Marcel Mauss

personal fulfillment, first in military service and afterwards as the leader of his uncle’s cause, following Durkheim’s premature death in 1917. Mauss now flourished as a political journalist, while redefining his main academic interest as the relationship between socialism and the nation. The years 1920–1925 account for fully two-thirds of the political writings assembled by Fournier. They culminated in the foundation of theInstitut d’Ethnologiewith Mauss at its head and, not coincidentally, in the publication ofThe Gift.Mauss lived another twenty-five years after that. He achieved considerable renown as a teacher and public figure, managing to be acknowledged both as Durkheim’s heir as a professor of sociology in theColle personality rather than Durkheim’s, Mauss kept pushing for a more concrete and complex approach to studying the human condition than the modern social sciences allow for. He supervised a revolution in French anthropology that he was never able to participate in directly, while the sociology he pro- fessed came under acute pressure during the interwar years. Marcel Mauss’ own life is the “total social fact” whose meaning he sought to illuminate and which we have to excavate. Even his apparent failures offer us much opportu- nity for reflection. While the twentieth century denied his enterprise at every turn, he sought a method for placing the whole person in society as a whole. A LIFE IN THREE STAGES 1. 1895–1914 E ́ mile Durkheim’sThe Division of Labor in Society, a version of his doctoral thesis written while teaching at Bordeaux, was published in 1893. It provided a template for the school of sociology he sought to found and his nephew, Marcel Mauss, was still addressing its central concerns more than thirty years later, when he wroteThe Gift. The idea of economic progress through specialization was at the core of the British economics founded by Adam Smith (1776). A century later economic individualism was the cornerstone of an evolutionary social theory articulated by Herbert Spencer (1897) and popularized as the native ideology of a triumphant western bourgeoisie. Dur- kheim sought to show that division was a dialectical process of separation and integration, that society became stronger as labor was divided and as the scope for individual action was enhanced. Emphasis on the making of individ- ual contracts obscured the social glue of “the non-contractual element in the contract” that made the economy possible—a combination of law, state, customs, morality, and shared history that it was the sociologist’s task to make more visible. The individual is the result of social development and not, as in Smith’s origin myth, its source. Durkheim’s aim, in a socialist tradition begun by Saint-Simon, was to uncover the sources of solidarity, of which he identified two main types: mech- anical and organic. The first was grounded in the sameness of “primitive” or stateless societies and was expressed as aconscience collective, while the second arose from higher levels of interdependence in economies whose differ- entiation obscured common interests. Modern nations draw on a culture of sameness while organizing a complex division of labor. Durkheim hoped to promote the stability of the French Third Republic through a syndicalist politics (the professional association of occupational groups) that was antagonistic to class-based socialism. Above all he hoped to nurture the development of a secular science of ethics to replace the traditional mixture of religious and class prejudice. Following the academic trend of the day in fields such as chem- istry, he aimed to establish an exclusive and reductionist method for sociology IN PURSUIT OF THE WHOLE3 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 and, in the following years, before moving to a more central base in Paris, he did so with the publication of t