A Political Economy of Co-Experience

Transcript

Abstract

An account of a co-experience is composed by one participant in a relation and used by a third party who took no part in it. Earlier volumes in this series established that the operative force of such an instrument is separable from the account it contains, is exchanged, and has no description in property law. This volume asks what a political economy of that object looks like: what circulates, on what terms, and what accumulates to whom. It argues that accounts drawn from singular relations admit no comparison from their content, so that comparability is supplied by the standing of the party who issued them; that a party whose standing serves in this office stands to the accounts compared as a measure stands to what is measured, so that the co-experiences in which that party participated fall outside the set the operation compares; and that the structure so described is Marx’s analysis of the general equivalent, whose extension beyond the commodity has been made by others and whose application to a party who measures by issuing accounts has not. The volume then examines what accumulates. A standing grows by being exercised and is not diminished by exercise; it admits no transfer, so a concentration of standings admits no correction by transfer and acquisition runs solely through positions in institutional hierarchies. The vocabulary of capital applies in respect of accumulation, return, and reproduction and fails at alienation; the vocabulary of financialisation applies in respect of prospective valuation and fails at the assignable claim. On circulation the volume finds a practice conducted in three exchange relations of which it names one, whose content degrades under unverifiability by two compounding mechanisms, and which is market-inalienable in fact while unprohibited in law. Two findings run against the position of the series: the conditions of issuance are reproduced by the asymmetry that made the practice worth examining, and the instruments proposed to improve it carry a contraction of it as their cost. The volume argues that these pose a question the series has not answered, namely whether its aim is the reform of the practice or its reduction, and that no further work on remedies should proceed before the question is settled. The volume proceeds without prices, units, or series, and states the methods that operate without them.

Keywords: political economy; co-experience; general equivalent; value-form; standing; commensuration; inalienability.

Status of the Draft and Terms of Circulation

This work is a preliminary draft of a book, circulated at a stage well before completion in order to invite dialogue, criticism, revision, and independent development. Its definitions, distinctions, and constructions remain provisional. Circulation across scholarly and practical communities is part of the purpose of releasing it now rather than later.

Being a book draft rather than a paper, it is provisional in ways a paper would not be, and the differences are worth stating so that a reader knows what to hold the text to. Its chapters are unevenly developed: some carry the weight the argument places on them, while others state a position that a completed volume would establish at greater length, and the survey chapters of Part II declare their own lower evidential standing where it applies. Its division into parts and chapters follows the argument as presently understood, and chapters may yet be merged, divided, or reordered as the argument settles. Two chapters name themselves as the weakest in the volume, and the closing chapter on limits collects what the text does not establish. A reader who finds a section thinner than its heading promises has found something the author also finds, rather than a claim advanced with false confidence.

The author treats the viewpoints, concepts, and lines of reasoning presented here as contributions to a shared field of inquiry. Similar or related ideas may have appeared in other intellectual, cultural, and disciplinary traditions. The manuscript therefore states its known antecedents where each arises, separates the researcher-origin proposal from later formal reconstruction, and leaves historical priority open pending a systematic originality review. Claims of absence rest on a bounded search and are stated in that form throughout.

The arguments should be understood as provisional and historically situated. Readers are encouraged to question, test, revise, extend, reinterpret, or independently develop the ideas presented here, and correction of a source, an attribution, or a step in an argument is more useful to the author at this stage than assent. Where appropriate, acknowledgment of this work as one point of encounter in the development of a related idea is appreciated. Such acknowledgment records an intellectual route; the ideas themselves remain available for criticism, revision, and independent development.

Responsible Use and Rights Reservation

This section separates requested scholarly conduct from the legal permissions stated in the notices below. It records an ethical request for responsible use and then defines the narrower scope of retained legal rights.

The author encourages good-faith discussion, criticism, independent inquiry, and responsible use of the material in this work. Separately from the licence’s terms, the author asks users to consider foreseeable harms when adapting or applying the arguments made here. Two misuses are foreseeable and each inverts the purpose of the analysis.

The first concerns the treatment of a person’s standing as a form of capital. Chapters 3 to 5 examine whether that designation is defensible and record where it fails. The examination is analytical. A reader who takes it as a recommendation that such standing be managed, priced, or optimised has reversed the argument, since Chapter 5 reports that pricing such a practice degrades it.

The second concerns the account of accumulation and concentration in Chapter 1. Describing how a capacity to issue accumulates at a few positions is a description of a mechanism. It supplies no warrant for the positions that hold it, and the description of an advantage is distinct from its justification.

The author reserves all rights not granted by the licence stated below.

Notices

Status. Preliminary draft of a book. Incomplete and subject to revision in structure as well as in content. Not peer reviewed. Not submitted for publication at the time of circulation.

Licence. This work is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Language-model statement. The author used a large language model as a drafting and verification aid. All argumentative claims, all readings of sources, and all decisions about scope and concession are the author’s own. Every source cited was verified against a publisher, journal, statutory, judicial, or institutional record before it was admitted to the manuscript, and editions and pagination variants are recorded where they differ across printings.

Declared interest. The author has been the subject of institutional judgments of the kind examined here. The object of the work is general and its arguments are stated for that general object. The author’s own case is not a source of evidence and is not discussed.

Related research programme. This volume belongs to a series on trust, neutrality, and the transmission of co-experience. It takes as settled the ontology of the judged subject, the duties of the issuing party, the allocation of rights over an account of a co-experience, and the assessment of governance mechanisms, each established earlier in that series. It takes from the jurisprudential volume the finding that the operative force of such an instrument is separable from the account it contains, is exchanged, and has no description in property law. It cedes distribution and the unequal conditions under which accounts are obtained to the volume on injustice, and cedes questions of justice across domains and of conversion between heterogeneous value systems to the two later volumes named for them.

Suggested citation. Huang, Wanhong. A Political Economy of Co-Experience. Preliminary book draft, 2026.

Object, Questions, and Method of the Inquiry

Introduction

A person who has worked closely with another is asked to give an account of them. The request comes from a third party that will decide something about the person described. What results is composed by one participant in a relation that two people made, is used by a party who stood outside that relation, and ordinarily reaches the person it characterises never or late. Earlier volumes in this series asked what such an instrument warrants, what rights attach to it, and what apparatus could govern it. This volume asks a different kind of question about the same object: what circulates when such an account moves, on what terms it is exchanged, what accumulates to those who issue them, and whether the standing of an issuer is intelligible in the vocabulary that political economy has developed for value, money and capital.

