics, Vilfredo Pareto, a Swiss eclectic and author of a famo*s theory in welfare economics, Émile Durkheim, the founder of French sociology, and of course Max Weber. All these men were motivated by a desire to humanize capitalism, to mediate its social contradictions and to reconcile scientific method (positivism) with the romantic ideal of individual action (voluntarism). This involved attacking the pseudo-scientific pretension to have rational answers to all the world's problems and specifically refuting the vulgar economism of the time which certainly persists today6. In the process, they invented the social science disciplines that dominate latterday universities—just as Sigmund Freud invented modern psychology, Ferdinand de Saussure modern linguistics and so on. Parsons succeeded in inventing modern American sociology, for which benefaction he is now roundly vilified by his epigones.
As I have already suggested, it is unlikely that contemporary academic divisions will survive for long, despite the tenacity with which most academics cling to the relics of the last intellectual revolution rather than embrace a new one. This is a good reason for borrowing Parsons’ method, thereby turning him into one element of a future synthesis. We should take seriously three main historical claims that I take from his book, if not exactly in his words: 1. The marginalist revolution in economics sacrificed political economy to a new functional division of academic labor in which state, economy (market), and society were studied by different groups of specialists. These were thereby prohibited from interacting and, moreover, claimed to know nothing of mind, nature or history 2. The professional middle classes tried to establish social democracy in the face of what seemed like a death struggle between intransigent capitalists and the newly organized working class now endowed with a revolutionary theory, Marxism; 3. What Parsons called ‘action theory’ attempted to solve the age-old dialectic between freedom and necessity, represented here as the relationship between individual will and social structure. Parsons took 800 pages and Anthony Giddens filled a library shelf trying to tackle these questions.
Maynard Keynes
It is standard to acknowledge that Maynard Keynes invented macroeconomics, the branch that deals with the state’s influence on economic affairs; that he found acceptance for this project with The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money; that the post-war welfare state is an expression of Keynesian ideas; and that, since the stagflation scare of the 1970s, orthodox opinion has retrenched once again on the old market liberalism that for a while enjoyed the revivalist label of ‘monetarism’. I will not rehearse here the arguments of The General Theory which were intended to persuade academic economists and civil servants attached to Victorian ideas.
Rather, I would point readers to his Essays in Persuasion, a collection of articles addressing the public and written between 1919, after Keynes flounced out of the Versailles peace negotiations, and 1931 when the Great Depression had recently hit. My main aim is to show Keynes’ importance as a critic of scientific economics. Because his thought has since been bowdlerized as mainstream economics, his radical critique of the professional discipline and more generally of thinking in the last bureaucratic century has been buried from view.
All western philosophy reflects a deeply felt need for certainty, determinacy, conceptual closure, proof, and rigor, in other words the need to escape from the limitations of everyday language. The urge to transcend the linguistic practices of one’s time, to find something necessary to cling to as truth, is a basic element of western culture. The polarization of science and mere opinion may have some justification when considering the evolution of the natural sciences. But the last century’s philosophy cast serious doubt on this rigid opposition to how ordinary people think. The contributions of the late Wittgenstein, Derrida, Rorty etc. have reinforced a shift to philosophical relativism that was well-aired in the German philosophy and sociology of Kant, Weber, and Simmel. Economics has remained immune to this trend; but Keynes, an active member of the ‘Bloomsbury Set’, was not. He regretted that the victory of David Ricardo's “machine of blind manipulation” over Malthus’ “vaguer intuitions” took economics back a century:
“The mix of logic and intuition and a wide knowledge of facts (mostly imprecise) required for the highest economic interpretation is too difficult for people who can only imagine the implications of simple facts known with a high degree of precision” (Keynes 1931).
