According to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system.

It is influenced by the sociologist Marcel Mauss's The Gift (1925), as well as by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality (1887).

In Volume I, Bataille introduces the theory and provides historical examples of the functioning of general economy: human sacrifice in Aztec society, the monastic institutions of Tibetan Lamaism, the Marshall Plan, and many others.

[6] The Accursed Share influenced French philosophers and intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and René Girard.

[7] In the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), Sartre credited Bataille with interesting insights into the way extravagance can become an "economic function".

[12] Gordon wrote that Bataille offered "a new theory of civilization", but one that "appears more valuable as a framework for his dazzling literary skills than a contribution to knowledge."

Gordon concluded that The Accursed Share was probably "of greater interest to students of French literature than to economists or historians".

Brown credited Bataille with providing "a first sketch" of a necessary "post-Marxist science of political economy" and showing that growth was not "the self-evident destiny of all economic activity".