Abstract:

Marcel Mauss employs a sociological interpretation of the Russian Revolution to illuminate the predicament between the modern individual and the collective, and responds to this predicament through the concept of totality. The anomie in the economic sphere and other sphere in modern society are, to a significant extent, associated with the rise of the "individual". By imposing "collectivity" upon individuals, and by abolishing freedom within the economic sphere through collective norms and organization, this project of social transformation could not, in Mauss's view, bring about the society it envisioned. Instead, it produced a modern state characterized by social disintegration. The fundamental reason, Mauss contends, is that this project failed to recognize the economy as a total social fact: to negate the economy is simultaneously to negate society itself. This rejection also presupposes an opposition between the individual participating in free exchange and the collective conceived as the bearer of moral authority. Yet the individual and the collective are not necessarily opposed. Within the framework of a total symbolic system, individuals are able to enter into relations with others voluntarily without necessarily being subsumed into the collective, and the two therefore always retain the possibility of mutual integration and transformation. Accordingly, the society envisioned by Mauss is not a coercive organizational order grounded in a collective morality that negates the individual. Rather, it is a total social configuration that treats the collective's value orientation as a spiritual fact while simultaneously preserving the space and boundaries of individual freedom. Politically, this vision finds its expression in the form of French socialism endorsed by Mauss. Only such a socialism, he argues, can establish forms of collectivity while avoiding the political dangers inherent in coercive social organization, thereby making a flourishing social life possible.

Key words: totality, French socialist thought, cooperative, the Russian Revolution