RBE I Workshop: Robert Leonard, "Karl Menger's Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and Social Science"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

ROBERT LEONARD
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)

Karl Menger’s Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and Social Science

Excerpt

From the beginning of my reading and archival work on Menger, both at the Illinois Institute of Technology and at Duke, I noticed his frequent references to the sphere of art and aesthetics. While this is something that is discussed only occasionally in the correspondence I have examined thus far, much of which is taken up with detailed mathematical matters, it does feature in his posthumously published Reminiscences (1994), in both their archival draft- and published versions.  At some points in his publications too, aesthetic considerations are important.  Finally, the visual arts occupied a significant place in Menger’s life.  All of this, taken together, seemed to point towards something of greater than incidental importance, worthy of closer examination.[1]

Menger was actively interested in modern art of various kinds and, if one is to judge by various obiter dicta, he was also self-consciously Modern – aware of the novelty and perhaps even slightly scandalous nature of his artistic tastes.  In the mid-1920’s, when he was in his early 20’s, he developed an interest for the work of certain graphic artists of the period, including those by the Duch avant-garde.  In the period 1925-27, not only did Menger live in The Netherlands, he spent the first year or so in Laren, an artists’ colony outside Amsterdam, where his then-mentor Ludwig Brouwer lived.  During that time, he travelled to Paris to see Piet Mondrian’s studio, and at some point he acquired for his own Vienna apartment modern furniture in the style of that made by De Stijl.  In Vienna, he discussed art with Clara Wittgenstein, the philosopher’s aunt, and he visited, and admired, the Stonborough House, which Ludwig had designed for his sister Margarethe.  He spent the academic year 1930-31 in the U.S., first at Harvard, then at the Rice Institute in Texas.  In Cambridge, Massachussetts, he engaged both Harvard’s George Birkhoff and MIT’s Norbert Wiener in discussions of aesthetics, a subject on which the former was actively working at the time.  Travelling across the U.S., Menger was greatly taken by the Native art of the American Southwest. 

Not only was Menger interested in art, but he drew connections between mathematical and artistic creativity.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that he saw mathematics as an art form, albeit one that had its rules and often showed itself to be relevant to science.  In Vienna in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, when defending complete freedom in the pursuit of abstract mathematics in the context of the foundational debates, he invoked the very Modern defence of  “Art for Art’s Sake”.  When he opposed Otto Neurath’s campaign for Unified Science, it was not because of any belief in a distinction between the natural and social sciences (regardless of what Menger Sr. may have written), but because he believed that trying to view mathematics as a sharply-defined “science” was to ignore the artistic nature of mathematical and scientific creativity. 

When Menger moved to the U.S., he soon left the University of Notre Dame for the Illinois Institute of Technology, whose campus was then being built by Mies van der Rohe, and the architecture of which Menger likened to the work of Mondrian.  In 1943, with encouragement from Walter Gropius, Menger’s wife Hilda developed a children’s game in architectural blocks, designed as an aid in cultural and political education.  In 1952, at the Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, Menger organised a geometry exhibition, another “aesthetic space”, not unreminiscent of Mondrian’s studio, designed in this case to present the wonders of geometry to a broader audience.

This essay is a tentative and preliminary attempt to explore Menger from an aesthetical point of view, to examine him from the perspective of the psychology of style. In a series of interconnected vignettes, we consider his engagement with the realm of artistic creation, looking at the places he lived, the things with which he surrounded himself, with a view to understanding how his imagination worked.  We see the resonance between the geometrical structures he explored as a mathematician, some of which could be seen by the eye, and the structures he admired in Modern art.  We see in Menger a concern for simplicity, clarity and sharp definition, aesthetic qualities that, for him, had political ramifications.  We consider the abstract theoretical structures he construed in his 1934 book in sociology, and probe the psychological, aesthetic and political dimensions of that work.

