The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

Chapter 6: “Exchanging” applies Chapter 3’s principles to economics in the same way Chapters 4 and 5 have applied these principles to language and natural science. Foucault argues that our modern analysis of economy—called “political economy”—did not exist in the Classical Age. Instead, they had analysis of wealth, which examined the link between signs of wealth and representation. The chapter is divided into eight parts.

In part one (“The Analysis of Wealth”), Foucault outlines the differences between political economy and analysis of wealth. Production and labor power, the basis of political economy, were not considered important factors to examine in the Classical Age. Instead, it is wealth itself and its symbols (gold, coins, etc.) that needed examining. The ideas of value, price, and how wealth circulated were all far more important than labor and production values.

In part two (“Money and Prices”), Foucault examines the Classical Age’s discourse on money and prices. Analysts of wealth were concerned with finding the best medium to use for money (silver versus gold, for example) and how to set prices in relation to the medium of money. The value of money was based on its ability to represent wealth and rarity. When metals from the colonized Americas entered the economy, they sunk the value of pre-existing coins because each coin could represent less wealth out of the whole.

In part three (“Mercantilism”), Foucault explores the economic system of mercantilism. Mercantilism divorced value from the medium of money’s ability to represent wealth. Instead, mercantilism placed value in the act of exchange itself; the minting of money by the state enabled this act of exchange to take place. Wealth became the thing that money signified and the act of exchange was the signature that allowed money to function in this representative capacity.

In part four (“The Pledge and the Price”), Foucault examines the conflict between the views on money presented in parts two and three. Money-as-commodity and money-as-sign were made possible by the same episteme that allowed them to be discussed in mutually-intelligible terms. Both ideas were made possible by the conception of money as a “pledge” (197). The pledge was the idea that money was a token accepted by common consent. The two approaches differ on how the pledge can be assured.

In part five (“The Creation of Value”), Foucault examines how the two approaches view value. The physiocrats, who view money as a commodity, believe value is anterior to money; value comes from need, and money can represent that. The psychological school believes value is created only in the moment of exchange, which happens through money.

In part six (“Utility”), Foucault posits that the physiocrats and psychological school are dealing with the same problem from different ends of the issue; they do not necessarily offer competing explanations. Both agree that value operates on utility, which utilizes the pledge of money to express that utility in a society. Like the structures of natural history, both approaches use value and utility to attribute and articulate the real thing underneath them, which is wealth (or character for the natural historian).

In part seven (“General Table”), Foucault takes the functions and concepts discussed so far in the chapter to fit the analysis of wealth into the Classical Age’s episteme of taxonomy and tabulation. As with natural history, analysis of wealth functions off of the taxonomies and rules of general grammar. Value is the attributive function, or the verb of analysis of wealth. The concept of value acts as a proposition that puts economy into motion, much like the verb “to be.” Foucault uses a graph on page 219 to demonstrate that general grammar, natural history, and analysis of economy function off of the quadrilateral of language. Each function of the three disciplines from the previous chapters is slotted into a vertex of the quadrilateral. Designation, derivation, articulation, and proposition occupy these vertices, making each function in a particular corner an extension of some part of the quadrilateral of language.

In part eight (“Desire and Representation”), Foucault paves the way for Chapter 7 by examining the end of the Classical Age through the work of the Marquis de Sade. Sade wrote Justine in 1791 and its follow-up Juliette in 1797. The novels follow sisters Justine and Juliette through their lives. Justine is virtuous and suffers extreme hardship while Juliette is an amoral murderer who lives a comfortable life. Foucault positions these novels at the end of the Classical Age in the same way he places Don Quixote at the beginning of the era. Sade’s scandalous novels contain the hint of a “bottomless sea” underneath the stable relationship the Classical Age attained with representation as a communicator between taxonomized knowledge and the transparent mesh of language (229). Foucault’s argument is that the novels predict the development of the “unthought” in the 19th-century episteme, which he will explore later.