The key to Keynes' thought on these matters is the Wittgenstein of Philosophical Investigations who argued that, between mathematics and poetry, there exist a wide spectrum of linguistic practices (‘language games’), each with its own logic, truth and standards of rigor. Sorting between rival theories in social science is best conducted by means of argument (rhetoric) rather than by deduction. There is no ideal universal language beyond our common ability to figure out our own times. If the subject matter of economics is inherently vague, as Keynes suggests, then seemingly precise language turns out to be paradoxically inefficient compared with everyday language. As the pragmatists say, nothing useful can be said of the properties common to all true statements; we gain nothing by reducing discourse to a primary level of abstraction. Eclecticism pays. We can be serious in our arguments without aping natural science.
Keynes rebeled against the analytical philosophy of Russell and Whitehead, which lent authority to his economist predecessors. He preferred vague and rhetorical relevance to rigorous irrelevance. Words in natural language are inherently vague, suggesting relations, correspondences, and analogies between phenomena. A priori dedication to precision in communication makes our language bulky and complex, an obstacle to communication. Keynes aired these views in the Treatise on Probability, but he drove the point home in The General Theory, in which he inveighs against
“…symbolic pseudo-mathematical methods [as] mere concoctions which allow the author to lose sight of the complications and interdependencies of the real world in a maze of pretentious and unhelpful symbols” (Keynes 1936).
He inverts the scient-ific notion of clarity by showing that for a class of statements, including economic theory, apparent vagueness aids precision. Carl Menger made a similar point when he insisted that ‘the principle of marginal utility’, expressed in words, says more than any mathematical derivation from it.
Keynes was concerned with addressing his audience, something most ordinary economists never attempt beyond the narrow circle of fellow professionals. In this respect, modern economists are a priestly caste, speaking a sort of Latin in a world of demotic languages. Keynes knew that “…a theorist requires much good will and intelligence and a large measure of cooperation from his readers”; he must “take up the tale much closer to the conclusion” than is normal for social scientists; economists, to be effective, must learn to speak and write precisely in everyday language. His method is matched by his policy conclusions.
The old rules of monetary policy were thought to have a timeless, universal validity; this led the British Treasury into blind incompetence in the Great Depression. Keynes offered discretionary standards of judgement which were relative to a specific problem in time and place, the now of the short run. Keynes beat the policymakers of his day in argument and had more influence over the shape of modern institutions than any other social theorist. He knew that the task is not so much to invent new ideas as to escape the old ones which “ramify into every corner of our minds”. Hence his belief in the receptivity of the young, as the last words of his great book attest:
“In the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are 25 or 30 years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil”* (Keynes 1936).
What would Keynes have achieved if he had known German philosophy as well as his mentor, Alfred Marshall, did?
Maynard Keynes left the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations because the French insisted on heavy German reparations which he was sure would destroy the European economy, since Germany was such a large part of it. In 1920 he bet all his savings to short the deutschmark for a fall, but somehow the banks kept it up for another year and he fell into serious debt as a result. His father, John Neville Keynes, professor of political economy and registrar at Cambridge University, bailed him out by re-mortgaging the family house. At a 1923 party, someone told him with hindsight of Weimar, ‘But in the long run, you were right’. He replied with his most famous saying, “In the long run we are all dead”, especially in the markets. Keynes never bet with his own money again, but, as bursar in the 1930s, he made Kings College, Cambridge rich by betting in a bear stock market.
Karl Polanyi
All the authors I have highlighted so far were, in a fundamental sense, right. With Veblen as the exception, this is reflected in their historical influence on society and intellectual life. Karl Polanyi was wrong; but he failed gloriously. The Great Transformation (1944) was written towards the end of World War II by a Hungarian exile in Vermont who had spent much of the 1930s in England teaching and writing about the need for socialist planning. His tone resembles that of an Old Testament prophet. Victorian industrial civilization, after a century of world peace (1815-1914), had broken down in a series of unmitigated catastrophes—two world wars, the great depression, fascism and Stalinism. This was because the British Empire had organized the world as a self-regulating market, held together for a time by the gold standard and the balance of power,, and underwritten by its own industrial, financial and maritime hegemony. The liberal state was a hollow sham and its creed a lie. Inevitably the market mechanism failed, and the illusion of personal freedom was replaced by the last century’s impersonal brutality. Polanyi's recipe for a better world was what Engels called “utopian socialism” and his view of Marxism was equally uncomplimentary.