---

[1] It is interesting to observe how ideas evolve.  In one or two unpublished papers in the mid-1990’s, I began groping towards an understanding of the place of art in the economics and social science of interwar Vienna.  However, in the published work that eventually grew out of that (with the exception of a paper on Neurath), the artistic dimension essentially disappeared, focused, as it was, on developments in economics and game theory.  In the latter stages of my work on that, however, particularly through my explorations of von Neumann, I found myself once again confronted with questions of aesthetics and style.  This time, it was style in mathematics and the manner in which it assumed political importance in Germany in the 1930’s.  In short, I learned to see von Neumann’s game theory not merely as something stimulated by the politics of the late 1930’s but as the reassertion of a “Modern”, Hilbertian style in the face of such political chaos, an idea I now see to be quite congruent with Jeremy Gray’s new broad portrayal of mathematical Modernism.  All of this has given me fresh impetus to return to exploring the social sciences in relation to the various expressions of Modernism in the first half of the 20^th century.    

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RBE I Workshop: Bruna Ingrao, "The Imaginative Faculty. Cognition in the Arts versus Rationality in Economics"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

BRUNA INGRAO  
Dipartimento di Economia, Università di Roma La Sapienza.

The Imaginative Faculty. Cognition in the Arts versus Rationality in Economics

Abstract

Conceiving the way markets work means conceiving the cognitive capabilities which traders use meeting in exchange.  Both purely intellectual and relational abilities are involved in market transactions, though in economic literature the first ones captured most of the attention. Along the twentieth century cognitive capabilities have been at the core of controversies in game theory, macroeconomics, economics of information, industrial organization. Research in behavioural economics underlined that people are not optimizing performers according to the paradigm of algorithmic rationality assumed as the normative standard of human cognition in mainstream economics since the marginalist revolution. People are prone to commit fallacies or systematic mistakes in logical reasoning and to violate coherence in choice. 

The paper argues that the divergence from the paradigm of algorithmic rationality has been argued mainly from the pessimistic side, underlying the limits of human cognitive capabilities. On the contrary, the author underlines the effectiveness of human intelligence in performing rational, constructive tasks, neither through routines nor through algorithmic rationality, but through the visionary capability that is the proper mark of human thought. The plastic power of imaginative intelligence is illustrated with reference to artwork, showing how perceptive illusions are used as linguistic instruments in the arts. The author underlines the importance of imaginative intelligence in a wide spectrum of economic activities.

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RBE I Workshop: Vincenzo Crupi, "Progress and Revolutions in Economics: The legacy of a Debate"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

VINCENZO CRUPI 
Department of Critical Care, University of Florence; Department of Philosophy, University of Turin.

