Why does the issue of charitable gift, that which humbles the receiver, and contrary to what was widely held to be true in the heydays of the Providence State, continues to impose itself on social sciences? A simple answer could be that political, rational solutions are insufficient, albeit necessary. The analysis of gift does not only mean we understand the rules, as Mauss might have thought at the onset, but also the conditions of these rules, what comes before the rules. In the end, Mauss went beyond rules to reveal, as he writes at the end of his Essay on Gift , “that fugitive moment when society binds.”