Altruism, sociology and the history of economic thought

Abstract

This paper is organized in three stages. In the first part, I outline the evolution of the notion of altruism with its critical dimension of political economy by following the intellectual sequence from Auguste Comte to Pierre Bourdieu, through Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. In the second, I consider the forms of transaction to which these sociologists report altruism and its derivatives. In the last section, I examine recent developments on altruism as a result of developments on performativity on the one hand and market design on the other.

Keywords:

• Altruism
• sociology
• market design
• comte
• bourdieu

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This paper has benefitted from the comments made during the Blanqui conference and from the suggestions of the anonymous reviewers of the journal; usual caveats apply.

2 Bourdieu cites sparingly, but references to Mauss are present when it comes to gift-giving (Bourdieu 1980, 1997a and especially Bourdieu 1992–3).

3 Comte did not read much of his contemporaries and had an approximate knowledge of the political economy of his time; Durkheim worked on the subject more thoroughly when writing his thesis on the division of labor and knows the work of the economists of the historical school; Bourdieu met with political economy in the 1960s, but not much later. François Simiand is an exception (Simiand 1912; Steiner 2011, chap. 3). A philosopher by training, like his sociological colleagues on the Durkheim team, he had a vast knowledge of the political economy of his time, before becoming an economist himself, who would be described as an institutionalist nowadays.

4 I have had the opportunity to develop these different elements about Comte and Durkheim in other texts (Steiner 2011, chap. 7, and Steiner 2017).

5 The theme of performativity has given rise to contradiction (Mirowski and Nik-Khah 2007, 2017), debate (Mackenzie 2006) and the search for its limits (Brisset 2018).