Page 41 - 《社会》2026年第4期

社会·2026·4

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鄄war elaboration of the“hyper鄄
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鄄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鄄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鄄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.
Keywords：Marcel Mauss， Civilization， hyper鄄social systems， common fund， limits
of fusion

一、 导论：重返莫斯与文明理论的当代焦虑

曾被主流社会科学长期悬搁的“文明”概念（Tiryakian，2004：33-34），

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