Altruism, Gifts and Symbolic Exchange: From Comte, to Durkheim, Mauss and Bourdieu
Nov 2025 · Theory Workshop Book 4 · BRILL
Ebook
236
Pages
About this ebook
Altruism, gifts and symbolic exchange refer to a vast set of practices deeply embedded in our market societies. They were successively theorized by Auguste Comte, Marcel Mauss, and Pierre Bourdieu. This book follows the outline of a history that has hitherto been glimpsed only as a series of fragments and which needs to be reassembled in order to see its full scope. This history is structured in terms of three stages: a critique of political economy, a theoretical construction backed by empirical practices, and, finally, an assessment of the social effects of the dissemination of economic knowledge.
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About the author
Philippe Steiner is emeritus Professor of sociology at Sorbonne University. His work focuses on the history of social sciences and economic sociology. He haspreviously published Durkheim and the Birth of Economic Sociology (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Calculation and Morality, co-authored with Caroline Oudin-Bastide (OUP USA, 2019).
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