Resuming an analysis of the gift, this article seeks to go beyond the phenomenological, structuralist, and economicist view of this phenomenon. It thereby shifts the trust of questioning towards the time and uncertainty linked with the interval between the gift and the counter-gift, the agent and the action linked to such practices, the economy of symbolic goods, and the specific habitus underlying it. It thus demonstrates against any and all reductionism (to consciousness, to unconcious calculation, and to calculation per se) that the gift's reason can only lie in its double truth, its generous and obligatory nature, both disinterested and interested. The author also demonstrates historically that it is only through a symbolic revolution, and not the development of a supposed human nature, that an economy of exchange can stand out from the economy of the gift, whose possibility remains open, requiring collective investments in its direction.