@inbook{83759faf903947baa4683ba7b1f5979a,
title = "Calasso, Roberto",
abstract = "Roberto Calasso was an Italian thinker, writer, and book editor. Though gaining a PhD with Mario Praz, he did not enter Italian academic life, preferring to work as chief editor of the publishing house Adelphi. Calasso published 11 books belonging to a series, his Opera (Work), 1983{\textendash}2020. Its significance lies in offering a sustained problematisation of secular modernity. The first volume, The Ruin of Kasch, contains the germ of most of the future volumes. Its subject matter is the French Revolution, taking a most unlikely person as guide, Talleyrand, while its back cover states that, in the volume, {\textquoteleft}The Age of Revolutions tells its own shipwrecking'. Calasso's work circles around four main themes: order {\textendash} the order of the world; knowledge {\textendash} human knowledge about our world, also implying awareness of invisible powers; rituals of sacrifice; and secular equivalents of rituals of sacrifice {\textendash} exchange and substitution {\textendash} focusing on the increasing role of substitution in modernity, leading to a {\textquoteleft}substitution society'.",
keywords = "Exchange, Knowledge, Mauss, Order, Sacrifice, Substitution",
author = "Arpad Szakolczai",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} The Editors and Contributors Severally 2025.",
year = "2025",
doi = "10.4337/9781035310494.00018",
language = "English (Ireland)",
series = "Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Anthropology",
pages = "58--64",
booktitle = "Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Anthropology",
}