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Material Considerations

On the Historical Forensics of Contract

Electoral Reform Working Group of the Green Party of California; national Coordinating Committee of the Green Party of the United States. pietz{at}igc.org

If Harr emphasizes that things become social objects only within particular storylines, Pietz makes the reverse point about the essential materiality of social relationships, especially contractual ones, e.g. as expressed in the legal history of the `material consideration'. Departing from a similar conception of the performative micro-reproduction of social order and the communicative objectification of social facts, he argues that a theory of forensic objects as social facts disrupts not only capitalist presumptions about economic objects as the sole origin of monetary value but also enlightenment conceptions of society as a sphere of consequential human action distinct from nature as the sphere of material causality. The material consideration is one such forensic object. A `material consideration' refers to an obscure but important social object that embodies the power to transform subjective promises into objective obligations and thereby establishes the social fact of legal liability. The failed attempt of liberal philosophers and jurists since the eighteenth century to conceive considerations as mere symbolic evidence of subjective moral intent rather as real enactments of social power demonstrates how difficult it is for modern social theory to articulate the idea of social materiality found in social facts such as considerations, at least as long as it sustains a strict separation between society and nature or between the intentional action of humans and the physical causality of material objects.

Key Words: contract • fact-making • forensics • materialism • social causality • valuation

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 5-6, 35-50 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/026327602761899138


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