Conclusion to the Gift by Marcel Mauss

The conclusion to Mauss’s incredible essay on the uses and concepts of gifts.

Moral Conclusions

It is possible to extend these observations to our own societies. A considerable part of our morality and our lives themselves are still permeated with this same atmosphere of the gift, where obligation and liberty intermingle. Fortunately, everything is still not wholly categorized in terms of buying and selling. Things still have sentimental as well as venal value, assuming values merely of this kind exist. We possess more than a tradesman morality. There still remain people and classes that keep to the morality of former times, and we almost all observe it, at least at certain times of the year or on certain occasions.

The unreciprocated gift still makes the person who has accepted it inferior, particularly when it has been accepted with no thought of returning it. We are still in the field of Germanic morality when we recall the curious essay by Emerson entitled ‘Gifts’. Charity is still wounding for him who has accepted it, and the whole tendency of our morality is to strive to do away with the unconscious and injurious patronage of the rich almsgiver.

The invitation must be returned, just as ‘courtesies’ must. Surprisingly, here are to be seen traces of the old, traditional, moral basis, that of the ancient aristocratic potlatches. Here we also see come to the surface these fundamental motives for human activity: emulation between individuals of the same sex, that ‘basic imperialism’ of human beings. On the one hand, it is the social basis, on the other the animal and psychological basis, that appears. In that separate existence that constitutes our social life, we ourselves cannot ‘lag behind’, as the expression still goes. We must give back more than we have received. The round of drinks is ever dearer and larger in size. Thus, in our childhood, one village family in Lorraine, which normally contented itself with living very frugally, ruined itself for the sake of its guests on saints days, and at weddings, first communions, or funerals. One must act the ‘great lord’ upon such occasions. It may even be said that one section of our people is constantly behaving like this, and spends with the utmost extravagance on guests and on feast days, and with New Year gifts.

The invitation must be given, and must be accepted. This is still the custom, even in our liberal society. Scarcely fifty years ago, and perhaps even more recently, in certain parts of France and Germany the entire village came to the wedding breakfast. If anyone stayed away it was a very bad omen, a foreboding, proof of envy, and a sign of bad luck. In France, in quite a number of places everybody still takes part in such ceremonies. In Provence, when a child is born, everybody still brings an egg and other symbolic presents.

Things sold still have a soul. They are still followed around by their former owner, and they follow him also. At Cornimont, in a valley of the Vosges, the following custom was common not so long ago and perhaps continues to linger on in certain families: so that animals that had been bought should forget their former master and were not tempted to return ‘home’, a cross was traced on the lintel of the stable door, the halter belonging to the seller was kept on the animals, and salt was fed to them. At Raonaux-Bois the animals were given a slice of bread and butter that had been carried three times round the dairy and was held out to them with the right hand. It is true that this was only for the larger livestock that, since the stable was part of the house, were part of the family. But a number of other French customs denote that the thing sold must be detached from the seller, by, for example, striking the thing that is sold, or by whipping the sheep that is sold, etc.

One might even say that a whole section of the law, that relating to industrialists and businessmen, is nowadays at odds with morality. The economic prejudices of the people, the producers, arise from their firm determination to follow the thing they have produced, and from the strong feeling they have that their handiwork is resold without their having had any share of the profit.

Nowadays the old principles react against the rigour, abstraction, and inhumanity of our legal codes. From this viewpoint it may be said that a whole section of our law that is just emerging, with certain customs, consists of turning back the clock. This reaction against the Roman and Saxon (sic) [Northern?] insensitivity of our system is perfectly healthy and well founded. A few new principles of law and custom may be interpreted in this way.

It took a considerable period of time to acknowledge proprietorship in artistic, literary, and scientific work, beyond the peremptory action of selling the manuscript, the first machine, or the original work of art. In fact, societies are not very interested in recognizing for the heirs of an author or an inventor—a benefactor of humanity—more than certain limited rights over the things created by the one that owns those rights. One likes to assert that they are the product of the collective mind as much as f individual mind. Everyone wishes them to fall into the public domain or join in the general circulation of wealth as quickly as possible. However, the scandal of the additional value acquired by paintings, sculptures, and objects d’art, during the lifetime of their creators or their immediate heirs, inspired the French law of September 1923 that gives to the artist and his inheritors a ‘right of succession’ over the series of additional gains made during the successive sales of their works.