Progress and Revolutions in Economics: The Legacy of a Debate

Excerpt

1. Economics, philosophy of science and method
Historically, economics and philosophy of science have been interacting at least from Stuart Mill’s through Keynes’s writings and right up to quite recent times (e.g., in the work of Herbert Simon). Indeed, there certainly exist shared issues of concern across the two disciplines, a paramount example being the notion of rationality. Economics, moreover, as a scientific endeavor itself, is a legitimate – and in fact fascinating – domain of inquiry and analysis for philosophers of science. On the other hand, there have been proposals of a broadly “economic” approach to methodological problems traditionally discussed in the philosophy of science (see, e.g., Radnitzky, 1987; Zamora Bonilla, 1997).
The purpose of the present contribution is to comment on one episode of interaction that has been relatively intense, here presented under the heading of a debate concerning “progress” and “revolutions” in economics. In contemporary philosophy of science, a strong emphasis on progress – meant as growth across substantial change – has been introduced by Karl Popper. [1] A similar role has been played by Thomas Kuhn for the occurrence of revolutions as relatively unusual and dramatic events breaking up lines of otherwise conservative development of scientific research (“normal science”). By associating progress and revolutions, I mostly mean to point to the work of Imre Lakatos, often perceived as “a convex combination of Popper and Kuhn” (Archibald, 1979, p. 304).
Lakatos is an important, though somewhat controversial, figure in twentieth century philosophy of science. Notably, his premature death in 1974 interrupted a marked approaching trajectory towards economics and the social sciences. Across his writings in the philosophy of science, for instance, Marxism has been increasingly present as a case-study of methodological appraisal (Lakatos, 1970, 1974). He also concluded his last lecture series in 1973 stating that the Department of Logic, Philosophy and Scientific Method at the LSE (of which he was the Director) would have welcomed any young scholar willing to tackle problems concerning methodology in the social sciences (Lakatos, 1999). As an editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, moreover, he had promoted the publication of early contributions in this vein (Latsis, 1972; Urbach, 1974). Finally, he had organized for 1974, but did not live to attend, a celebrated conference in Napfilion (Greece) devoted to methodological appraisal in economics; the publication of the conference proceedings (Latsis, 1976a) essentially inaugurated the “rise and fall” of his philosophical views in debates on methodological issues in economics (Backhouse, 2008). As for the fall, it took about fifteen years to arrive: the majority of the contributors of a similar conference in 1989 expressed an overall negative assessment concerning Lakatos’ methodological analyses as providing a guide for the study economic research and its development (see De Marchi & Blaug, 1991).
Based on the above brief reconstruction, the debate on progress and revolutions in economics looks like an essentially closed dossier. Moreover, the alleged failure of Lakatos’s approach has been announced repeatedly, in philosophy even earlier than in the economic literature (see Agassi, 1971; Feyerabend, 1975; Pera, 1989; McCloskey, 1993). In consideration of all this, the present contribution displays a somewhat heretic, partly provocative, point of view. Let me present, crudely and apodictically, the main tenets of my discussion. Some (though not all) of the following statements will be subsequently provided with supporting arguments and remarks.
(i) Lakatos’s account of scientific methodology has been convincingly refined and fruitfully developed, mostly by the contributions of two of his colleagues and followers: John Worrall (see 1976, 1989a, 2006) and Paul E. Meehl (see 1990, 1992).
(ii) As for a viable understanding of general issues about method and progress in science, Lakatos’s framework (now updated and refined) remains a highly valuable starting point – probably still the best available.
(iii) The “disenchantment” for Lakatosian views among scholars in economic methodology (Hausman, 2008) has been importantly fostered by a line of argument which is unsound in crucial respects.
(iv) As a consequence, the debate on progress and revolutions in economics across the Seventies and Eighties has to be seen as a largely missed chance to improve methodological insight concerning economic research.

[1] E.g.: “Science is one of the very few human activities – perhaps the only one – in which […] we can speak clearly and sensibly about making progress […]. In most other fields of human endeavour there is change, but rarely progress.” (Popper, 1963, pp. 216–217).

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RBE I Workshop: Pietro Terna, "Complexity and Economics, Reading Notes for a Discussion"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

PIETRO TERNA

Dipartimento di scienze economiche e finanziarie G. Prato, Università di Torino and ISI

Complexity and Economics, Reading Notes for a Discussion

Excerpt

1.      Basics

The complexity manifesto is mostly identified with Anderson (1972) paper “More is different”, where we read:

(p.393) The reductionist hypothesis may still be a topic for controversy among philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without questions. The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of which we have any detailed knowledge, are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws, which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well.

(…)The main fallacy in this kind of thinking is that the reductionist hypothesis does not by any means imply a "constructionist" one: The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe. In fact, the more the elementary particle physicists tell us about the nature of the fundamental laws, the less relevance they seem to have to the very real problems of the rest of science, much less to those of society.

The constructionist hypothesis breaks down when confronted with the twin difficulties of scale and complexity. The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles. Instead, at each level of complexity entirely new properties appear, and the understanding of the new behaviors requires research which I think is as fundamental in its nature as any other.

(p.396) In closing, I offer two examples from economics of what I hope to have said. Marx said that quantitative differences become qualitative ones, but a dialogue in Paris in the 1920's sums it up even more clearly:

FITZGERALD: The rich are different from us.

HEMINGWAY: Yes, they have more money.

… and the dialog is only apparently a joke.