Asking it is worth while because the preceding volume left a finding it could not develop. The operative force of such an instrument, meaning the alteration it effects in what the person described may thereafter do, was found to be separable from the account the instrument contains. That force is what the parties transact for. It is exchanged, sometimes for consideration and sometimes for an undertaking about future dealings. Beyond that, it has no description in property law, since the doctrines that name the force of a document name a force the legal system itself constituted, and this force the legal system did not constitute. The result was a practice in which something changes hands that no legal vocabulary reaches. What changes hands is the subject of this volume.

Three features of that transaction organise the argument, and each is inherited rather than assumed. A market exists in something that has no legal description. Its unit of account is a person’s standing rather than a quantity of anything. Third, its supply contracts when it is regulated, in a direction that is documented and by a magnitude that is not. Each of these clauses arrived from a different volume of the series, and Chapter 3 records which, together with what falls if any of the three is rejected.

Two routes carry the argument, and they are kept apart to the end. One reads the traditions of political economy for what each asks and for what each would say about this object. The other derives consequences from the framework of generative relations in which the author works, and from the results the preceding volumes established. Chapter 3 reports where the routes converge, where a result rests on one alone, and where they conflict.

Much of the ground is occupied, and the occupants are conceded at the point each claim arises rather than in a closing note. Six concessions are large enough to state at the outset, and the first is the largest.

The structural claim on which this volume turns is Marx’s. In the analysis of the value-form, a commodity that comes to serve as the general equivalent is excluded from the world of commodities whose value it expresses: it can no longer appear in the relative form alongside the others, because it has become the material in which their value is stated . The claim this volume makes about an issuer of accounts, namely that a party who comes to serve as the measure of others is thereby placed outside the set of parties measured, is that claim transposed from a commodity to a person. The transposition is not this volume’s either. The volume on injustice in this series derives it and establishes why an equivalent emerges under generalised circulation of incommensurable things. What remains for this volume is what follows once the equivalent circulates, and Chapter 2 states the boundary exactly.

A second concession concerns the vocabulary of capital. That capital exists in forms other than the monetary, that cultural and social forms convert into the economic form under stated conditions, and that such forms are accumulated labour rather than natural endowments, is Bourdieu’s ; that a resource can inhere in the structure of relations rather than in persons or things is Coleman’s . The designation carries commitments, and Chapters 3 to 5 test the present object against them rather than assuming the designation fits. The object satisfies three of the four and strains on the fourth, and the strain is reported as a finding.

A third concerns the rendering of persons as comparable. That the transformation of qualitative difference into a common metric is a social process with its own politics, and that what is at stake in a claim of incommensurability is the refusal of that transformation, is Espeland and Stevens’s ; that being measured alters what is measured, through mechanisms of self-fulfilling prophecy and of commensuration itself, is established for public rankings by Espeland and Sauder . This volume adds no category to that analysis and uses it in Chapter 1 to describe how an account of a relation is made comparable with accounts of other relations.

A fourth concerns the reading of unverifiable quality in exchange. That asymmetric information about quality produces adverse selection, and that a market can be driven toward its worse instances or fail to form at all, is Akerlof’s ; that a costly observable action can sustain an informational equilibrium is Spence’s ; that an educational institution may sort without augmenting what it sorts is Arrow’s ; and that credentials operate as instruments of occupational closure rather than as measures of skill is Collins’s . Chapters 2 and 3 rely on all four and extend none of them.

A fifth concerns things that may be given and not sold. That a category exists between full commodification and full inalienability, occupied by things whose transfer is permitted as a gift and forbidden as a sale, is Radin’s ; that a practice organised as a gift may be degraded rather than improved by the introduction of payment, with consequences for both supply and safety, is Titmuss’s . Chapter 5 brings these together with a finding of the preceding volume, that the reference practice contracts rather than adjusts when exposure is raised, and argues that the two are one structure reached from two literatures.

A sixth concerns accumulation. That recognition accrues disproportionately to those who already hold it, so that equivalent contributions receive unequal credit, is Merton’s ; the mechanisms by which such advantage compounds, and the conditions under which the compounding can be identified empirically, are set out by DiPrete and Eirich . Chapter 3 applies both, and states where it goes beyond them, since neither addresses a standing that cannot be transferred.

Two further points about the position of this volume follow from these concessions.

One concerns what is unoccupied. A search of the economic, sociological and legal literatures conducted for this volume located no treatment of an instrument of the present kind as a good in a market for such instruments; no account of a personally held standing functioning as a unit of account in the sense the theory of the value-form gives that term; and no economic treatment of the sale or commissioned drafting of such instruments, though the practice is documented in professional ethics. The nearest neighbours are conceded where each arises. In behavioural ecology, reputation is described as a currency spent to obtain assistance , and the description is figurative rather than a claim about a numeraire. In economic sociology and education, standing is analysed as capital, which is a claim about a stock and not about a measure. The distinction between a stock and a measure is the space this volume occupies, and Chapter 4 states it with the qualification that a bounded search establishes the absence of a located owner rather than the absence of one.

The other concerns method, and it is stated early because a reader may otherwise take the volume for something it declines to be. This is a political economy without prices and without quantities. The object has no price, since what is transacted has no legal description under which a price could be recorded; it has no unit, since the standing of an issuer is not a quantity of anything; and it produces no series that could be estimated. Chapter 5 argues that this is a constraint on method rather than a disqualification, and that four recognised methods operate without either. Rising from abstract determinations to the concrete is the method of the critique of political economy itself. Treating the economic substantively, as the instituted process by which a collective provisions itself, rather than formally, as choice under scarcity, is Polanyi’s  and it frees the analysis from the requirement of a market form. Analysing economic action as embedded in ongoing relations rather than as the conduct of under-socialised or over-socialised agents is Granovetter’s . Fourth, commensuration analysis examines how comparability is produced where it did not exist. None of the four requires a quantity.

