Prix, vérité et socialité

Abstract

Have been gathered here the introduction and the conclusion of a manuscript entitled Price. The introduction emphasizes the parallel existing between the way price and truth mould human relations within the social tissue, where price acts as the truth of human matters as expressed by numbers while truth is the price of things when expressed with words. The conclusion, which summarizes the book in its entirety, proposes a reversal of the classical view according to which the economic determines the social which in its turn defines the political; instead, the political is here presented as the ground of the social which then determines the economic through price seen as a border phenomenon where the social status of seller and buyer meet. This is of course nothing but Aristotle's theory of price formation. One is left with defining the political as emergent from the social division of labor and the relative scarcity of individuals within the conditions resulting from such division. The author's data were gleaned by him during fieldwork, in the fisheries of France and West Africa, and in the financial world of both Europe and the United States.