Nineteenth-century liberalism denied the knowledge of society that had been given to us by the Enlightenment. Polanyi understood the necessity of society for our survival and recognized that Man can be free only when he is resigned to his limitations, that is, to death and society. We must exchange an illusory freedom of the individual for real freedom based on acknowledgment of necessary evils. This neo-Aristotelian message came from a Central European whose country was trapped between Hitler and Stalin. He took refuge in England and the United States but was convinced of the need for a planned alternative to their markets.
After the war he was forced to sit in American academia as witness to the greatest economic boom in history, a global market revival with welfare states under US leadership. Yet his book is an inspiration to all those who know intuitively that there is something fishy about economics. His vision is broad and well-informed. He correctly focuses on the specific cultural history of England's industrial revolution as the crucible of the modern world. His critique of liberal market orthodoxy is brilliant. His institutional analysis is accurate and original. He even attempts an anthropological framework for his argument, suggesting that human societies have always relied on reciprocity, redistribution and householding as alternatives to the antisocial market mechanism. How could someone who got so much right be so wrong?
Polanyi was the most influential figure in post-war economic anthropology. This is more because of his role in a postwar symposium (Polanyi et al 1957). Apart from paying homage to Aristotle there, he attempted grand theory in The economy as instituted process. Without acknowledging Kant, Weber and the Battle over Methods between Berlin and Vienna—he was, after all, living in a society that believed it had *escaped from history—he identified two analytical constructs of economy, one formal (rational calculation) and the other substantive (material provisioning). The former was appropriate to industrial market economies and the latter to non-industrial economies. In other words, Polanyi abandoned the synoptic historical vision of The Great Transformation to impress American academics; anthropologists were more gullible than the historians because they too believed that ethnography had escaped from history.
The centre-left, however, was later interested in Polanyi’s idea of a ‘double movement’, fixing on the argument that labor, nature and money are “fictitious commodities,”and on his line that society, which had been embedded before the 19th century, was “disembedded” by the self-regulating market. Polanyi’s idiosyncratic argument on the role of classes in double movement is rarely discussed. He held that classes are often sectarian but sometimes, when resisting the encroachments of the self-regulating market, they become vehicles for asserting the interests of society as a whole and take on a temporary universality. Polanyi was not clear whether ‘disembeddedness’ is just an ideological fiction of liberal economists or ever happened in history. Politicians need money and moneymen need political cover. They have been in bed together for centuries, even millennia. How long then have markets been embedded in states and their social structures?
Something different took root in nineteenth century Britain and spread to the world. Marx underplayed rent, interest and debt in Victorian capitalism. Yet finance and rentier capitalism, as well as massive indebtedness, seem to have taken over industrial capitalism’s preoccupation with production and sale for profit at various times, from the Victorian era until now. Marx and Polanyi both missed the political revolution of the 1860s and early 70s undertaken by all the last century’s leading countries, based on a new alliance between capitalists and the military landlord class who were opposed in the industrial revolution. The most clear-cut examples of this were Japan (after 1868) and Germany (after 1870), but the United States, Russia, the Anglo-Indian super-state, France, and Italy all went through similar revolutions at much the same time.
The resulting ‘national capitalism’ (Hart 2024) spawned a bureaucratic revolution in the late nineteenth century, heralding a new, but tense partnership between modern governments and business corporations; this led to an era of mass production and consumption. Marx probably had more excuse for largely missing this in Capital than Polanyi, since he wrote% it when the revolution was being launched. Max Weber understood that modern Germany was unified by an alliance between the Prussian army/government and Rhineland capitalism, idealized as two forms of rational power, the market and bureaucracy, that together assured what he called legitimate domination. Meanwhile, many on the left now attack free market ideology and internalize its premises as their own (Weber 1978).
