When it comes to gift giving, scholars frequently argue in historical terms, claiming that the principle of the gift used to regulate all sorts of social relationships. Thus, while in medieval times people still owed each other support and deference (even though this was not explicitly defined in terms of a gift- based exchange), with the advent of modernity there occurred a split in what once was a unified principle, with the spheres of public economic exchanges and of private acts of giving or donating parting ways. We encounter this model, for example, in Sociology of Giving by Helmuth Berking ([1996] 1999) who, after investigating its conceptual history, concludes that the gift proper survives only in a residual sphere that is marginalized by market exchange and utilitarianism, namely, in the private practice of gifting. We are confronted with a dichotomy of exchange and self-interest as signa of modernity on the one hand versus the gift as something “premodern” and irrational on the other. The Hobbesian solution, assuming that the convergence of individual interests can under certain conditions lead to cooperation, and the Rousseauist solution, supposing that cooperation requires a common cultural background consisting of shared norms, values, and knowledges, are thus squarely juxtaposed. Attempts to bring the two views together again usually result in the widespread contention that for cooperation to work, you need to first teach people to behave prosocially— and use sanctions if they do not.

Marcel Mauss resisted this dichotomy and this antinomy, and he challenged many of the contract theoretical premises prevalent in political and economic theory, such as Adam Smith’s belief in a human “propensity to exchange.” In his [1925] 1990 seminal Essai sur le don (The Gift), Mauss rejects the assumption that exchanges and contracts form the basis of society. What he assumes instead is that all human institutions are based on practices of giving, practices that synthesize the polarities of freedom vs. obligation and self-interest vs. solidarity, be it in premodern or in modern societies (Hart, 2007). Mauss’ goal is to establish a gift discourse for our own times. While Europeans had increasingly lost sight of gift relations during most of the 1800s, which were dominated by the emergence of capitalism, bureaucracy, and positivism, towards the end of the century the tables began to turn.