All our social insurance legislation, a piece of state socialism that has already been realized, is inspired by the following principle: the worker has given his life and his labour, on the one hand to the collectivity, and on the other hand, to his employers. Although the worker has to contribute to his insurance, those who have benefited from his services have not discharged their debt to him through the payment of wages. The state itself, representing the community, owes him, as do his employers, together with some assistance from himself, a certain security in life, against unemployment, sickness, old age, and death.

Even recent ingenious strategems, for example, the family assistance funds that our French industrialists have freely and energetically developed for the benefit of workers with family obligations, represent a spontaneous response to this need to forge links with individuals, to take into account the burdens they have to bear, and the varying degrees of material and moral interest that such burdens represent.

Similar bodies operate in Germany and Belgium with just as much success. In Britain, during this time of terrible, long drawn-out unemployment affecting millions of workers, an entire movement is emerging in favour of insurance against unemployment, which would be obligatory and organized through corporate bodies. The municipalities and the state are tired of shouldering this immense expense of payments to the unemployed, whose root cause lies in industry and market conditions alone. Thus distinguished economists and captains of industry such as Mr Pybus and Sir Lynden (sic) Macassey are urging that firms themselves, through their corporate associations, should organize these unemployment funds, and themselves make such sacrifices. In short, they would like the cost of security for the worker and his defence against being out of work to become part of the general expenses of each individual industry. All such morality and legislation corresponds in our opinion, not to any upheaval in the law, but a return to it.

On the one hand, one is seeing the dawning, and even the realization, of professional morality and corporate law. The compensatory funds and mutual benefit societies that industrial groupings are setting up in order to finance corporate charitable works, from a purely moral viewpoint are entirely admirable, save on one score: they are run entirely by the employers. Moreover, it is groups that are acting: the state, the municipalities, institutions of public assistance, pension funds, savings banks, mutual benefit societies, employers, and wage-earners. They are all in association together, as, for example, under the social legislation existing in Germany and Alsace-Lorraine. Very soon they will be similarly associated in French social security schemes. Thus we are returning to a group morality.

On the other hand, the state and its subordinate grouping desire to look after the individual. Society is seeking to rediscover a cellular structure for itself. It is indeed wanting to look after the individual. Yet the mental state in which it does so is one in which are curiously intermingled a perception of the rights of the individual and other, purer sentiments: charity, social service, and solidarity. The themes of the gift, of the freedom and the obligation inherent in the gift, of generosity and self-interest that are linked in giving, are reappearing in French society, as a dominant motif too long forgotten.

But to note the fact is not enough. One must deduce practice from it, and a moral precept. It is not sufficient to say that the law is in the process of ridding itself of a few abstractions such as the distinction between real law and personal law; or that it is intent on adding other rights to the cold-hearted law of sale and payment for services. It must be said that this is a salutary revolution. First of all, we return, as return we must, to habits of ‘aristocratic extravagance’. As is happening in English-speaking countries and so many other contemporary societies, whether made up of savages or the highly civilized, the rich must come back to considering themselves—freely and also by obligation— as the financial guardians of their fellow citizens. Among ancient civilizations, from which ours has sprung, some had a (debtors’) jubilee, others liturgies (of duty) such as choregies and trierarchies, and syussitia (meals in common), and the obligatory expenditure by the aedile and the consular dignitaries. We should return to laws of this kind. Then there must be more care for the individual, his life, his health, his education (which is, moreover, a profitable investment), his family, and their future. There must be more good faith, more sensitivity, more generosity in contracts dealing with the hiring of services, the letting of houses, the sale of vital foodstuffs. And it will indeed be necessary to find a way to limit the rewards of speculation and interest.

However, the individual must work. He should be forced to rely upon himself rather than upon others. On the other hand, he must defend his interests, both personally and as a member of a group. Over-generosity, or communism, would be as harmful to himself and to society as the egoism of our contemporaries and the individualism of our laws. In the Mahabharata a malevolent genie of the woods explains to a Brahmin who gave away too much, and too injudiciously: ‘That is why you are thin and pale.’ The life of the monk, and the life of a Shylock are both equally to be shunned. This new morality will surely consist of a good but moderate blend of reality and the ideal.

Thus we can and must return to archaic society and to elements in it. We shall find in this reasons for life and action that are stil prevalent in certain societies and numerous social classes: the joy of public giving; the pleasure in generous expenditure on the arts, in hospitality, and in the private and public festival. Social security, the solicitude arising from reciprocity and cooperation, and that of the occupational grouping, of all those legal entities upon which English law bestows the name of ‘Friendly Societies’—all are of greater value than the mere personal security that the lord afforded his tenant, better than the skimpy life that is given through the daily wages doled out by employers, and even better than capitalist saving—which is only based on a changing form of credit.

