The Spirit of Exchange and Promise : Hau and SOCIAL contract

Year 2016, Volume: 22 Issue: 88, 147 - 156, 01.11.2016

Ebru Kayaalp

Abstract

This article compares the gift society to the social contract society, as discussed respectively

by Marcel Mauss and Thomas Hobbes, in an attempt to further an understanding

of how sociability and social totality are constructed through gift exchanges and promises

among 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 exchange

that would bring peace, while for Hobbes it is the presence of a sovereign. In both

cases, peace is vastly fascilitated through gift exchange or social contract. This article argues

that the self-reflexive character of gift exchange and covenant consequently reconstructs the

reality of society, concluding that although there is an inherit fragility in both societies, they

are being fantasized as coherent, unified and homogenous totalities through gift exchange or

social contract.

Keywords

Mauss, Hobbes, Hau, Social Contract

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