Annals of the Fondazione Luigi Einaudi Volume LV, June 2021: 87-106 ISSN: 2532-4969 doi: 10.26331/1135 This article revisits Sahlins’s discussion of Mauss’s Essay on the Gift, with a fo- cus on its contribution to research on the gift and its broader, social and political implications. Sahlins’s reading of the Essay in Stone Age Economics (1972), we submit, richly buttressed Mauss’s attention to the gift’s “total” signifcance and its “spiritual” dimensions – even as it developed a new interpretation of the famed Maori notion of hau, or “spirit” of the gift. But it also ofered a Hobbesian-infected, rational and utilitarian rendering of the gift as a form of social contract, which elided the more complex and contradictory facets of gift-exchange that were underscored by Mauss in the Essay on the Gift. No less important, it left the reader wonder how precisely to relate between the gift’s spiritual and contractual dimensions. Recent returns by Sahlins to the topic of the gift indicate a persistent interest in the gift’s “spirit”, while confrming, even enhancing tendencies found in his early writings. Highlighting the anti-Hobbesian and anti-utilitarian efects of one modal- ity of the gift – ‘the gift from everyone to everyone’ – in the sphere of kin-like re- latedness in particular, they also pose a contrast to the Essay’s more inclusive vision of the gift’s extensions to all parts of social life, including the state. Building upon Mauss and Sahlins, we need pursue the relation between the “spirit” of gift relations and their “contractual” implications as not only a normative and political but also empirical question, equally pertinent across past and present settings. ABSTRACT RECONCILING SPIRIT AND CONTRACT? MARSHALL SAHLINS AND THE ESSAI SUR LE DON Philippe Chanial * Ilana F. Silber ** Keywords: Cultural Economics, Economic Anthropology, Gift, Hobbes, Kinship, Mauss, Po- litical Philosophy, Social Contract, Symbolic Anthropology. Jel Codes: Z12, Z13. * Université Caen - Normandie (CERREV). Address for correspondence: philippe.chanial @unicaen.fr. ** Bar-Ilan University. Address for correspondence: Ilana.Silber@biu.ac.il.