It is even possible to conceive what a society would be like in which such principles were the rule. In the liberal professions of our great nations to some extent a morality and an economy of this kind already flourish. For them honour, disinterestedness, corporate solidarity are not vain words, nor do they run counter to the necessities of work. Let us humanize in the same way other occupational groupings and improve them still further. This will represent great progress, as Durkheim has often advocated.

In so doing, we shall return, I think, to the enduring basis of law, to the very principle of normal social life. We must not desire the citizen to be either too good or too individualist nor too insensitive or too realist. He must have a keen sense of awareness of himself, but also of others, and of social reality (in moral matters is there even any other kind of reality?) He must act by taking into account his own interests, and those of society and its subgroups. This morality is eternal; it is common to the most advanced societies, to those of the immediate future, and to the lowest imaginable forms of society. We touch upon fundamentals. No longer are we talking in legal terms: we are speaking of men and groups of men, because it is they, it is society, it is the feelings of men, in their minds and in flesh and blood that at all times spring into action and that have acted everywhere.

Let us demonstrate this. The system that we propose to call the system of ‘total services’, from clan to clan—the system in which individuals and groups exchange everything with one another— constitutes the most ancient system of economy and law that we can find or of which we can conceive. It forms the base from which the morality of the exchange-through-gift has flowed. Now, that is exactly the kind of law, in due proportion, towards which we would like to see our own societies moving. To make these distant phases of law understood, here are two examples, borrowed from extremely different societies.

During a corroboree (a public drama dance) at Pine Mountain, in mid-west Queensland, each individual in turn enters the consecrated place, bearing in one hand his spear-slinger, and with his other hand behind his back. He throws his weapon from a circle at the other end of the dance area, at the same time calling out the place from where he comes, for example: ‘Kunyan is my land’.He stops for moment, and during this time his friends ‘put a present’, a spear, a boomerang, or some other weapon, into his other hand. ‘A good warrior can thus receive more than his hand can hold, particularly if he has daughters to marry off.’

In the Winnebago tribe (the Sioux tribe), the chiefs of the clans very typically give speeches to their fellow chiefs from other tribes that are models of that etiquette widespread in all the Indian civilizations of North America. Each clan cooks food and prepares tobacco for the representatives of the other tribes, during the clan’s festival. Here, for example, are excerpts from the speech made by the chief of the Snake clan:

I greet you. It is good. How could I do otherwise? I am a poor, worthless man and you have remembered me. It is good… You have thought of the spirits and you have come to sit down with me…Soon your dishes will be filled. So I greet you once again, you humans that take the place of the spirits. Etc

And when each chief has eaten, and has put offerings of tobacco into the fire, the final form of words sets out the moral effect of the festival, and all the services that have been rendered:

I thank you for having come to sit down in this seat, I am grateful to you. You have encouraged me…The blessings of your grandfathers who have enjoyed revelations (and who are incarnate in you) are equal to those of the spirits. It is good that you have taken part in my festival. As our ancestors have said, this must be: ‘Your life is weak and you can only be strengthened by the counsel of the braves.’ You have counselled me… This is life for me.

Thus, from one extreme of human evolution to the other, there are no two kinds of wisdom. Therefore let us adopt as the principle of our life what has always been a principle of action and will always be so: to emerge from self, to give, freely and obligatorily. We run no risk of disappointment. A fine Maori proverb runs:

Ko Maru kai atu Ko maru kai mai ka ngohe ngohe

‘Give as much as you take, all shall be very well.’

Conclusions for Economic Sociology and Political Economy

These facts not only throw light upon our morality and help to direct our ideals. In their light, we can analyse better the most general economic facts, and even this analysis helps us dimly to perceive better organizational procedures applicable in our societies.

Several times we have seen how far this whole economy of the exchange-through-gift lay outside the bounds of the so-called natural economy, that of utilitarianism. All these very considerable phenomena of the economic life of all peoples—let us say, to fix things firmly in our minds, that they represent fittingly the great Neolithic civilization—and all these important vestiges of those traditions in societies close to our own, or of our own customs, fall outside the schemes normally put forward by those rare economists who have wished to compare the various types of known economies. We therefore add our own repeated observations to those of Malinowski, who has devoted an entire study to ‘exploding’ current doctrines concerning ‘primitive’ economy.