From the wonderful list of foundational paper about complexity that we can find at this page, let’s have a second basic reference related to the model building perspective. In Rosenblueth and Wiener (1945), the founders of cybernetics, we read:

(p. 317) A distinction has already been made between material and formal or intellectual models. A material model is the representation of a complex system by a system which is assumed simpler and which is also assumed to have some properties similar to those selected for study in the original complex system. A formal model is a symbolic assertion in logical terms of an idealized relatively simple situation sharing the structural properties of the original factual system.

Material models are useful in the following cases. a) They may assist the scientist in replacing a phenomenon in an unfamiliar field by one in a field in which he is more at home.

(…) b) A material model may enable the carrying out of experiments under more favorable conditions than would be available in the original system. This translation presumes that there are reasonable grounds for supposing a similarity between the two situations; it thus presupposes the possession of an adequate formal model, with a structure similar to that of the two material systems. The formal model need not be thoroughly comprehended; the material model then serves to supplement the formal one.

(p. 319) It is obvious, therefore, that the difference between open-box and closed-box problems, although significant, is one of degree rather than of kind. All scientific problems begin as closed-box problems, i.e., only a few of the significant variables are recognized. Scientific progress consists in a progressive opening of those boxes. The successive addition of terminals or variables, leads to gradually more elaborate theoretical models: hence to a hierarchy in these models, from relatively simple, highly abstract ones, to more complex, more concrete theoretical structures. The setting up of a simple model for a closed-box assumes that a number of variables are only loosely coupled with the rest of those belonging to the system. The success of the initial experiments depends on the validity of that assumption. As the successive models become progressively more sophisticated the number of closed regions may actually and does usually increase, because the process may be compared with the subdivision of an original single box into several smaller shut compartments. Many of these small compartments may be deliberately left closed, because they are considered only functionally, but not structurally important. At an intermediate stage in the course of a scientific inquiry the formal model may thus be a heterogeneous assembly of elements, some treated in detail, that is specifically or structurally, and some treated merely with respect to their overall performance, that is, generically or functionally.

Being cybernetics a root of all our contemporary work in complexity and agent based simulation, it is important to underline the analogy between the ‘material model’ above, which is now the artifact we can construct into a computational system, with more or less open-boxes, to see in a closest way the problem while we are also studying it in a theoretical way.

Why this is more and more important in social science and economics?

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RBE I Workshop: Francesco Cassata & Roberto Marchionatti, "The Darwin-Babbage Connection. Complexity and Biology in Alfred Marshall"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

FRANCESCO CASSATA, ROBERTO MARCHIONATTI  
Department of Economics "S. Cognetti de Martiis", University of Turin

The Darwin-Babbage Connection. Complexity and Biology in Alfred Marshall

Abstract

“Marshall’s problem” consists in finding a way to integrate physics and biology into economics in order to represent a complex economic world. It is widely believed that Alfred Marshall was the first to address the issue, but he failed to integrate the two methodological approaches into economics. In particular the prevailing view is that Marshall was unable to follow through on his declaration that biology is the “Mecca” of economics. This paper reconsiders “Marshall’s problem” by focusing on the intellectual connections among Darwin, Babbage and Marshall: it explores the relationship between Marshall’s view of complexity as a dialectical mixing of routine and variation and reconstructs the development of a powerful intellectual model that we call the “evolutionary machine”.

[forthcoming as "A transdisciplinary perspective on economic complexity. Marshall's problem revisited"  Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization]
 
Excerpt

      Introduction

The role of biology in Alfred Marshall’s methodology and theoretical analysis is a classic theme, which has been widely investigated by the historians of economic thought.

The spectrum of the interpretations includes hitherto three different positions. For some scholars, such as Philip Mirowski, biological analogies did not play any significant role in the intellectual structure of the Principles of Economics. They were introduced strategically just in order to make economics acceptable to a scientific community strongly influenced by the successes of biology.[1]

