ABSTRACT
Since the end of the Cold War, Western societies have been confronted with new social tensions, a furthering of social inequalities, processes of economic globalization, a crisis of financial capitalism, and a crisis of the welfare state. Thus in Western philosophy and the social sciences, there is a strong binary opposition between morality and value commitments on one side, and egoism on the other. The dichotomy between rational utilitarian action and normatively orientated action existed long before the establishment of sociology as a discipline. A long-neglected paradigm of action theory, which acknowledges actions that can be reduced neither to the utilitarian nor to the normative, can be found in Marcel Mauss's. The utilitarian model was accepted in principle, because it was seen as suitable for explaining economic actions. But sociologists were looking for the domain where non-rational normative action was sustained, and for them that was obviously outside the economy.