From this there follows a very solid chain of facts: the notion of value functions in these societies. Very large surpluses, speaking in absolute terms, are amassed. They are often expended to no avail, with comparatively enormous luxury, which is in no way commercial. These are the signs of wealth, and kinds of money are exchanged. Yet the whole of this very rich economy is still filled with religious elements. Money still possesses its magical power and is still linked to the clan or to the individual. the various economic activities, for example the market, are suffused with rituals and myths. They retain a ceremonial character that is obligatory and effective. They are full of rituals and rights. In this light we can already reply to the question that Durkheim posed concerning the religious origin of the notion of economic value. The facts also answer a host of questions concerning the forms and reasons behind what we so ineptly term exchange, the ‘barter’, the permutation of useful things, that, in the wake of the prudent Romans, who were themselves following Aristotle, an a priori economic history places at the origin of the division of labour. It is indeed something other than utility that circulates in societies of all kinds, most of which are already fairly enlightened. The clans, the generations, and the sexes generally—because of the many different relationships to which the contracts give rise—are in a perpetual state of economic ferment and this state of excitement is very far from being materialistic. It is far less prosaic than our buying and selling, our renting of services, or the games we play on the Stock Exchange.

However, we can go even farther than we have gone up to now. One can dissolve, jumble up together, colour and define differently the principal notions that we have used. The terms that we have used—present and gift—are not themselves entirely exact. We shall, however, find no others. These concepts of law and economics that it pleases us to contrast: liberty and obligation; liberality, generosity, and luxury, as against savings, interest, and utility—it would be good to put them into the melting pot once more. We can only give the merest indications on this subject. Let us choose, for example, the Trobriand Islands. There they still have a complex notion that inspires all the economic acts we have described. Yet this notion is neither that of the free, purely gratuitous rendering of total services, nor that of production and exchange purely interested in what is useful. It is a sort of hybrid that flourished.

Malinowski has made a serious attempt at classifying, from the point of view of motives of self-interest and disinterestedness, all the transactions that he noted among the Trobriand Islanders. He gradates them between the pure gift and pure barter after bargaining has taken place. This classification is in reality inapplicable. Thus, according to Malinowski, the type of pure gift would be the gift between man and wife. But, in our view, precisely one of the most important facts reported by Malinowski and one that throws a brilliant light upon all sexual relationships throughout humanity, consists of comparing the mapula, the ‘constant’ payment made by the man to his wife, as a kind of salary for sexual services rendered. Likewise the presents made to the chief are a tribute paid; the distributions of food (sagali) are rewards for work or rituals performed, for example, in the case of funeral vigils. All in all, just as these gifts are not freely given, they are also not really disinterested. They already represent for the most part total counter-services, not only made with a view to paying for services or things, but also to maintaining a profitable alliance, one that cannot be rejected. Such, for example, is the alliance between tribes of fishermen and tribes of farmers or pottery-makers. Now, this is a general fact. We have met it, for example, in the Maori and Tsimshian areas, etc. We can therefore see where this force resides. It is one that is both mystical and practical, one that ties clans together and at the same time divides them, that divides their labour, and at the same time constrains them to carry out exchange. Even in these societies, the individual and the group, or rather the subgroup, have always felt they had a sovereign right to refuse a contract. It is this that gives the stamp of generosity to this circulation of goods. On the other hand they normally had neither the right to, nor any interest in refusing. It is this that makes these distant societies nevertheless related to our own.

The use of money might suggest other reflections. The vaygu’a of the Trobriands, bracelets and necklaces, just as the copper objects of the American Northwest or the wampun of the Iroquois, are both riches, signs of wealth, and means of exchange and of payment, but also things that must be given, or even destroyed. However, these are still pledges linked to the persons that use them, and these pledges bind them. Since, on the other hand, they already serve as indicators of money, one has an interest in giving them away so as to be able to possess yet other objects, by transforming them into goods or services that, in their turn, can be transformed again into money. One might really say that the Trobriand or Tsimshian, although far removed from him, proceeds like the capitalist who knows how to dispose of his ready cash at the right time, in order to reconstitute at a later date this mobile form of capital. Self-interest and disinterestedness likewise explain this form of the circulation of wealth and that of the archaic circulation of the signs of wealth that ensue.