Karl Polanyi has been revived in the neoliberal era. His name is often cited in the current crisis, Marx’s too. If there are two sides to all this, both camps are myopic in some respects. I never came across an unsatisfied reader of The Great Transformation. But its conceptual, historical and political relevance to our times is rather less than its protagonists think. Polanyi is upheld by many in the western intellectual class, mainly by disgruntled academics and their followers. They can feel themselves to be critical without rocking the boat. This position is unlikely to be tenable for long.
Marcel Mauss
Marcel Mauss was a French sociologist and ethnologist whose reputation has grown exponentially in recent decades, perhaps because his vision of economy and society contrasts starkly with today’s market fundamentalism. In nineteenth-century English thought, self-interested contracts reigned supreme. Gifts were often assimilated to the law of contract. But eventually gifts and contracts became contrasted in Herbert Spencer’s philosophy as primitive and modern social principles respectively. Apart from a huge volume of occasional writings in French, Mauss left only a few translated essays of which The Gift has become a classic (Mauss 1925). His argument is now usually conflated in the Anglophone world with the Victorian bourgeois opposition between gift and market that he wished to refute.
His main essays were edited as a collection in French by Claude Lévi-Strauss, then widely dispersed in English translation, mainly through the Oxford social anthropology department (Hart and James 2014). He contributed to the confusion by maintaining a firewall between his academic and political writings. Mauss was a prolific pamphleteer and journalist. In consequence, he is cited often, but his non-academic work is not read by many who cite him. The key to his message is the man himself, especially his commitment to living with integrity as a whole person in society (Hart 2007).
Mauss’ uncle, Émile Durkheim, took firm charge of their partnership in building up sociology as an academic discipline; he assembled a team of researchers in Paris around the journal, L’Année Sociologique. Mauss wrote a vast number of reviews for the journal. He held a chair in the religion of primitive peoples but did not complete his doctoral thesis on prayer. Durkheim thought he devoted too much time to politics. Mauss was a cooperative socialist who maintained strong relations with British anthropologists and left-wing politicians. He spent 1914-1918 in the trenches as a translator for British and Australian troops. His party, the French Section of the Workers International (SFIO) was anti-capitalist, but embraced the social market and was opposed to Marxism, especially Bolshevism (Mauss 1924-25). Mauss advocated an economic movement from below that would combine work associations, mutual insurance, and cooperatives.
This social engagement peaked in 1920-1925 after Durkheim’s death during the war, when Mauss assumed leadership of the Année Sociologique group, temporarily revived the journal, published The Gift, was a prolific journalist and prepared for his party’s short-lived accession to national power. But from the mid-1920s, he withdrew from politics and devoted himself to teaching France’s first generations of ethnographers. He suffered from the Nazi occupation as a Jew but was not deported.
Mauss’s essay on the gift is a continuation of Durkheim’s (1893) first book. There he argued, against English utilitarianism, that contractual exchange is always based on a ‘non-contractual element in the contract’. This consists of shared history, state institutions, laws and customs and is largely hidden from view by a legal focus on the contracting parties. Durkheim wanted to make the social market visible. Mauss did too. For him, gifts and market contracts both belonged to the family of exchange relations including money transactions.
Ethnographies of archaic gift-exchange (‘potlatch’) could reveal aspects of capitalist economies. Personal political agency is repressed in the latter but is vividly present in the former. Nor are gifts absent from our societies. He meant not just Christmas and wedding presents, but key contracts with a time element—like wages, rent and credit—that cannot be understood if market exchange is conceived of only as immediate cash payments (spot contracts). Gift-giving, the non-contractual element in the contract, epitomise but is not opposed to buying commodities (Chevalier 2014); his ethnographic examples showed the potential of money and markets to be solidary, humane, and generous.
