The Spirit of Exchange and Promise : Hau and SOCIAL contract

Özet

This article compares the gift society to the social contract society, as discussed respectivelyby Marcel Mauss and Thomas Hobbes, in an attempt to further an understandingof how sociability and social totality are constructed through gift exchanges and promisesamong people. Mauss, like Hobbes, suggests that the primitive order is an absence of law,in which people live under conditions of fear and hostility. Yet, for Mauss it is the gift exchangethat would bring peace, while for Hobbes it is the presence of a sovereign. In bothcases, peace is vastly fascilitated through gift exchange or social contract. This article arguesthat the self-reflexive character of gift exchange and covenant consequently reconstructs thereality of society, concluding that although there is an inherit fragility in both societies, theyare being fantasized as coherent, unified and homogenous totalities through gift exchange orsocial contract.