The formal definition against which this volume measures itself is worth stating at the outset, since the volume declines it. On the definition that made economics a science of a certain form of problem, the subject studies human behaviour as a relation between ends and scarce means having alternative uses . The transaction examined here does not take that form. What is transacted is not scarce in the relevant sense, since an issuer who writes one account is not thereby prevented from writing another; the ends are not given in advance, since what an altered field of relational conditions will produce is undetermined; and the alternative uses are not comparable, since there is no unit in which the alternatives could be ranked. A definition constructed around a form of problem excludes what does not take that form, and this volume takes the exclusion seriously rather than disputing it. The older name for the subject, which the definition displaced, covered production, distribution, exchange and consumption together with the social relations through which these occur , and it is under that older description that the present object is intelligible.

Chapters 2 to 5 fix the object, record the inheritance, set out the questions a political economy is expected to answer, and state the method. Chapters 1 to 4 survey the traditions and mark the boundary of what follows. Chapters 1 to 5 examine the standing of the issuer, its accumulation, its convertibility, and its reproduction. Chapters 1 to 5 examine what circulates, on what terms, and how the instrument degrades. Chapters 1 and 2 report concentration and the question of financialisation, and Chapters 3 to 6 report the standing of each result, the consequences for the framework, the limits, and the conclusion.

Three limitations qualify everything that follows. The survey of traditions is bounded, so a claim that no tradition asks a given question is a claim about that survey. The volume establishes no magnitudes, so where a mechanism is identified its size is left open and no comparison resting on size is made. Beyond that, the object is a single instrument in a small number of domains, so the generality of the results is the generality of that instrument and no more.

Instrument and Transaction Under Examination

This chapter fixes the object of the volume and the vocabulary used for it. Its purpose is to say what instrument is examined, which parties stand in what relation to it, what is meant by the force such an instrument carries, what is meant by the standing of the party who issues it, and which neighbouring practices fall outside. The chapter is stipulative and expository: it defines and delimits, and defers every contested claim to the chapters that argue for it. A reader who disputes a definition here should expect the dispute to propagate, since the later chapters are built upon these terms and upon no others.

Parties to the Transaction and the Order of Composition

The transaction has three parties and proceeds in two moments, and the interval between the moments is what makes it worth examining.

In the first moment two parties participate together in a working, instructional, or therapeutic relation. What either does within it is conditioned by the other: the supervisor’s questions shape which problems the student attempts, and the student’s attempts shape which questions the supervisor asks next. Neither party is observing the other from outside. Each is a condition of what the other does, and what is produced is produced between them.

In the second moment a third party, which took no part in that relation, must decide something about one of the first two and asks the other for an account. The interval between the moments may be days or years. The relation may have ended, and often has. The third party did not witness any of what it is now asking about, which is the reason it is asking.

What the two parties of the first moment have between them is called throughout this volume a co-experience: an episode jointly constituted by two parties, in which what each did was conditioned by the other, and of which neither holds a complete account. The term is the one used across this series, and it is preferred here to the ordinary phrase for a reason internal to the subject matter. Describing an episode as shared says either that two parties underwent it together or that one party communicated it to another, and this volume examines an arrangement in which both occur: two parties undergo an episode, and one of them afterwards communicates an account of it to a third. A term carrying both senses would be ambiguous in exactly the sentences where the distinction does the most work. Co-experience names the first sense only, and transmission is reserved for the second.

Definition 2.1 (The Parties To A Transmitted Account). The issuer is the party who composes the account. The person described is the party the account characterises and who participated in the relation from which it is drawn. The receiving institution is the party who requests, holds, or acts upon the account and who took no part in that relation.

Three features of this arrangement recur throughout the volume and each is a consequence of the ordering just described rather than an additional assumption. The material of the account was produced by two parties. The account itself is composed by one. Finally, the party who acts upon it is the one party who observed none of what it reports.

Instruments in which this ordering holds include the letter of recommendation in academic and professional selection, the employment reference, the performance appraisal used in promotion and retention decisions, the peer review report, the clinical formulation transmitted to a party other than the patient, the teacher evaluation entering a pupil’s record, and the supervisory assessment entering a licensing or disciplinary process. They differ in formality, in whether the person described may see what is written, and in whether the receiving institution is bound by what it reads. They agree in the ordering, and the argument of this volume turns on the ordering alone.

Force of an Instrument and the Object of Transaction

Three things may be distinguished in an account of a co-experience, and the distinction is the volume’s most consequential piece of vocabulary.

There is the document: a physical or electronic artefact that may be held, filed, copied, and forwarded. There is the expression: the words composed, which may be read, quoted, and set beside other words. Third, there is what the document accomplishes when it arrives, which is neither of the first two and which this volume calls the force.

Definition 2.2 (The Force Of An Instrument). The alteration an instrument effects, upon arrival at a receiving institution, in the relational conditions available to the person described.

The force is what the parties transact for, and the ordinary conduct of the practice shows that they know it. A receiving institution requests an account in order to act upon it and would have no use for one it had resolved to disregard. An issuer who declines to write withholds an alteration rather than a quantity of prose, and both parties understand the refusal in those terms. A person described who asks for an account is asking for the alteration and not for the words, and would be indifferent between two sets of words producing the same effect.

The jurisprudential volume of this series established three things about this force, which Chapter 3 records in full together with the chapters that depend upon each. The force is separable from the account, as the case of an instrument composed by one party and signed by another demonstrates. It is exchanged, sometimes for consideration and sometimes for an undertaking about future dealings. Moreover, it has no description in property law, since the doctrines that name the operative force of a document name a force the legal system itself constituted, and this one it did not.

Of the three, the last deserves a further remark here, since it is easily mistaken for a gap in the law rather than a feature of the object. A receiving institution acts upon such an instrument because it treats the instrument as a reason. Nothing obliges it to act, no obligation follows from issuance, and no party could sue upon the instrument as such. The force operates because parties behave as though it does, which is a fact about an institution rather than about a legal system, and Chapter 2 takes up what may be exchanged where the object of exchange has no legal name.

Standing of an Issuer

The force of a given instrument depends upon who issued it, and the dependence is not marginal. An account in identical words carries a different alteration according to the position of the party who composed it. The parties know this and act upon it: a person described seeks an account from one party rather than another, a receiving institution weighs two accounts differently according to their sources, and an issuer who is asked frequently is asked because of what their asking is worth. The property of an issuer that produces this difference is what this volume calls a standing.