Even pure destruction of wealth does not signify that complete detachment that one might believe to be found in it. Even these acts of greatness are not without egoism. The purely sumptuary form of consumption (which is almost always exaggerated and often purely destructive), in which considerable amounts of goods that have taken a long time to amass are suddenly given away or even destroyed, particularly in the case of the potlatch, give such institutions the appearance of representing purely lavish expenditure and childish prodigality. In effect, and in reality, not only are useful things given away and rich foods consumed to excess, but one even destroys for the pleasure of destroying. For example, the Tsimshian, Tlingit, and Haïda chiefs throw these copper objects and money into the water. The Kwakiutl chiefs smash them, as do those of the tribes allied to them. But the reason for these gifts and frenetic acts of wealth consumption is in no way disinterested, particularly in societies that practise the potlatch. Between chiefs and their vassals, between vassals and their tenants, through such gifts a hierarchy is established. To give is to show one’s superiority, to be more, to be higher in rank, magister. To accept without giving in return, or without giving more back, is to become client and servant, to become small, to fall lower (minister).

The magic ritual of the kula called the mwasila is full of formulas and symbols that demonstrate that the potential contracting party seeks above all this advantage of social superiority—one might almost say brute superiority. Thus, having cast a spell over the betel nut that they are going to use with their partners, after having cast a spell over the chief, his comrades, their pigs, the necklaces, then the head and its orifices, plus everything that is brought there, the pari, the opening gifts, etc.…after having cast a spell over all these, the magician sings, not without exaggeration:

I topple the mountain, the mountain moves, the mountain crumbles away, etc.…My charm goes to the summit of the Dobu mountain…My boat is going to sink…etc. My fame is like that of the lightning. My tread is like that of the flying witch doctors, the Tudududu.

To be first, the most handsome, the luckiest, the strongest, and wealthiest—this is what is sought after, and how it is obtained. Later, the chief gives proof of his mana by redistributing what he has just received to his vassals and relations. He sustains his rank among the chiefs by giving back bracelets for necklaces, hospitality for visits, etc. In this case riches are from every viewpoint as much a means of retaining prestige as something useful. Yet are we sure that it is any different in our own society, and that even with us riches are not above all a means of lording it over our fellow men?

Let us now put to the test the other notion that we have just opposed to that of the gift and disinterestedness: the notion of interest, of the individual search after what is useful. This does not present itself either as it functions in our own minds. If some equivalent reason animates the Trobriand or American Indian chiefs, the Andaman clans, etc., or once motivated generous Hindus, and Germanic or Celtic nobles, as regards their gifts and expenditure, it is not the cold reasoning of the merchant, the banker, and the capitalist. In those civilizations they are concerned with their own interest, but in a different way from our own age. They hoard, but in order to spend, to place under an obligation, to have their own ‘liege men’. On the other hand, they carry on exchange, but it is above all in luxury articles, ornaments or clothes, or things that are consumed immediately, as at feasts. They repay with interest, but this is in order to humiliate the person initially making the gift or exchange, and not only to recompense him for loss caused to him by ‘deferred consumption’. There is self-interest, but this self-interest is only analogous to what allegedly sways us. A relatively amorphous and disinterested economic system exists within subgroups, that regulates the life of the Australian clans or those of North America (the East and the Prairies). On the other hand there exists also the individualistic and purely self-interested economy that our own societies have experienced at least in part, as soon as it was discovered by the Semitic and Greek peoples. Between these two types there is an entire and immensely gradated series of institutions and economic events, and this series is not governed by the economic rationalism whose theory we are so willing to propound.

The very word ‘interest’ is itself recent, originally an accounting technique: the Latin word interest was written on account books against the sums of interest that had to be collected. In ancient systems of morality of the most epicurean kind it is the good and pleasurable that is sought after, and not material utility. The victory of rationalism and mercantilism was needed before the notions of profit and the individual, raised to the level of principles, were introduced. One can almost date—since Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees—the triumph of the notion of individual interest. Only with great difficulty and the use of periphrasis can these two words be translated into Latin, Greek, or Arabic. Even those who wrote classical Sanskrit, who used the word artha, fairly close to our own idea of interest, had a different idea of it from our own, as they did for other categories of action. The sacred books of classical India already divide human activities up as follows: law (dharma), interest (artha), desire (kama). But above all it is a matter of political selfinterest—that of the king and the Brahmins, of the ministers, in the kingdom and in each caste. The considerable literature of the Niticastra is not concerned with economics.

