Abstract:

The selective appropriation of Marcel Mauss's theory of civilization in contemporary scholarship-both Western and Chinese-betrays a persistent anxiety about how to articulate the relationship between Civilization in the singular and civilizations in the plural, and in doing so obscures the intellectual evolution through which Mauss himself sought to reconcile universality and particularity in response to successive historical crises. This article reconstructs Mauss's trajectory as a movement across three positions: a "strict pluralism" before the First World War, a "qualified singularism" in its immediate aftermath, and a mature position of "constitutive tension" by the late 1920s. The pre-war elaboration of the "hyper-social system, " developed with Durkheim, already opened up a methodological space for the singular, but its principal aim was to secure the scientific legitimacy of civilizations in the plural against older unilinear narratives of Civilization. By treating civilization as a pre-given "system of solidarities, " this early framework neither identified the mechanisms by which social facts travel across boundaries nor furnished any normative ground for the bonds it described. After the war, Mauss turned toward a normative project centered on a "world human civilization, " yet this construction was repeatedly stalled by contradictions internal to its point of departure-the nation. The decisive breakthrough came with the dynamics of exchange elaborated in The Gift: through the risk-laden circuit of giving, receiving, and returning, "moral persons" simultaneously establish their own limits and their entanglement with others. Transposed to the civilizational register, the antagonistic interplay of "borrowing" and "refusal" emerges as the micro-mechanism through which universality is generated. In his 1929 lecture, Mauss reclassifies Civilization in the singular not as an a priori principle but as a "common fund" accumulated at the "limit" through the antagonistic interaction of plural civilizations-a fund that arises as the historical consequence of such interaction and, once arisen, in turn constitutes the empirical precondition for civilizations to individuate themselves and engage in exchange. This rereading unsettles the binary that has organized recent civilizational analysis between "integrationist" and "relational" approaches; it also engages the contemporary Chinese effort to rethink China through the category of civilization, suggesting that the distinctiveness of Chinese civilization resides precisely in the particular manner of its long entanglement with countless others through which the common fund of humanity has been jointly shaped; and it offers, finally, a sociological account of a modern order of coexistence grounded not in consensus but in tension.

Key words: Marcel Mauss, Civilization, hyper-social systems, common fund, limits of fusion