A second interpretation stresses the relevance of biological references in Marshall’s vision of economics, particularly underlining the influence of Spencer’s view of social evolution. However, despite this acknowledgment, Marshall’s attempt to elaborate an “economic biology” is considered a substantial failure. For Brinley Thomas, for example, “economic biology remained promise rather than substance”.[2] Geoffrey M. Hodgson shares this argument, remarking the impact of Spencerism on Marshall’s though: “Marshall hitched his wagon to the Spencerian train, but encountered difficulties when Spencer’s prestige declined rapidly from its high point in 1890s”.[3] Camille Limoges and Claude Ménard, even showing the relevance of Darwin’s principle of divergence in Marshall’s analysis of industrial organization, end up considering the notion of representative firm as a “regression to pre-Darwinian biology”, as a fundamental shift from a populationist approach to a typological one, which marked “a turning point in the modern history of economics”.[4]

A third, recent interpretation, represented first of all by Tiziano Raffaelli and Simon Cook (but Whitaker, Hart and Niman should be added), identified in Marshall’s seminal idea of the self-development of mental machine - developed in his earlier studies in psychology and neuro-physiology - the core of his vision of economic and social evolution as the gradual absorption of novelties in an increasingly complex structure through successive phases of standardization and specialization.

Considering particularly fruitful this latter historiographical line, the present paper focuses on Marshall’s methodological issues, moving from his interpretation of complexity as a dialectical succession of routine and variation, order and disorder, machinery and life.

   

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RBE I Workshop: Mario Cedrini, "What Was Keynes Fighting For? A Maussian Perspective of Keynes's Economic Diplomacy"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

MARIO CEDRINI 

Dipartimento SEMeQ, Università del Piemonte Orientale “Amedeo Avogadro” – Alessandria, Novara, Vercelli

What Was Keynes Fighting For? A Maussian Perspective of Keynes's Economic Diplomacy

Excerpt

Introduction

What was Keynes fighting for? The last volume of Skidelsky’s (2000) biography of John Maynard Keynes has raised a wide debate on the real aims of Keynes’s economic diplomacy in the years of World War II (see in particular Skidelsky 2001, Boughton 2002, De Long 2002, Moggridge 2002, Pressnell 2003, Vines 2003, Turnell and Harcourt 2004, Newton 2006). Skidelsky’s book, John Maynard Keynes. Fighting for Britain 1937-1946, deals mostly with wartime and the negotiations of the Bretton Woods agreement and of the American Loan to a financially exhausted Britain at the end of the war. It discusses “Keynes’s part in Britain’s struggle for survival”, his fight “to preserve Britain as a Great Power against the United States” (Skidelsky 2000, p. xv) and their determination to use financial strength as a means of compelling a weak Britain to dismantle the Empire and take part in the desired free-trade post-war world. The story, in Skidelsky’s (2001, p. xiii) own words, of “Keynes’s patriotism”, of his defence of Britain’s “national interests”, Fighting for Britain sees Keynes as “the Last of the Romans” (De Cecco 1977, p. 18), who attempts to “construct an international economic environment which would help Britain to adjust to a lesser role” (ib., p. 23). A life spent trying to revive London’s pre-war international leadership, Keynes the “history-taker” (ib.) of the years of World War II becomes, in Boughton’s radical interpretation, the “defender of the Empire” (2002, p. 12), his presumed “resistance to multilateralism” being “grounded in the need to preserve Britain’s special status through its central role in the Empire and its bilateral relationship with the United States” (ib.).

The “Fighting for Britain” view is not undisputed. The “good, coherent narrative” (Newton 2000, p. 190) of Keynes’s economic diplomacy offered by Roy Harrod (1951) in his biography of the Cambridge economist is endorsed by scholars who emphasize Keynes’s success in creating a consensus on the need of a new international order, embodying the results of the revolutionary analysis of the General Theory. This line of thought insists on the similarities between White’s and Keynes’s reform plans for the postwar world (Gardner 1980; Ikenberry 1993; De Long 2002) or drives attention on Keynes’s efforts to come to an agreement “even when the sacrifice involved his own proposals” (Williamson 1983, p. 542). Keynes the “British” economist of the “Fighting for Britain” approach is thus replaced by Keynes the “American” economist (Ferrari Bravo 2002) of what could be named the “Fighting despite Britain” view, which sees Keynes fighting for a new enlightened order despite Britain’s difficulties to play a major role in it. Not unexpectedly, a relevant marker distinguishing the two views is the interpretation of Keynes’s role in the American loan negotiations. Whilst the “Fighting for Britain” view regards Keynes’s request for a generous American grant to Britain in 1945 as his drastic attempt to save his country from financial dependence on the U.S., the “Fighting despite Britain” view sees the final result of the negotiations as the tribute Keynes’s political naïveté should necessarily pay to “the greater power of the United States” (De Long 2002, p. 160), rather than a symbol of “American malevolence” (ib.), or even come to describe it, enthusiastically, as “the capstone of the great constructive effort on which [Keynes] embarked in 1941 to create a world-wide multilateral financial system” (Clarke 1982, p. 6).