It is our western societies who have recently made man an ‘economic animal’. But we are not yet all creatures of this genus. Among the masses and the elites in our society purely irrational expenditure is commonly practised. It is still characteristic of a few of the fossilized remnants of our aristocracy. Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but lies ahead, as does the man of morality and duty, the man of science and reason. For a very long time man was something different, and he has not been a machine for very long, made complicated by a calculating machine. Moreover, happily we are still somewhat removed from this constant, icy, utilitarian calculation. We need to carry out an analysis in depth, with statistics, as Halbwachs has done for the working classes, of our own consumption and expenditure, we of the western middle class. How many needs do we satisfy? And how many inclinations do we not satisfy whose ultimate purpose is not one of utility? How much of his income does or can the rich man allocate to his personal utilitarian needs? His expenditure on luxury, on art, on outrageous things, on servants—do not these make him resemble the nobles of former times or the barbarian chiefs whose customs we have described? Is it good that this should be so? That is a different question. It is perhaps good that there are other means of spending or exchanging than pure expenditure. In our view, however, it is not in the calculation of individual needs that the method for an optimum economy is to be found. I believe that we must remain something other than pure financial experts, even in so far as we wish to increase our own wealth, whilst becoming better accountants and managers. The brutish pursuit of individual ends is harmful to the ends and the peace of all, to the rhythm of their work and joys—and rebounds on the individual himself.

As we have just seen, already important sections of society, associations of our capitalist firms themselves, are seeking as bodies to group their employees together. Moreover, all syndicalist groupings, whether of employers or wage-earners, claim they are defending and representing the general interest as fervently as the individual interest of their members or even their corporations. These fine speeches, it is true, are adorned with many metaphors. However, we must state that not only morality and philosophy, but even public opinion and political economy itself, are beginning to elevate themselves to this ‘social’ level. We sense that we cannot make men work well unless they are sure of being fairly paid throughout their life for work they have fairly carried out, both for others and for themselves. The producer who carries on exchange feels once more—he has always felt it, but this time he does so acutely— that he is exchanging more than a product of hours of working time, but that he is giving something of himself—his time, his life. Thus he wishes to be rewarded, even if only moderately, for this gift. To refuse him this reward is to make him become idle or less productive.

Perhaps we may point out a conclusion that is both sociological and practical. The famous Sourate LXIV, ‘mutual disappointment’ (the Last Judgement) given to Mahomet at Mecca, says of God:

15. Your wealth and your children are your temptation, whilst God holds in reserve a magnificent reward.

16. Fear God with all your might; listen and obey, give alms (sadaqa) in your own interest. He who is on his guard against his avarice will be happy.
17. If you make a generous loan to God, he will pay you back double; he will forgive you because he is grateful and long-suffering.
18. He knows things visible and invisible, he is the one powerful and wise.

Substitute for the name of Allah that of society and the occupational grouping, or put together all three names, if you are religious. Replace the concept of alms by that of co-operation, of a task done or service rendered for others. You will then have a fairly good idea of the kind of economy that is at present laboriously in gestation. We see it already functioning in certain economic groupings, and in the hearts of the masses, who possess, very often better than their leaders, a sense of their own interests, and of the common interest.

Perhaps by studying these obscure aspects of social life we shall succeed in throwing a little light upon the path that our nations must follow, both in their morality and in their economy.

Conclusion Regarding General Sociology and Morality

May we be allowed a further remark about the method we have followed? We have no wish to put forward this study as a model to be followed. It only sets out bare indications. It is not sufficiently complete and the analysis might be pushed still farther. We are really posing questions to historians and ethnographers, and putting forward subjects for enquiry rather than resolving a problem and giving a definitive answer. For the time being it is enough for us to be persuaded that in this direction numerous facts will be discovered.

Yet, if this is so, it is because in this way of treating a problem there lies a heuristic principle we should like to bring out. The facts that we have studied are all, if we may be allowed the expression, total social facts, or, if one wishes—although we do not like the word—general ones. That is to say, in certain cases they involve the totality of society and its institutions (potlatch, clans confronting one another, tribes visiting one another, etc.), and in other cases only a very large number of institutions, particularly when these exchanges and contracts rather concern the individual.

All these phenomena are at the same time juridical, economic, religious, and even aesthetic and morphological, etc. They are juridical because they concern private and public law, and a morality that is organized and diffused throughout society; they are strictly obligatory or merely an occasion for praise or blame; they are political and domestic at the same time, relating to social classes as well as clans and families. They are religious in the strict sense, concerning magic, animism, and a diffused religious mentality. They are economic. The idea of value, utility, self-interest, luxury, wealth, the acquisition and accumulation of goods—all these on the one hand—and on the other, that of consumption, even that of deliberate spending for its own sake, purely sumptuary: all these phenomena are present everywhere, although we understand them differently today. Moreover, these institutions have an important aesthetic aspect that we have deliberately omitted from this study. Yet the dances that are carried out in turn, the songs and processions of every kind, the dramatic performances that are given from camp to camp, and by one associate to another; the objects of every sort that are made, used, ornamented, polished, collected, and lovingly passed on, all that is joyfully received and successfully presented, the banquets themselves in which everyone participates; everything, food, objects, and services, even ‘respect’, as the Tlingit say, is a cause of aesthetic emotion, and not only of emotions of a moral order or relating to self-interest. This is true not only for Melanesia, but even more especially so for the system of potlatch in the American Northwest, and still more so for the festival-cum-market of the Indo-European world. Finally, the phenomena are clearly structural. They all occur during assemblies, fairs, and markets, or at least at festivals that take their place. All such festivals presuppose congregations whose duration can exceed one season of social coming together, as do the winter potlatches of the Kwakiutl, or weeks, as do the seafaring expeditions of the Melanesians. Moreover, there must be roads or at least trails, and seas and lakes across which one may peaceably transport oneself. There must be tribal, intertribal, or international alliances, those of the commercium and the connubium.

