The Economy and Society No Longer Share the Same Value

    For a very long time, the economy and its logic were built into the heart of a total "society" with which they maintained difficult and contradictory relations. There was a simple reason for these bad relations: The same "values" were not operating within both realms; that is to say that the embedding in question involved two heterogeneous worlds, the one convertible into cash and its calculations, the other of the spirit, morality and of handed-down codes; the first imposing quantities, the other knowing only qualities.

    Today, the economic logic of the value of material wealth, its acquisition and its seizure, pursues its immutable objectives within the heart of a social whole that is teetering - and it's this chaotic context that transforms the scene.

    First of all, the second part of the 20th century saw the market model, and the calculations it implies, infusing the social whole to the point that the articulation described above could perfectly well be read in the opposite way: one might wonder whether society had not come under the domination of the economic matrix, where the attitudes and conceptions of life were conceived.

    Moreover, one notes the rise in power over the last 30 years of ecological or "natural" ideas. Thus, the beginning of the 21st century is characterized in the West by the ideological priority of rescuing the planet in all its dimensions. That reality is so strong that the whole system of values of Western societies finds itself disrupted, economic and material progress rendered responsible for the environmental errancies that provoke climate change.

    Consequently, pure economic logic, often assimilated to the market model (in fact, the market is the institution that encodes and measures the economic field), seems forced to return to its useful and localized position embedded within a plural and complex social whole. In this sense, the 2008 crisis, which reveals the reality of an ineffective market, critiques and shakes up the economic logic's domination of global society, to the extent that this critique is of the excesses to which we have succumbed. As though the 20th century, synonymous with the reign of the economy, seemed to truly conclude with this crisis that is becoming a determining threshold. It opens the way to a taking into account of the environmental imperative, as much on the political as the economic level, as the 27 European Union Member States' adoption of the Climate Plan on December 13 - right in the middle of complete economic confusion - demonstrated.

    Consequently, it is precisely the economy's position, its function as well as its social role, that is en route to destruction as an effect of this crisis. The stakes are not minor. The 2008 crisis puts in play the destruction of a rejected organization. And the pure economic logic that people are rediscovering today to be greedy and ever insatiable now finds itself over-determined by the environmental preoccupation with the rescue of the natural environment from the human. The mercantile, uncontrollable and discredited by the fact of financial excesses, falls back under the yoke of society's "superior" values, today environmental, an adjective that has become synonymous with collective morality. A configuration is dying, the one that accorded a preponderant position to the economy, and especially to a certain way of envisaging and practicing it, with its financial deviancies. And, suddenly, a future looms beyond Queen Economy and its insane growth.

    Through sustainable development, through the transformation of companies and their calculations, through Western leaders' new political and economic policies, a new articulation between the economic and a society which has changed its guiding values is taking shape. A more responsible, more moral society that will distance itself from the fatal excesses of fund managers and other speculators. A Western society that directly examines the economic calculations responsible for its outrages and for the crisis we are experiencing. This profound mutation necessitates a phase of radical destruction of the patterns that dominated performance. Reinstalling politics and governments at the command posts' economic ideology seemed to refuse to them, rehabilitating a certain ethic, re-establishing the requirement of a "posture," the 2008 crisis signals and seals this profound upheaval.