Definition 2.3 (The Standing Of An Issuer). The property of a party in virtue of which accounts issued by that party effect larger or smaller alterations in receiving institutions than accounts issued by others in the same words.

The definition is deliberately thin, and its thinness is a methodological choice rather than an evasion. It is relational, since it defines the property by comparison with other issuers rather than by any intrinsic feature. It is functional, since it identifies the property by what it does rather than by what it consists in. Finally, it is silent on every question the volume goes on to ask.

Four such questions are worth naming here so that the silence is visible. Whether a standing accumulates, and by what mechanism, is examined in Chapter 3. Whether it may be transferred to another party is examined there also. Whether it converts into other holdings, and therefore whether the vocabulary of capital reaches it, is examined in Chapter 4. Further, what a standing becomes when accounts issued under it circulate generally is the subject of Chapter 2, which is the central chapter of the volume.

A definition that settled any of these in advance would make the corresponding chapter circular. What the thinness costs is that the term does little work until Part III supplies it with content, and a reader who wants to know what a standing is before that point will find the answer withheld.

Scope of the Volume

Three restrictions apply throughout and each is stated with its ground.

The volume examines this instrument rather than co-experience in general. General claims about co-experience arise where the instrument produces them and are asserted nowhere in advance. Its ground is division of labour rather than modesty: the wider object belongs to work of the author’s on generative relational economics, and that work is cited where it bears rather than reproduced. A reader looking for a general theory of co-experience will not find one here and is directed to the companion work.

Coverage is the second restriction: the volume examines circulation, exchange, accumulation, and the standing of the issuer, and does not examine the distribution of the capacity to obtain a favourable account, which belongs to the volume on injustice in this series, nor the design of an apparatus to govern the practice, which belongs to the volume on governance. Both boundaries are load-bearing, since the questions reserved are ones a reader might reasonably expect this volume to answer, and Chapter 3 records what is taken from each of those volumes in exchange for what is ceded to them.

Finally, the volume establishes no magnitudes. Where a mechanism is identified, its size is left open, and no argument here rests on a comparison of sizes. Its ground is stated in Chapter 5: the object has no price, no unit, and no observable population, so a quantitative claim would be an assertion rather than a finding. This restriction is the most consequential of the three, since several questions a reader will want answered turn on magnitudes the volume cannot supply, and Chapter 5 names them.

Three neighbouring practices fall outside the object, and they are excluded by the definition rather than by preference. Assessments composed from records by a party who never encountered the person involve no shared course of dealing, so the question of divided authority over a jointly produced past does not arise; Chapter 1 records that the analysis of such assessments is held by other work and marks the boundary between the two. Standardised test results occupy a similar position, since whatever difficulties they present arise between a person and an instrument rather than between two participants in a relation. Finally, self-reports and personal statements are composed by the person they describe, so the composition is not unilateral in the sense that generates the volume’s question.

Results Carried from the Preceding Volumes

This chapter records what the volume inherits and what falls with each inheritance. Its purpose is to make the dependencies inspectable, so that a reader who rejects an earlier result can identify which chapters of this volume lose their support and which stand without it. Six results are taken as settled and are not re-argued. Each is stated in the form the earlier work established it, together with the ground on which it rests, the use made of it here, and the consequence of declining it.

Ontology of the Judged Subject

An attribute exhibited within a relation depends for its exhibition upon that relation. What a party did within a working or instructional arrangement was conditioned by the other party to it, by what was attempted, by what was possible there, and by what counted as success within it. An observation is accordingly valid for the relation in which it was made, and its extension beyond that relation is an error of scope rather than of accuracy: the observation may be entirely correct and still warrant nothing about conduct elsewhere.

The ground of the result in the earlier work is an argument about what an account reports rather than about how reliably it reports. Two parties produced the conduct jointly, so a characterisation of it describes a joint product, and no position among the parties yields a standpoint from which what the relation amounted to could be settled independently of the positions occupied.

Three chapters here rely upon it. Chapter 1 relies on it throughout, since the argument that comparability must be supplied from outside the accounts depends upon the relations being singular and unrepeatable. Chapter 1 relies on it in distinguishing what travels from what stays, since the conditions that qualified an observation are precisely what fails to travel. Beyond that, Chapter 5 relies on it in establishing that the object admits no outcome standard.

A reader who declines the result should expect Chapter 1 to fail first. If accounts can be assessed against what actually occurred, comparability is supplied by the material, no external supplier is required, and the argument of Chapter 2 has no premise.

Duties of the Issuing Party

Judgments of persons formed inside one relation and used inside another are governed by duties appropriate to an exercise of discretionary power rather than by norms of assertion. Three consequences were established. The primary obligation runs to the person described rather than to the party who asked, since the party who asked can protect itself and the person described cannot. The issuer’s position is one of discretion rather than of report, so the standards governing it are those governing the exercise of a power. Third, refusal to issue is the act requiring the stronger justification, since a refusal forecloses without stating a reason that could be answered.

The ground is the asymmetry of the three positions rather than any claim about the accuracy of accounts. A party who may decline, whose declining is unobservable, and upon whose decision another party’s prospects turn is exercising a power whatever the quality of what it writes.

Chapter 5 relies on the third consequence and would be weakened without it. A practice in which refusal requires justification behaves differently under the introduction of payment from one in which issuance is simply optional, since in the first case the party who declines must account for the declining and in the second need not. Chapter 2 relies on the first in describing what the issuer owes in each of the three exchange relations.

A reader who declines the result loses the account of why issuers issue at all where issuing costs them time and creates exposure, which Chapter 2 takes from it.

Allocation of Rights over an Account

Positive law grants the person described some measure of access to an account of themselves and withholds authority over its content. The finding was reached across provisions enacted in different systems, at different times, and for unrelated purposes: evaluative assessments are the assessed person’s own data and are disclosable while the assessment stands; a student may inspect a recommendation by default and the ordinary execution of a waiver removes the entitlement; one legislature has withdrawn access to the confidential reference on both sides of the transaction; integrity in a work belongs to its author; copyright vests in whoever composed the expression; and reputation standing alone falls below the threshold at which process attaches.

