The Empire of Value - 9780262026970

With the advent of the 2007--2008 financial crisis, the economics profession itselfentered into a crisis of legitimacy from which it has yet to emerge. Despite the obviousness oftheir failures, however, economists continue to rely on the same methods and to proceed from thesame underlying assumptions. André Orléan challenges the neoclassical paradigm in this book, with anew way of thinking about perhaps its most fundamental concept, economic value.

Orléan argues that value is not bound up with labor, or utility, or any otherproperty that preexists market exchange. Economic value, he contends, is a social force whose vastsphere of influence, amounting to a kind of empire, extends to every aspect of economic life.Markets are based on the identification of value with money, and exchange value can only be regardedas a social institution. Financial markets, for example, instead of defining an extrinsic, objectivevalue for securities, act as a mechanism for arriving at a reference price that will be accepted byall investors. What economists must therefore study, Orléan argues, is the hold that value has overindividuals and how it shapes their perceptions and behavior.

Awarded theprestigious Prix Paul Ricoeur on its original publication in France in 2011, The Empire ofValue has been substantially revised and enlarged for this edition, with an entirely newsection discussing the financial crisis of 2007--2008.