L'analyse des écrits de J.B SAY sur la monnaie, la banque et la finance impliquait la maîtrise du contexte culturel, monétaire et financier de la période 1767-1832. En deuxième lieu, il fallait établir la conception globale des rapports entre individu et société chez Say qui est celle de l'intérêt éclairé. Enfin, la lecture des écrits a reposé sur un travail biographique approfondi, une prise en compte de la totalité des écrits et le refus d'une lecture rétrospective. Say développe une conception de la monnaie qui est à l'opposé de toute idée de substance. Sa vision globale du phénomène monétaire englobe sous le concept d'agent de la circulation la monnaie métallique et les signes monétaires (billets, lettre de change). La seule fonction de la monnaie est pour lui de servir à la circulation des valeurs. Les fonctions d'unité de compte et de réserve de valeur n'existent que dans le domaine de l'économie politique pratique. Sur ce point, son objectif est de limiter au maximum l'emprise de l'État. Dans sa théorie de la banque, Say part d'une position de free banking pur, pour ensuite évoluer vers un free banking impur. La dette publique est considérée comme totalement improductive et menaçant la démocratie par les moyens qu'elle donne aux gouvernements. Sur le plan technique, son souci est de doter l'économie française d'une monnaie flexible, sûre et stable. Say n' a jamais été un partisan de la version triviale de la théorie quantitative mais tout au plus un partisan de la version substantielle de cette théorie. La loi des débouchés comporte de nombreuses versions qui combinent à la fois une logique de circuit et une logique de marchés interdépendants. Say lui même n'a jamais été un partisan inconditionnel de la loi des marchés et ne la considère pas comme son principale apport à la science économique.

In his Defence of Poetry (c. 1580), Philip Sidney argues that poetry—a category in which he includes all imaginative fiction—aims at the education of its readers. Archepollycyes studies the attempts of a loose group of sixteenth-century writers around Sidney to write fiction that lives up to this aim, in order to understand the methods they developed to educate readers and the relationship between this education and the politics of the monarchical state. Sidnean fiction demands long study on the part of its readers because it aims to transform their mental habits and create new internal resources for right action. The works of fiction I study here—Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton’s Gorboduc, George Buchanan’s Baptistes, Sidney’s Arcadia, Mary Sidney Herbert’s Antonius and A Discourse of Life and Death, and Fulke Greville’s Mustapha—were products of their authors’ experiments with genre, narrative, translation, and style as tools to achieve this aim. Through the reading experience these works invite, readers exercise their judgment in the interpretation of fictional examples and reflect explicitly on the mental habits of generalization and application that inform decisions about how to act in new circumstances. Readers also come to see these habits of judgment as shared with others and experience the act of reading as participation in both real and imagined interpretive communities. I argue that these interpretive communities are best understood as loose political institutions, networks of organization and affiliation whose members could think and act together through common habits of judgment and the mutual resolution that results from recognizing this commonality. I adopt the term “archepollycyes” from Gabriel Harvey in order to describe the role of such institutions in monarchical politics. Harvey coins the term to describe the foundational forms of political knowledge, action, and organization, in contrast to the day-to-day work of government and the business of political rule. “Archepollycyes” hold a political community together in spite of changes in its ruler or government; understanding and creating such institutions was thus a means of responding to the escalating crises of succession, absolutism, and civil war that confronted early modern monarchies. By reading and writing fiction, I argue, Sidney and a broader network of writers aimed to act at a distance from contemporary political conflicts by founding “archepollycyes,” loose institutions capable of acting independent of the monarchical state and outside of existing structures of government, but on behalf of the long-term stability of a political community. In this way, I offer a new way of thinking about fiction and political institution in relation to the contested emergence of the modern sovereign state.