A second result accompanies the first and is used more heavily here: access and interpretive authority are separately allocable. A legal system may move access in either direction without settling anything about who may interpret, and two of the provisions above do exactly that in opposite directions.

Chapter 1 relies on the separability in describing what moves when an account is transmitted and what remains where it was, and Chapter 1 relies on the allocation itself, since the convergence between the economic and the jurisprudential descriptions of who fixes the terms is one of the volume’s principal results.

A reader who declines the separability should expect the analysis of Chapter 1 to collapse into a simpler one, in which an account either is or is not available and nothing further is allocated.

Separability and Exchange of the Force

The operative force of such an instrument, meaning the alteration it effects in the relational conditions available to the person described, is separable from the account the instrument contains, is exchanged, and has no description in property law. Each of the three limbs was established separately. Separability was established from the case in which one party composes the text and another signs it, so that the expression belongs to the composer while the force belongs to the signatory. Exchange was established from the forms the practice takes where consideration or an undertaking passes. Beyond that, the absence of a legal description was established from the observation that the doctrines naming the operative force of a document name a force the legal system itself constituted, whereas this one it did not.

This is the inheritance on which the volume most depends, and the dependency is uneven across the chapters that carry it. Chapter 2 would fail without it, since it examines the terms on which the force is supplied and there would be no separable thing to supply. Chapter 3 would fail, since the arrangement it examines is defined by the expression and the force coming from different parties. Chapter 4 would fail, since the circuit it traces has the force as one of its legs. In addition, Chapter 2 would lose its object rather than its argument: the structural claim would survive, and the thing said to occupy the equivalent position would be undefined.

The finding is itself dependent, in the earlier work, upon an account of what such an instrument does in a receiving system. That account is contested by readings on which the instrument is informative through what its issuer stakes rather than through what it says, and the contest is pursued elsewhere. A reader who accepts the contesting reading should treat Part IV of this volume as suspended and Parts III and V as standing, since neither depends upon the force being separable from the account.

Assessment of Governance Mechanisms

Three results were established about the governance of the practice. The mechanisms available are process mechanisms, since an output standard would require a comparison the ontology of the first result denies, and a requirement that an account be accurate is therefore unenforceable because its standard is unavailable rather than because verification would cost too much. A prohibition on exchanging the instrument fails as a governance mechanism, since a prohibition is discharged by non-occurrence and the non-occurrence of a private exchange between willing parties cannot be established. Moreover, the practice responds to raised exposure by contracting rather than by adjusting, in a direction that is documented and by a magnitude that is not.

Two chapters rely upon these. Chapter 5 relies on the second and third together, and the combination produces the finding that the instrument is market-inalienable in fact while unprohibited in law. Chapter 2 relies on the second in a smaller way, since a holding whose exchange cannot be observed is a holding whose market cannot be described.

The third result is one of the three clauses that give this volume its object, and a reader who declines it loses Chapter 5 entirely while leaving the remainder of Part IV intact.

Emergence of a General Equivalent

Under generalised circulation of things admitting no common measure, a general equivalent comes into existence, and the party who comes to occupy that position is thereby alienated into serving as the measure and is excluded from the set of parties whose contributions it measures. The volume on injustice in this series derives this result and this volume does not re-derive it.

The ground of the derivation is a claim of necessity rather than of observation. Where things that cannot be compared must nonetheless be circulated and ranked, some element is forced into the office of expressing the others, and the office is constituted by the exclusion rather than merely accompanied by it.

Chapter 2 states the boundary between the two treatments precisely, and the boundary is worth previewing here because the two volumes are easily read as one. The earlier work owns why an equivalent emerges and what becoming it does to the party concerned. This volume owns what follows once accounts issued under such a standing circulate generally: what accumulates to the party occupying the position, whether the accumulation transfers, on what terms accounts are exchanged, and how the arrangement degrades.

A reader who declines the derivation may still accept Chapter 2, which argues the placement from the requirement of comparison established in Chapter 1 rather than from necessity. What would be lost is the account of why the position exists at all, and with it the answer to a reader who asks why the practice could not simply proceed without any party occupying it.

Questions a Political Economy Is Expected to Answer

An object may be described in the vocabulary of a subject without belonging to it. Chapter 2 fixed the object of this volume and Chapter 3 recorded what earlier work established about it, and neither settles whether a political economy of such an object is available. What would settle it is whether the questions the subject asks can be asked here and receive determinate forms, since a subject is identified by its questions at least as much as by its answers.

That is the test this chapter applies. Its purpose is to establish that the object admits the full range of questions rather than a selected few, to give each question the form it takes for this object, and to record which chapter of the volume takes it up. A subsidiary purpose is served along the way: the definitional choice made in Chapter 1 is shown to do concrete work, since two of the thirteen questions have no answer under one definition of the subject and clear answers under the other.

The chapter gives the two definitional positions between which the subject has moved, states the recurring questions in general form, re-asks each of them for an account of a co-experience, collects the result in Table [tab:questions], and draws three consequences. One task is expressly not undertaken here. Attribution of particular questions to particular traditions belongs to Chapter 1, which rests on a survey of lower evidential standing, and separating the two keeps the present chapter independent of it.

Definitional Positions of the Subject

The subject has occupied two definitional positions, and which of them is adopted decides whether the present object belongs to it at all. Setting them beside one another is therefore not a preliminary courtesy but the first substantive step of the chapter.

On the first position, the subject studies human behaviour as a relation between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses . Three features of that formulation deserve notice, since each bears on what follows. It is constructed around a form of problem rather than around a domain of activity, so that any activity whatever falls within the subject provided it exhibits the form, and any activity failing to exhibit the form falls outside however economic it may appear. It presupposes scarcity in a particular sense, namely that the use of a means for one end forecloses its use for another. It presupposes, further, that alternatives can be ranked, since a relation between ends and means is unintelligible where no ordering of ends exists.

On the second position, the subject examines production, distribution, exchange and consumption together with the social relations through which these are carried on . This is a definition by domain rather than by form. An activity may fail the ends-and-means test and still fall within the subject, provided it belongs to the way a collective carries on its material and social reproduction. The two definitions are therefore not rivals about the extension of one concept. They identify the subject by different criteria, and an object may satisfy one while failing the other without any contradiction arising.

