ABSTRACT
Anti-utilitarianism is not a negative doctrine, however, but an eminently positive one. Unlike liberal-masculine visions of the self that underscore autonomy, feminist ethics of care value and cultivate relations of interdependence between persons. The people understand, therefore, that mutatis mutandis modern struggles for recognition are contemporary manifestations of the struggles to give – the “agonistic” gift for recognition – as properly exhumed by Marcel Mauss in his study of archaic societies. The theories of action and interaction they propose are pitched from the very beginning as theories of social change. All this, of course, in the hope that the collaborative elaboration of neoclassical sociology as an alternative to neoclassic economics, will help the social sciences to survive not as disciplines of the past – “sociology has been a way of grasping that reality within a historical period that has now ended”? – but as a discipline with a future.
