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Alain Caillé, the founder of the Mouvement du MAUSS, presents an influential interpretation of Marcel Mauss's classic Essay on the Gift as a foundational text of and for an anti-utilitarian theory of action. This article returns to Mauss's seminal essay and presents the paradigm of the gift by resituating the MAUSSian reading within the French field of Maussology. While the article is largely sympathetic to the anti-utilitarian project, it also develops critiques and theoretical suggestions of its own.

AbstractThe impact of decentralization on ethno‐territorial conflict is widely debated, but empirical analyses of ethno‐territorial party politics are scarce. This paper uses novel data on conflicts in power‐sharing cabinets to explore the relation between decentralization and ethno‐territorial conflicts in the case of Belgium (1979–2006). These data are analysed with the help of poisson and logistic regressions, which confirm the negative association between decentralization and conflict. In addition to institutions, the analyses also examine the relevance of issue saliency, regionalist parties' strength, regionalist cabinet participation, and the proximity of elections. The results contradict the paradox of federalism and add to contemporary debates on ethno‐territorial politics, conflict management, and power‐sharing.

The article presents an overview of the intellectual trajectory of Alain Caillé, the founder and animator of the anti-utilitarian movement in the social sciences (MAUSS) in France. Going back to early influences of Claude Lefort, Karl Polanyi and Pierre Clastres, it shows the centrality of the symbolic constitution of the economy in the development of an intellectual front against rational choice. It also considers how Marcel Mauss's famous Essay on the Gift has been developed into a 'gift paradigm' that aims to unify the various social sciences into a comprehensive alternative to the interest paradigm.