Chapter 1 recorded that the object of this volume fails the first definition on each of its three elements: what is transacted is not scarce in the relevant sense, since composing one account forecloses no other; the ends served are not given in advance; and the alternatives are not rankable for want of a unit. That result is accepted here rather than disputed. Its consequence is not that the object lies outside political economy but that it lies outside one definition of it, and the questions collected below are the questions the subject asks under the second. A reader holding to the first definition will find the chapter reporting on questions that definition does not license, and section four states exactly where the difference between the two shows itself.

Questions Recurring across the Traditions

Thirteen questions recur across the traditions surveyed in Chapter 1. They are stated here in general form and without attribution, and they fall into five groups whose members have more in common with one another than with the rest.

Four questions concern the movement of the thing at issue. Production asks how it comes into being and through what activity; distribution asks how it is apportioned among parties; exchange asks on what terms it passes between them; and consumption asks how it is used and used up. These four are the ones the domain definition names explicitly, and a subject that could not ask them of an object would have little claim on it.

Two questions concern what persists. Reproduction asks how the conditions of the whole process are restored so that it may occur again, and accumulation asks how holdings grow over time and whether growth compounds. Both look beyond a single passage of the thing to the arrangement in which passages recur, which is why an answer to either constrains what may be said about the movement questions.

One question concerns the terms in which the others are stated. Valuation asks what makes one quantity of the thing comparable to another. It is prior to distribution and exchange in the sense that an account of how something is apportioned or passed presupposes that quantities of it can be set against one another, and it is the question this volume finds hardest and treats at greatest length.

Three questions concern the conduct of parties and the fate of the arrangement. Incentive asks what disposes a party to act as the arrangement requires; stability asks what holds the arrangement together; and crisis asks how it fails. The three form a sequence, since an arrangement holds together for as long as the dispositions it requires are supplied, and fails in the manner in which that supply gives way.

Three questions remain and each stands somewhat apart. Justice asks what the arrangement owes to those within it. Development asks how the arrangement changes over historical time. Power asks who determines the terms on which the other twelve are settled, and it is the one question whose answer is not a feature of the arrangement but a party to it.

Re-Asking of the Questions for an Account of Co-Experience

Each question takes a determinate form when the object is an account of a co-experience and the standing under which it is issued. The forms are given in the order of the groups above, and the chapter answering each is recorded in Table [tab:questions] rather than repeated here.

Of the movement questions, production becomes the question of how a standing comes into being: through what activity a party acquires the property in virtue of which its accounts carry weight. Distribution becomes the question of how the capacity to issue is spread across positions, which is a question about institutional arrangement rather than about the division of a quantity. Exchange becomes the question of what passes when an instrument is supplied and what is given for it, and the difficulty there is that the parties do not describe themselves as exchanging. Consumption becomes the question of whether a standing is used up by being exercised, and the answer divides: in the negative for the individual act, and open for the practice.

Of the persistence questions, reproduction becomes the question of how the conditions under which accounts can be issued at all are restored, since an issuer without relations has nothing to report. Accumulation becomes the question of whether standing compounds, and if so whether it compounds in the manner cumulative advantage describes for recognition.

Valuation becomes the question of what makes an account drawn from one relation comparable with an account drawn from another. That is the commensuration question, it is the volume’s central puzzle, and Chapter 1 is devoted to it.

Of the three questions about conduct and fate, incentive becomes the question of what disposes a party to issue at all, given that issuance costs time and creates exposure. Stability becomes the question of what holds the practice together in the absence of any legal description of what is transacted, which is a sharper form of the general question than most objects present. Crisis becomes the question of how the practice degrades, and it degrades in two ways rather than one: through the contraction of supply that Chapter 5 takes up, and through the inflation of content that Chapter 2 takes up.

Of the three remaining, justice becomes the question of what is owed to the person described, whose co-experience is the material of the account and who is party to neither its composition nor its exchange. Development becomes the question of how the practice has changed as the institutions relying on it have grown. Power becomes the question of who fixes the terms on which the preceding twelve are settled, which in this practice is the party requesting the account and the party composing it, and never the party described.

P2.4cmYP1.5cm Question & Form taken for the present object & Chapter
Production & Acquisition of a standing under which accounts carry weight & 3
Distribution & Spread of the capacity to issue across positions & 1
Exchange & What passes on issuance, and what is given for it & 2
Consumption & Whether a standing is used up by being exercised & 4
Reproduction & Restoration of the conditions of issuance & 5
Accumulation & Whether standing compounds, and by what mechanism & 3
Valuation & Comparability of accounts drawn from distinct relations & 1
Incentive & Disposition to issue, given cost and exposure & 5
Stability & Cohesion of the practice absent a legal description & 2
Crisis & Contraction of supply and inflation of content & 5
Justice & What the arrangement owes the party whose experience is reported & 4
Development & Change in the practice as reliant institutions grew & 1
Power & Determination of the terms on which the other questions are settled & 1

Consequences of the Re-Asking

Three consequences follow from the table and each shapes the remainder of the volume. They are given in ascending order of usefulness, since the first is weaker than it appears and the last is the one the volume relies on.

The object admits all thirteen questions. That result is weaker than it looks, and the weakness should be stated before any use is made of it: a sufficiently general question admits any object, and a demonstration that thirteen general questions can be asked about a practice establishes very little on its own. What makes the result informative is not admission but determinacy. A question earns its place where the form it takes for this object is specific enough that an answer could be wrong. Twelve of the thirteen forms given above meet that condition. Consumption is the exception, since the answer differs according to whether the individual act or the practice is in view, and Chapter 4 treats the divergence rather than resolving it.

Two questions have no answer under the first definitional position and clear answers under the second. Valuation and power both presuppose that the terms of comparison, and the authority to set them, are themselves objects of study. A definition constructed around choice under scarcity takes the terms of comparison as given, since a party choosing among ranked alternatives is presented with the ranking rather than asked where it came from. Under that definition the two questions cannot be posed, and the two chapters answering them here would have no subject. This is where the definitional choice of Chapter 1 does its work, and Table [tab:questions] records the consequence: a reader who prefers the formal definition should expect the argument to fail at Chapter 1 and Chapter 1 rather than gradually.

