Toward a Dialogue between Gift and Love

Some insights from a meta-sociological perspective

Abstract

This paper follows the intuition that “gift” and “love”, in the social dimensions and dynamics through which they manifest themselves, are co-involved. It offers a comparative analysis – on the one hand – of the sociological thought concerning “gift”, developed by scholars of the Mouvement Anti-utilitariste das Sciences Sociales (MAUSS) – especially A. Caillé (1998, 2008) and J. T. Godbout (1998, 2002, 2008) – and – on the other hand – of the thought of the Russian sociologist P. A. Sorokin (2005) on “altruistic creative love”. The paper aims at highlighting how dialogue between these concepts allows us to discover their common “essential core” and proposes this as a theoretically useful element in view of a deeper understanding of the generative dynamics of social bonds.