The ‘Social’ as Reciprocity: Marcel Mauss and the Idea of Nation

This essay, examining some of the stages of Marcel Mauss's thought, aims to demonstrate how he made an important contribution to overcoming a static concept of society, closed within the confines of the nation-state. In particular, two lines of thought are followed. With the first, the aim is to make explicit the foundational nature assumed in his thinking by comparing phenomena of the relations between societies with those attributable to a single society or to those human groups that, in his eyes, seem to be much more recent and still badly defined: in other words, nations. With the second, the aim is to place the emphasis on the peculiar meaning with which Mauss inflects the concept of ‘nation’, distinguishing it from that of ‘nationalism’ on the one hand and ‘State’ on the other. The internationalism of Mauss was one of the first examples of a sociology capable of theorizing the coexistence between European peoples.