Paper's abstract

Pierre Caye, Power and Money. From market to sovereignty.
For the founding of the Federal German Republic, for reuniting the two Germanys, for the European community, money is always at the core of the new foundations of politics. However, it is a strange symbol for politics, abstract, mute, without project or meaning which, for this reason, seems to cause not only a real democratic dearth, but even more of a radical crisis of the great European historical sovereignties. It is just that the question of power does not seem to be present in the new political entities federated around money. However, the catallactic logic of the monetary instrument implies a truly metaphysical conception of man's action, grounded on the estimation of his own forces when tried by his generic powerlessness. This profound intuition on man's acting, the liberal ideologies, which postulate the self-organisation of the market without really succeeding in justifying it, are unable to support it till the end. In fact, the experience of freedom and of the force specific to man through exchange demands constituting not a minimal power, but on the contrary a highly sophisticated one : a power in a position to create duration and discipline.

Key Words : market, sovereignty, Germany
t. 42, 1998 : p. 175-190

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