Are humans egoistic by nature? Or, on the contrary, are they endowed with a disposition to give freely, unselfishly? What is cooperation based on? How do people come to agree in concrete interactions? These are questions that have occupied thinkers for years, and the answers they presented were very different, depending on their disciplinary background and the view of “human nature” prevalent in it. In what follows, I will defend the idea that there exists in human beings a tendency, with both biological and cultural roots, towards giving and sharing, a basic prosociality that is anthropologically prior to linguistic-reflective communication and explicit morality. Drawing on findings from the fields of evolutional biology, developmental psychology and emotion research, neuroscience, and the pragmatist philosophies of John Dewey and George Herbert Mead, I will make that basic human propensity come to light. In doing so, I will try to avoid all naturalistic and culturalistic stereotypes and go beyond the traditional dualism of subject and object. In addition to Maussian gift theory, this pragmatist anthropology constitutes another major pillar on which I build my argument in this book.

A pragmatist model of action and emotion

Pragmatism is a school of philosophy that dominated American intellectual life from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I and is commonly associated with the names of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Dewey, and Mead. In US history, this was a period of great upheaval, with processes of urbanization, industrialization, bureaucratization, and immigration shaking up the relative tranquility of 19th-century American society which was still largely agrarian in character. In politics, this was the time of progressivism and other reform movements, which would result in the introduction of welfare programs. Intellectual debates, too, were mainly concerned with adjusting the relationship of excessive self-interest— triggered by the new free market economy— and the common good.

Philosophical pragmatism assumes that truth does not spring from a single subject’s intellectual confrontation of an object, but from a cooperative effort aimed at overcoming concrete social, political, or scientific problems. George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) and John Dewey (1859–1952) tried to escape the Cartesian dualism of knowing subject and to-be-known (and manipulated) object, and stressed the mostly preconscious nature of human behaviors. adjusting the relationship of excessive self-interest— triggered by the new free market economy— and the common good.