The rediscovery of Keynes’s international economics in the times of the financial crisis clearly indicates that the “Fighting despite Britain” is right to consider the establishment of a “sounder political economy between all nations” (CW 25, p. 43) as the real target of Keynes’s theoretical contributions and practical diplomacy. Still, as the supporters of the “Fighting for Britain” approach point out, Keynes’s disappointment with both the final settlement of Bretton Woods and the American Loan can scarcely be undervalued (see Newton 2000). This paper aims to foster an alternative explanation of Keynes’s diplomacy. After revisiting Keynes’s proposals for the 1945 Loan negotiations to the light of his whole work as an international economist committed to the cause of global multilateralism, we suggest rethinking Keynes’s fighting for Britain as a constituent part, not a minor but a major one, of his fighting for the whole world, and the true telltale sign of the defeat of his overall reform project. The novelty of our approach is in the use of insights from the anthropology and sociology of gift-giving as a means of counteracting the traditional tendency to downsize the theoretical relevance of Keynes’s call for an American gift, rather than an American loan, to Britain. A “fighting through Britain” view of Keynes’s diplomacy is thus proposed, which sees Keynes’s heretic request for an American gift to Britain as his last attempt to cope with the dilemmas engendered by the interdependence and complexity which characterize international economic relations, and an unequivocal symbol of his preference for an international order using discipline as a means of promoting freedom and national policy space.

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RBE I Workshop: Keith Hart, "Marcel Mauss on Gifts, Markets and Money"

WORKSHOP

REVISITING THE BOUNDARIES OF ECONOMICS

A Historical Perspective

Collegio Carlo Alberto, Moncalieri (Torino, Italy)

April 16, 2010

KEITH HART 

Goldsmiths, University of London

Marcel Mauss on Gifts, Markets and Money

Excerpt

The First World War was more than a watershed; it was an irreversible fissure in modern European history. The state had acquired undreamt of powers in the course of the war: to mobilize and kill off huge armies, to control production and distribution, to monopolize propaganda; from now on it was a struggle between rival state forms for world domination. The claim of Western societies to lead the rest of humanity in reason and civilization had been mortally wounded by the senseless slaughter of the trenches. Life after the war was quite unlike what had gone before. Marcel Mauss, who admitted to a sense of relief when the war first allowed him to escape from his scholarly burdens, took his time to resume his academic and political activities. The death of Émile Durkheim and numerous colleagues during the war took some adjusting to, while some close friends told him it was now time to grow up. So, to a double life as a professor of the religions of uncivilized peoples in the marginal École pratique des hautes études and as a political activist-cum-dilettante, he now had to add responsibility for the movement launched by his uncle at a time when the sociology project still felt rather precarious.

Yet the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. Mauss’s political party and the Left in general had a real chance of winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his Écrits politiques (Marcel Fournier editor, 1997) were written in this period. He resumed teaching religion at the École pratique and was able to relaunch Année sociologique by the period’s end, contributing to it his most famous essay, on The Gift, as well as “In memoriam: the unpublished work of Durkheim and his collaborators” and a vast amount of work as editor and reviewer. He suffered some reverses at this time, including a serious illness, but remained optimistic for both political and intellectual regeneration on a scale that was increasingly international in scope. He began serious work on a book dealing with the main political currents of the day, nationalism and socialism. His interest in the American “potlatch” was expanded by the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), confirming his belief that competitive gift-exchange was endemic in Melanesia and Polynesia, as well as elsewhere. And the Institut d’ethnologie was formed in 1925 with Rivet, Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss himself in charge.

