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9 - The promise of performance and the problem of order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2009

By
Kay Junge
Edited by
Jeffrey C. Alexander ,
Bernhard Giesen  and
Jason L. Mast
Kay Junge
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Sociology, University of Konstanz
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Bernhard Giesen
Affiliation:
Universität Konstanz, Germany
Jason L. Mast
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
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Summary

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is partly historical, partly conceptual. It is an attempt to articulate the performative element implied by the metaphor of the social contract, a metaphor that served as one of the basic social paradigms in early modern and Enlightenment social thought and only a generation ago began to enjoy a revival mainly due to John Rawls' Theory of Justice and, to a lesser extent, the wintrier Calculus of Consent by Buchanan and Tullock. Though almost all of today's contractarians have taken to heart David Hume's early critique of the idea of an original contract (Hume 1948), I do not think that the exchange of promises or some equivalent performance that Hobbes and others deemed necessary for establishing a commonwealth is merely a theoretical chimera. Indeed, the particular type of consent that the earlier social contract theorists assumed people showed to their government has, as we hope to show, a strong performative element to it that deserves further theoretical attention. In particular, if sociologists with an interest in performance were to examine Hobbes' way of framing the contractual institution of a sovereign they would discover a nice interlocking of concerns relating both to problems of social fusion and the staging of collective representations (see the contributions of Alexander and Giesen in the present volume). Our reading of Hobbes will add a certain performative twist to the contractarian paradigm and will enable us to reframe some of its seemingly sterile or misplaced idealizations as the dramatic effects necessary for its successful discursive implementation.

Type
Chapter
Information
Social Performance
Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual
 , pp. 283 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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