Thus these are more than themes, more than the bare bones of institutions, more than complex institutions, even more than systems of institutions divided, for example, into religion, law, economy, etc. They are whole ‘entities’, entire social systems, the functioning of which we have attempted to describe. We have looked at societies in their dynamic or physiological state. We have not studied them as if they were motionless, in a static state, or as if they were corpses. Even less have we decomposed and dissected them, producing rules of law, myths, values, and prices. It is by considering the whole entity that we could perceive what is essential, the way everything moves, the living aspect, the fleeting moment when society, or men, become sentimentally aware of themselves and of their situation in relation to others. In this concrete observation of social life lies the means of discovering new facts, which we are only beginning dimly to perceive. In our opinion, nothing is more urgent or more fruitful than this study of total social facts.

It has a double advantage. Firstly, there is the advantage of generality. Those facts that relate to the general functioning of society are likely to be more universal than the various institutions, or the various themes that relate to these institutions, which are always more or less accidentally tinged with local colour. But above all such a study has the advantage of reality. Thus one succeeds in seeing the social ‘things’ themselves, in concrete form and as they are. In societies one grasps more than ideas or rules, one takes in men, groups, and their different forms of behaviour. One sees them moving, as one does masses and systems in mechanics, or as in the sea we notice the octopuses and the anemones. We perceive numbers of men, forces in motion, who are in movement intheir environment and in their feelings.

The historians feel and rightly object to the fact that the sociologists are too ready with abstractions and unduly separate the various elements of societies from one another. We must do as they do: observe what is given. Now, the given is Rome or Athens, the average Frenchmen, the Melanesian from this island or another, and not prayer or law by itself. After having of necessity divided things up too much, and abstracted from them, the sociologists must strive to reconstitute the whole. By so doing they will discover rewarding facts. They will also find a way to satisfy the psychologists. The latter are strongly aware of their privileged position; the psychopathologists, in particular, are certain that they can study the concrete. All these study or should observe, the behaviour of total beings, not divided according to their faculties. We must imitate them. The study of the concrete, which is the study of completeness, is possible, and more captivating, more explanatory still in sociology. For our part, we observe the complete and complex reactions of numerically defined masses of men, complete, complex beings. We, too, observe what constitutes their organism or their psyche. At the same time we describe the behaviour of this mass and its corresponding psychoses: sentiments, ideas, and the volitions of the crowd, or of organized societies and their subgroups. We, too, view entities, and the reactions of those entities, whose ideas and feelings are normally interpretations, and more rarely do we see the reasons for them. The principle and the end of sociology is to perceive the whole group and its behaviour in its entirety. We have not had time—it would have meant extending unduly a limited subject—to try to perceive at this time the structural basis for all the facts we have indicated. However, it is perhaps useful to indicate, at least as an example, the method we would like to follow, and along what lines we would carry out that research.

