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From status to contract: the significance of agrarian relations of production in the West, Japan, and in ‘Asiatic’ Persia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Grace Goodell
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Extract

This paper focuses upon the distinction which Maine and others have drawn between relations of status and those of contract. The particular aspect of contract which interests us is that, due to its characteristic impersonality, it enables individuals and groups who are socially unequal because of stratification, or who have no social links and hence no status at all vis-à-vis each other—enables them to negotiate and enter into binding agreement with each other as political and legal equals. Contract can do this because, unlike status, the former splits the whole-person, enabling him to offer for the purpose of transaction only a singular and specialized aspect of himself to a singular and specialized aspect of another or other partners: the social persona of each participant is set aside. Through this impersonality, contract not only cancels out any social consideration or difference between the participants, but also achieves temporal specificity (delimiting, in advance, the duration of the tie established by the transaction),—whereas interpersonal dealings bind the partners in a relationship that has temporal continuity.

Type
Racines aristocratiques de la démocratie
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 21 , Issue 2 , November 1980 , pp. 285 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1980

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