In the late 1920s, things began to unravel on all fronts. Mauss’s personal standing as a savant grew inexorably; but his party suffered political reverses, its newspaper and journal folded, the cooperative movement foundered and, after a successor half-volume, the Année sociologique second series ended; his closest friend, Henri Hubert, died in 1927. Perhaps also Mussolini’s example diminished Mauss’s confidence in the prospects for the “nationalization of socialism”. The years 1920-25 therefore stand apart for the energy and fulfillment they brought. Mauss himself kept a sort of Chinese wall between his academic and political interests; so it is not so surprising that the two have been kept apart, especially in the Anglophone world, where his political writings are virtually unknown (but see David Graeber, 2001). Mauss allowed himself one public attempt to bridge them, the concluding chapter of The Gift. Mary Douglas, in her Foreword to the second English edition, is rather dismissive of this chapter. For her, the essay should be seen as a great leap forward in anthropological science, theoretical forerunner of his Manual of Ethnography (Nick Allen editor, 2007) and a suitable launch of his career at the Institute: “his own attempt to use the theory of the gift to underpin social democracy was very weak…really jumping the gun” (1990:xv).

I agree that the essay itself does not provide an effective intellectual bridge between the two compartments of Mauss’s life. The Gift approaches the evolution of human exchange as moving through three stages: from a total exchange of services as in moiety systems, through competitive gift-exchange involving political leaders to individual contract, whose illumination (“the non-contractual element in the contract”) was the aim of Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society (1893), itself the main source for Mauss’s essay. Yet any elaboration of what capitalist markets are really like or even a recapitulation of Durkheim’s main arguments are largely missing here. As a result, the programmatic conclusions float at some remove from the substance of the essay and his successors have been able to suppose that its point really is just to expose the “gift economy” to scholarly view. Mauss himself is responsible for the contrasting interpretations that his essay has generated. Hubert did not spare him at the time: “It is often rather vague…Are you really sure that the development of social insurance can be attached to your ‘human bedrock’, as you say?” (Fournier 2006:244).

So, why then take seriously the relationship between Mauss’s sociology and his politics? (Dzimira 2007). Mauss, while tending to his uncle’s legacy, was making a profound break with the latter’s sociological reductionism in these years, opening himself to psychology and the humanities, while espousing a method of “total social facts” which underpins The Gift and figures prominently in those same conclusions. This was just one of the ways he responded to the war. Another was the shift to studying contemporary politics in his (ultimately abortive) “Nation” project. Mauss himself can be seen as a “total social fact” in ways that undoubtedly concerned him and might deserve our attention. I do not claim that his work is a seamless whole; just that it might pay to juxtapose his disparate efforts of this extraordinary period as a way of throwing new light on the meaning of his great essay for us today.

So I propose here to examine his journalism in the years, 1920-25, with a view to isolating his views on economy at the time. I will then offer an interpretation of The Gift, particularly as it bears on markets and money, as well as the proposals offered by Mauss there for the management of our societies. The aim is a more integrated account of his economic vision, one that has resonance for our own crisis. Such an exercise goes to the heart of a persisting translation problem which partly accounts for the diverging traditions of Maussian scholarship that we hope to bring together in this conference. When I want to know what Mauss or his main interpreters meant, I read the originals in French. But his work has been ill-served in the ways it has been made available to the Anglophone world. The two published English translations are seriously defective in some important ways, not necessarily because of the translator’s fault, but because key words like prestation and morale are almost impossible to render in English. My aim here is to persuade some English-speakers to take up the body of French scholarship that has not yet been translated, especially his political writings and subsequent commentary on them. In recent years, Marcel Fournier’s indispensable biography has been published in an abridged English edition (Marcel Mauss: a biography, 2006). Accordingly, I will make exclusive reference here to that edition and to the second English translation of The Gift.

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