All the societies, we have described above, except for our European societies, are segmented. Even Indo-European societies—Roman society before the Twelve Tables, Germanic societies even very late on, up to the writing down of the Edda saga, and Irish society up to the creation of its main literature— were still based on the clan and, at the very least the large families, which formed internally a more or less undivided block, being more or less externally isolated from one another. All these societies are or were far from our own state of unification, or the unity that a defective history ascribes to them. Moreover, within these groups, individuals, even those with strong characteristics, were less sad, less serious, less miserly, and less personal than we are. Externally at least, they were or are more generous, more liable to give than we are. The law of friendship and contracts, with the gods, came to ensure ‘peace’ within ‘markets’ and towns. This occurred when groups paid visits to one another at tribal festivals and at ceremonies where clans confronted one another and families allied themselves or began ‘initiations’ with one another. It happened even in more advanced societies when the ‘law of hospitality’ had been developed. Over a considerable period of time and in a considerable number of societies, men approached one another in a curious frame of mind, one of fear and exaggerated hostility, and of generosity that was likewise exaggerated, but such traits only appear insane to our eyes. In all the societies that have immediately preceded our own, and still exist around us, and even in numerous customs extant in our popular morality, there is no middle way: one trusts completely, or one mistrusts completely; one lays down one’s arms and gives up magic, or one gives everything, from fleeting acts of hospitality to one’s daughter and one’s goods. It is in such a state of mind that men have abandoned their reserve and have been able to commit themselves to giving and giving in return. This was because they had no choice. Two groups of men who meet can only either draw apart, and, if they show mistrust towards one another or issue a challenge, fight—or they can negotiate. Until legal systems and economies evolved not far removed from our own, it is always with strangers that one ‘deals’, even if allied to them. In the Trobriand Islands the people of Kiriwina told Malinowski: ‘The men from Dobu are not good like us; they are cruel, they are cannibals. When we come to Dobu, we are afraid of them. They might kill us. But then I spit out ginger root, and their attitude changes. They lay down their spears and receive us well.’ Nothing better interprets this unstable state between festival and war.

One of the best ethnographers, Thurnwald, writing about another Melanesian tribe, giving genealogical statistics, describes for us a particular event that also clearly demonstrates how these people, as a group, suddenly pass from festival to battle. Buleau, a chief, had invited another chief, Bobal, and his people to a banquet, probably the first in a long series. They began to rehearse the dances the whole night through. In the morning they were all in a state of nerves from their sleepless night, the dances, and the songs. As a result of a simple remark made by Buleau, one of Bobal’s men killed him. And the rank and file massacred, pillaged, and carried off the women of the village. ‘Buleau and Bobal were rather friendly, and merely rivals’, Thurnwald was told. We have all observed such facts, even around us.

It is by opposing reason to feeling, by pitting the will to peace against sudden outbursts of insanity of this kind that peoples succeed in substituting alliance, gifts, and trade for war, isolation and stagnation.

This is therefore what one may have found at the conclusion of this research. Societies have progressed in so far as they themselves, their subgroups, and lastly, the individuals in them, have succeeded in stabilizing relationships, giving, receiving, and finally, giving in return. To trade, the first condition was to be able to lay aside the spear. From then onwards they succeeded in exchanging goods and persons, no longer only between clans, but between tribes and nations, and, above all, between individuals. Only then did people learn how to create mutual interests, giving mutual satisfaction, and, in the end, to defend them without having to resort to arms. Thus the clan, the tribe, and peoples have learnt how to oppose and to give to one another without sacrificing themselves to one another. This is what tomorrow, in our so-called civilized world, classes and nations and individuals also, must learn. This is one of the enduring secrets of their wisdom and solidarity.

There is no other morality, nor any other form of economy, nor any other social practices save these. The Bretons, and the Chronicles of Arthur tell how King Arthur, with the help of a Cornish carpenter, invented that wonder of his court, the miraculous Round Table, seated round which, the knights no longer fought. Formerly, ‘out of sordid envy’, in stupid struggles, duels and murders stained with blood the finest banquets. The carpenter said to Arthur: ‘I will make you a very beautiful table, around which sixteen hundred and more can sit, and move around, and from which no-one will be excluded…No knight will be able engage in fighting, for there the highest placed will be on the same level as the lowliest.’ There was no longer a ‘high table’, and consequently no more quarrelling. Everywhere that Arthur took his table his noble company remained happy and unconquerable. In this way nations today can make themselves strong and rich, happy and good. Peoples, social classes, families, and individuals will be able to grow rich, and will only be happy when they have learnt to sit down, like the knights, around the common store of wealth. It is useless to seek goodness and happiness in distant places. It is there already, in peace that has been imposed, in well-organized work, alternately in common and separately, in wealth amassed and then redistributed, in the mutual respect and reciprocating generosity that is taught by education.

In certain cases, one can study the whole of human behaviour, and social life in its entirety. One can also see how this concrete study can lead not only to a science of customs, to a partial social science but even to moral conclusions, or rather, to adopt once more the old word, ‘civility’, or ‘civics’, as it is called nowadays. Studies of this kind indeed allow us to perceive, measure, and weigh up the various aesthetic, moral, religious, and economic motivations, the diverse material and demographic factors, the sum total of which are the basis of society and constitute our common life, the conscious direction of which is the supreme art, Politics, in the Socratic sense of the word.