Mauss stressed the interdependence of aesthetic, legal, economic, political, and religious dimensions of social life. This was captured in synthetic events that he called total social facts. He wanted to advance an economic movement from below on the analogy of archaic gift-exchange. He debunked the idea of a fundamental opposition between self-interested individual contracts and altruistic gifts. The gift is often coercive and unequal, but it also has a generous side. Gift-exchange and markets both extend society from local places into the wider world. Their combination is hard to see in capitalist societies. Mauss did not have a theoretical paradigm of ‘the gift’. The Brazilian anthropologist, Lygia Sigaud (2002) shows in a brilliant essay how The Gift has been misinterpreted. But the history of interpretive error rolls on unchecked.
Mauss departed from his uncle’s approach in three important ways. First, he abandoned Durkheim’s positivist sociological reductionism, seeking rather to identify social phenomena as wholes—a dynamic assemblage of persons, networks, groups, objects, and ideas—more readily revealed through ethnography than by specialist disciplines. The generosity of the archaic gift does not point to a non-market alternative, as Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) -insisted, but rather to the humanity inherent in markets that needed to be liberated from capitalism. Second, Durkheim oversimplified the contrast between primitive and modern societies: he exaggerated the homogeneous and static nature of the former and downplayed similar aspects of industrial nations. Mauss held that all economies are plural; the basic human economic arrangements co-exist in any society. Economic change does not require a radical replacement of one set of institutions by another. It is enough to give their combination a new direction and emphasis, while focusing on their human qualities.
Third, Mauss saw human history as a movement of society towards increasing inclusiveness as the boundaries of local societies are pushed outwards. After the war, he began two book projects on socialism and the nation. Mussolini’s synthesis of these forced a rethink. He believed that markets and money, in many different forms, are universal, since no society was ever self-sufficient materially and all had to establish mutual obligations with foreigners through trade. Gift-exchange was in some ways like the ‘free market’; the human expansiveness and trust that it made visible was indispensable to markets everywhere. The Bolshevik revolution’s violent repression of money and markets was a disaster (Mauss 1924)6.
Why did Mauss separate his academic and political writings? One aimed to stimulate reflection in individual readers, the other collective action. The symbolic power of his concrete descriptions of exotic phenomena was food for personal thought, not prescriptive. Mauss wanted his readers to find their own true beliefs in his academic works, knowing that they would then be more likely to act politically than if authors, professors and politicians told them what and how to think.
In the 1930s he gave well-attended public lectures at Paris’ Institut d’ethnologie. A trio of Surrealist philosophers, led by André Breton, could not agree on their meaning. As an experiment, they took notes separately and compared them later. They were quite different, which they found irritating. The Surrealists then asked Mauss if he cared about getting his message across to “the audience.” He replied, “It was never my intention to impose my thoughts on you, gentlemen. I hoped to help you discover your own.” He knew that each of us only takes something to heart if we find it inside ourselves, perhaps incoherent until given form through conversation and interaction in society with others. The latter help5 us to find something that is intrinsically ours. When that happens, we should do something about it, like join a political movement.
This is how religion instils beliefs that should inform personal actions which are also collective, a development beyond Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), which probably involved several members of the group he assembled in Paris especially his nephew, the specialist in comparative religion. The book served to assert that his neo-Kantian positivist version of sociology of the late 1890s—where society is a reified actor shaping its members in their chaotic everyday lives—was still valid on the eve of the First World War.
Marcel Mauss found his own version of sociology/anthropology, first with his close friend Henri Hubert in the early years of the last century and—after his uncle and his closest friend died—as himself, the author of The Essay on the Gift (1925) and the teacher of France’s first generations of ethnographers. Mauss venerated informal intellectual collaboration—he described friendship as “the delicate aroma of city life”and didn’t bother much about getting his name on joint publications. He was a concrete dialectician who wanted to stimulate original thinking and social action in receptive readers.