Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 July 2017
On n'a pas suffisamment pris la mesure des mutations qu'a induites sur la politique économique son plongement dans le contexte d'une finance internationale totalement déréglementée. Certes la contrainte d'exposition permanente de la politique économique aux jugements des marchés financiers et les reculs de souveraineté qui en sont la conséquence sont maintenant de mieux en mieux identifiés. Mais le préjudice que la finance porte à la politique économique est autrement plus profond. C'est son exercice même qui se trouve fondamentalement perturbé. Or au coeur de ce trouble qui gît dans la relation nouée entre la politique économique et la finance, il y a d'abord la question de savoir comment se constitue la norme de la « bonne politique économique ».
Because economies is unable to provide certain statements, agents’ action must rely on “home-made ” substitution knowledge. This one is in fact a collective product, named hereafter a referential. The referential is a corpus of representations which provides a synoptic view of the working of the economy and helps agents to make themselves an idea of what is “good” or “bad” for them. Mixing pieces of academie theory, more or less ideological statements and various beliefs, the referential is built in the interplay of multiple institutional talks. The referential allows to settle an economic policy norm, whereas multiple such norms were a priori possible. The present paper tries to show how such an economic policy norm is self-stabilizing because of self-fulfilling prophecies effects, but how nevertheless it can be driven to crisis as soon as doubts or critics on its relevance reappear. It is suggested that since the beginning of the 90's, the French economic policy is faced with a return of multiple equilibria of norm: in short the so-called “desinflation competitive” vs the “other policy”. Because of the competition between these two norms, the decisions of economic policy may be quite indeterminate. It is proposed that not all the societies are able, as the German is, to build the hermeneutic and semiotic devices which permit to contain indeterminacy on a long term horizon.