Communication, promise and politics: The power of mutual promises Comunicación, promesa y política: El poder de las promesas mutuas

Abstract

In this article, the promise is analysed as peculiar communicative action that creates a link between the person who makes a promise and the person who receives the promise. The one who makes a promise in a free and unilateral way becomes committed in his present and his future. At the moment the promise is announced, it becomes a commitment and a debt that the other can legitimately retrieve. Another form is the mutual promise, that links together those that make the promise in their actions and future condition, making this promise a common condition. From this perspective, the conformation of the body politic itself has be revised, that which arises from the original contract (pactum unionis) that at least from the beginnings of modernity is the basis of a we, an artificial community created from the act of a mutual promise. We is a product of an inheritance that commits our present and our future. This we is a task that not yet, at least not completely, we have to become.