The thirteen questions are answered by different chapters in an uneven distribution, with three chapters carrying two questions each and several carrying none. That unevenness is reported rather than corrected. A structure organised to answer one question per chapter would impose on the object a shape it does not have, and would separate results the object joins: accumulation and production have a single answer here because the activity by which a standing comes into being is the activity by which it grows.

Method for an Object Without Price or Quantity

A political economy without prices invites an immediate objection: that whatever such an inquiry produces, it is not political economy. The objection is reasonable, it would be fatal if it held, and meeting it is the first task of this chapter rather than a matter deferred to the chapter on limits.

Three purposes are accordingly served here. One is to establish that the three absences governing this inquiry are properties of the object rather than deficiencies of the investigation, so that no better-resourced study would escape them. A second is to name four recognised methods that operate without price, without unit and without series, each with an owner, so that the method used here is inherited rather than improvised. A third is to state what would show the volume’s principal claims to be wrong, since an inquiry that cannot be measured against data can still be measured against findings that would defeat it.

Four sections follow in that order: what the object lacks and why; the four methods and where each is used; the two routes along which the volume argues and the reason for keeping them apart; and the conditions of disconfirmation, given together with three kinds of claim the volume does not make and which therefore cannot be brought against it.

Absences Governing the Method

Three absences govern the method. Each is a property of the object rather than a limitation of the inquiry, and the distinction is not a rhetorical one: a limitation of an inquiry can be remedied by a better inquiry, while a property of an object cannot be remedied at all.

Consider price first. What is transacted when an instrument is supplied is the force defined in Chapter 2, and that force has no description in property law, so no transaction in it is recorded as a transaction in it. Where consideration passes it is recorded as something else, most often as payment for a document or for time; where no consideration passes, the transfer leaves no trace at all. A price would require both a described thing and a recorded exchange of it, and neither is present. No archive discloses one, because what is missing is not the record but the described object a record would have to name.

A unit is absent for a different reason, and the reason is conceptual rather than archival. A standing is not a quantity of anything, and two standings are not commensurable by any procedure the practice itself supplies. Participants do say that one party carries more weight than another, and such statements are made constantly; they are nonetheless made by parties using the very operation whose character is in question, so they report the operation rather than measure it. Chapter 1 examines how comparability is nonetheless produced, and that examination presupposes throughout that comparability is made rather than found.

No series can be assembled either, and here the ground is institutional. Instruments are issued privately, held confidentially, and in one surveyed jurisdiction exempted from the access rights that would otherwise make them visible, so no population of them is observable. What follows is stated as a rule the volume observes rather than as a regret: no frequency is estimated here, no trend is asserted, and no claim in the volume depends on a magnitude. Where a mechanism is identified, its existence and its direction are claimed and its size is not.

Methods Available in the Absence of Quantity

Four methods operate without price, unit or series, and each has an owner. Naming the owners matters for the same reason the absences were stated as properties of the object: a method with a recognised source can be criticised on its own terms, whereas a method invented for the occasion invites the suspicion that it was shaped to reach the conclusion it reaches.

One is the reconstruction of an object from abstract determinations toward the concrete, which is the method of the critique of political economy itself. Its procedure begins from the simplest determinations of an object and proceeds by adding further determinations until the object is reproduced in thought as a concentration of many. It requires no measurement, since what it establishes is the composition of a concept rather than the magnitude of a quantity. This volume uses it in Part III, where the standing of an issuer is built up from accumulation, convertibility and reproduction in turn, each chapter adding one determination to what the preceding chapter left.

A second is the substantive conception of the economic. On this conception the economic is the instituted process by which a collective provisions itself in interchange with its environment and its members, and the formal conception, which identifies the economic with rational choice among scarce means, is one historically situated case rather than the general one . The distinction bears directly on the present object, which is provisioned without a market form; a method taking the market form as the general case cannot describe it, and would report its absence as a defect. This volume uses the substantive conception throughout Part IV.

A third analyses economic action as embedded in ongoing structures of relations, against accounts treating action as atomised or as fully determined by internalised norms . This supplies the level at which the object is described, since the practice is carried on between parties in continuing relations and its regularities are relational rather than contractual, so that an analysis pitched at the level of the discrete transaction would miss what holds the practice together. Chapters 1 and 2 rest on it.

A fourth treats commensuration as a social process, by which qualitative differences are transformed into a common metric, together with the recognition that the transformation is itself an exercise of power . This supplies the treatment of the volume’s central puzzle, which is how accounts of incomparable relations come to be compared, and Chapter 1 is built on it.

Taken together the four supply what the absences withhold. The first gives a procedure of construction where no measurement is available; the second gives a conception of the economic under which an unpriced practice is economic; the third gives the level of description; the fourth gives the treatment of comparison. None of them was devised for this object, and each is used here in the sense its owner gave it.

Separation of the Analytical and Framework Routes

The volume argues along two routes and keeps them separate to the end. The reason for the separation is that the routes differ in what they rest on, so that a reader accepting one and declining the other should be able to see exactly which results survive.

The analytical route reads the traditions of political economy for the questions they ask and for what each would say about this object. It treats a definition as evidence of what a tradition took its subject to be rather than as authority on what the subject is, and it treats an empirical finding as a claim about the sample and the method that produced it. Its results stand or fall with the accuracy of the reading and with the quality of the findings relied upon.

The framework route derives consequences from the results inherited in Chapter 3 and from the framework of generative relations in which the author works. It is deductive relative to those premises and inherits whatever standing they have. A reader who declines the premises is entitled to decline every conclusion reached along this route, and Chapter 3 states which chapters would fall in that event.

Separation matters most where the two disagree, and disagreement is treated here as a finding rather than as an error to be resolved by preferring one route. Each result in the volume is marked with the route or routes that reach it. Chapter 3 collects the markings and reports three things: where the routes converge, which is a modest corroboration; where a result rests on one alone, which fixes its exposure; and where they conflict, which is the most informative case and is the one that chapter finds.

Conditions of Disconfirmation

Four principal claims are advanced in the volume, and each would fail on a stated finding. Setting the conditions out here, before any of the claims is made, prevents the conditions from being formulated afterwards in terms the claims are known to survive.

