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

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
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 aresociallyunequal because of stratification, or who have no social links and hence no status at allvis-à-viseach other—enables them to negotiate and enter into binding agreement with each other aspoliticalandlegalequals. 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 socialpersonaof each participant is set aside. Through this impersonality, contract not only cancels out anysocialconsideration or difference between the participants, but also achieves temporal specificity (delimiting, in advance, the duration of the tie established by the transaction),—whereas interpersonaldealings bind the partners in a relationship that has temporal continuity.

This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit: