The GiftRevisited: Marcel Mauss on War, Debt, and the Politics of Reparations

Abstract

This article offers a new interpretation of Marcel Mauss's The Gift. It situatesMauss's argument within his broader thinking on the politics of sovereign debt cancellation and the question of German reparations paid to the Allies after World War I. Mauss applauded the policies of reparation and debt cancellation proposed by the French "solidarist" activists who were responsible for inclusion of reparations provisions in the Versailles Treaty. But Mauss was also aware that their legal mobilization could not by itself restore a sense of solidarity among European peoples. Broader systems of political alliance and anthropological norms of gift-making were also necessary. In Mauss's writings on war reparations, as in The Gift, he described the legal, political, and macrostructural dynamics at work in the settlement of reparations and sovereign debts, which he differentiated from the dynamics at work in the speculative logics of financial capitalism. In doing so, Mauss provided insights into the settlement of sovereign debt crises, which still agitate the international community today.

On the Theoretical and Practical Relevance of the Concept of Gift to the Development of a Non-imperialist Economics

“…), and rather saw them as social actors who can and should cooperate internationally in the name of mutual respect for each other's freedom, if the opportunities of global interdependence must exceed its threats. Now, Mallard (2011) and Carabelli and Cedrini (2010a) have recently stressed the affinity between Keynes's and Mauss's reasoning about German reparations and the European economic conflict at the end of WWI -it is to be noted that Mauss, who considered the international environment as "le milieu des milieux" (Ramel 2004, p. 231) The Maussian character of Keynes's new order -wherein, as Sahlins (1972, p. 162) observed in relation to gift exchange in archaic societies, "the freedom to gain at others' expense is not envisioned by the relations and form of exchange" -may profitably 28 become the focus of a strongly interdisciplinary research on the international economic order. In particular, this research should aim at establishing the political foundations of a possible alternative to the current "non-system" which favored the most severe global crisis since the Great Depression in a context of unprecedented global and European imbalances.…”

Equivalencia y valor en procesos de reciprocidad e intercambio entre los mapuches

“…Toda transacción creará vínculos sociales más allá de las personas, por eso la moralidad emerge de estos vínculos sociales como realidad sui generis de interacciones sociales informales (Mauss, 1971;Godbout, 1997;Mayer, 2002;Hollenbeck et al, 2006;Davies et al, 2010;Mallard, 2011;Kowalski, 2011).…”

“…Diversos autores como Sahlins (1977), Monaghan (1990Monaghan ( y 1996, Yan (1996), Tereucán (2003Tereucán ( y 2008, Good (2005) , Ferraro, (2004), Teigen et al (2005), Carrasco y Robichaux (2005), Khattri (2010), Peebles (2010), Venkatesan (2011), Mallard (2011), HØjer (2012) se han abocado al análisis teórico del tema, poniendo en discusión las premisas de Mauss y/o su estudio en contextos diversos.…”

The duty to repair in practice: The hundred years history of a legal concept

“…In fact, the philosophical outlook of the reparations "contract" -as we may call these sixteen provisions of the Versailles Treaty -was deeply prospective rather than retrospective: by paying reparations, the Germans did not expiate for a collective crime, but made sure that Europe would not fall again in the cycle of financial disorder and chaos that would lead to a new war. For the French members of the Reparations Commission in particular, reparations would then express a renewed sense of transnational social "solidarity," a key concept for the solidarist intellectuals active in the work of the Reparations Commission, like Léon Bourgeois, Charles Gide, but also Durkheim's nephew, Marcel Mauss and his friend Léon Blum (Mallard 2011). In fact, such a philosophy of financial responsibility was not only asked from Germany by the Allies: in fact, the Versailles Treaty also asked that the new countries that included territories formerly under German control accept to repay the debts that Germany had contracted when it administered these territories (Article 255).…”