Marcel Mauss was more than a scholar: he was a public intellectual involved in socialist party politics, activism, and political journalism. At the end of The Gift he mixes these two realms when he draws normative conclusions for the present from his analysis of premodern gifting practices. But this was a rare exception. Generally, he made a point of keeping science and politics apart— and this fact has caused major misunderstandings in the reception of his essay (Hart, 2014). For one thing, the socio- economic dimension of The Gift and its relevance for our own times has often been overlooked: a case in point is Marcel Hénaff (2010), a protagonist of modern gift theory, who downright denies the existence of this dimension in Mauss. For another, the presumption of a strict separation of science and politics has time and again encouraged readings of The Gift which claim that he strictly distinguishes between gift economies in “archaic societies” and our own modern market economy (see for example Gregory, 1982). And third, Mauss’ political statements were repeatedly dismissed as half-baked, rash, and uncalled-for; even his closest colleague and friend Henri Hubert saw it this way (Fournier, 2006: 244). For example, in her 1990 foreword to The Gift, the anthropologist Mary Douglas opined that “[t] aking the theory straight from its context in full- blown gift economies to a modern political issue [is] really jumping the gun” (1990: xix). I could not disagree more.

Mauss, the socialist

In this section I will elaborate on Mauss’ activism and his journalistic writings to establish which contemporary issues he had in mind while writing The Gift. Which social, political, and economic vision did he want to see realized? And what does this mean for our present? I will suggest that Mauss still has much value as a political and socio-economic thinker, that his version of socialism is now more relevant than ever. Crucially, he does not rely solely on either market or state, which, given the later excesses of both neoliberalism and state socialism, was far-sighted indeed. Combining the two will not do either. Instead, Mauss stresses the all-important aspect of self-organization, as realized, for example, in cooperatives.