Abstract

Threading these legacies and their inherited crises together is Mauss’s effort to provide an analytic concept, a positive historical description, a thinly veiled normative justification for an alternative means to establish and secure international peace, and a history of socialism separable from the Bolshevik experiment. As he does so, he reaches toward technique as a field of analysis that he knows he needs but has not yet learned to think. These are summary assertions, and I want now to explicate them. We must begin with language.