Whether a standing occupies the position of a general equivalent would be settled against this volume by a demonstration that accounts issued under different standings are compared by a procedure passing through none of them, so that no standing serves as the material in which the others are stated. Such a demonstration would require exhibiting a comparison conducted either by reference to a property of the accounts themselves or by reference to a scale external to all issuers, and Chapter 2 states the same condition in the place where the claim is made.

Accumulation without transferability would fail on the identification of a mechanism by which standings are in fact transferred, as distinct from the exercise of a standing being exchanged. Chapter 3 examines three candidate mechanisms and finds each to be an exercise; a fourth candidate not considered there would defeat the claim.

Application of the capital designation in three of its four respects would fail on a showing that the fourth is dispensable, so that convertibility is no part of what the designation commits its user to. That would be a claim about the vocabulary rather than about the object, and it would be established by demonstrating that the extension of the vocabulary beyond money does not depend on convertibility.

Degradation under pricing would fail on a case of a comparable practice in which the introduction of payment left supply and composition unaltered. Chapter 5 states the mechanism it relies on, and a counter-case would have to be one in which that mechanism was available and did not operate.

Three kinds of claim lie outside the volume and therefore outside this list, and naming them fixes the boundary of what the disconfirmation conditions cover. No estimate is offered of how often instruments are issued or exchanged, since section one established that no series exists. No prediction is offered about the future of the practice. No recommendation is made, since the volume describes an arrangement and proposes none, and Chapter 4 states what would have to be settled before any recommendation could be framed.

Existing Accounts and the Reach of Each

Schools of Political Economy and the Questions Each Introduced

This chapter surveys the traditions of political economy for the questions each introduced. Its purpose is to supply the attributions that Chapter 4 deferred, and to identify which of the thirteen recurring questions has no tradition that introduced it in a form reaching the present object. The chapter states the standing of the survey, treats the traditions in three groups, and reports the question left unclaimed.

Evidential Standing of the Survey

The attributions in this chapter are orienting rather than established, and the qualification belongs at the outset rather than among the closing limits.

Two things account for the lower standing. The survey conducted for this volume covered the history of the subject less thoroughly than it covered the bodies of work on which the volume’s own claims rest, and the bibliographic detail for the works named here carries that lower level of independent confirmation. In addition, the attribution of a question to a tradition is in any case an interpretive act rather than a finding: traditions overlap, questions are asked in weak forms long before they are asked in strong ones, and a historian of the subject would distribute several of the credits below differently.

Even so, the chapter is worth having, for a reason that survives the qualification. Chapter 4 re-asked thirteen questions for the present object without saying where any of them came from, and a reader is entitled to ask whether the thirteen were assembled to fit the object. Setting them against the traditions shows that they were not: the list is recognisable as the subject’s own, and the present object is being placed among questions that existed before it was examined. That purpose is served even where a particular attribution is contested, and no argument of this volume rests upon one. A reader who assigns a question differently loses nothing that any later chapter requires.

Questions Introduced before the Marginalist Turn

Most of the thirteen questions entered the subject before the eighteen-seventies, and they entered it as answers to difficulties that were felt before they were formulated.

Reproduction came first, and it came as an object rather than as an assumption. The physiocratic account traced the total product of a nation through the classes that produce, own, and transform it, and asked how the circuit returns each year to a condition from which it may run again. Before that account the annual recurrence of economic life was a fact about the world; after it, recurrence was something an arrangement had to accomplish and might fail to accomplish.

Production and exchange in their modern form arrived with the account of the division of labour . At issue there is how a multitude of parties, each pursuing its own advantage and none intending the result, produces a greater aggregate than any of them could produce alone, and how exchange coordinates them without direction. That answer made the market a mechanism to be explained rather than a setting to be assumed, and it left behind the question of what the coordination requires in order to work.

Distribution was separated from production by the account of rent, profit, and wages , and the separation was the achievement. Once the product’s division among classes is a distinct question from its creation, the two may vary independently, and a change in the terms of division may be examined without supposing that anything has changed in how the product is made. That same account made relative prices a problem in their own right rather than a consequence of anything already established.

Crisis entered as a structural possibility rather than an accident with the argument that population presses upon subsistence . Whatever is thought of the argument, its form was new: an arrangement may fail not through mismanagement or misfortune but because two of its own tendencies run at different rates.

Justice entered through the claim that the laws of production are natural while the laws of distribution are institutional and alterable . That claim is contestable and has been contested, and its importance here is that it made the terms of distribution a subject for argument rather than a fact to be described. Every later argument about what an arrangement owes those within it proceeds in the space that claim opened.

Power entered the subject as a question about production itself, rather than as a question about the state, with the treatment of the social relations through which production, distribution, exchange, and consumption are carried on . That move relocates the question: rather than asking who governs an economy from outside it, one asks what relations of command are internal to the way a product is made and divided.

Questions Introduced by the Marginalist Turn and Afterward

The turn of the eighteen-seventies changed the valuation question rather than answering the one already asked. Where the classical tradition sought the source of value in labour or in cost, the new accounts located its determination at the margin: in the utility of the last unit consumed , in the subjective valuations of individuals and the imputation of value from wants back to the goods that serve them , and in the conditions under which all markets clear together . Stability entered the subject here in the form of equilibrium, as a property an arrangement of markets might or might not possess.

Consolidation followed, making price the joint product of supply and demand across different periods of time  and defining the subject as a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. That definition is worth setting beside the one examined in Chapter 4, since it is a definition by subject matter rather than by form, and the present object is admitted by it without difficulty.

Two dissents followed and each introduced a question the mainstream had not posed. One asked why the subject is not an evolutionary science , and with it made the habits and institutions through which economic life is conducted into objects that change over time rather than constants. The other asked what determines the aggregate level of employment, and answered that an arrangement may settle and remain at a level well below the full use of its capacity . Crisis returns here in a second form, no longer a collision of tendencies but a stable position that nobody chose.

Two further questions belong to this period and both bear on the present object. The account of innovation as a process that destroys the arrangements it supersedes  made development a question about the transformation of structures rather than about their growth. Beyond that, the account of the price system as a device for coordinating knowledge that no single party possesses  introduced a question this volume returns to more than once: what an arrangement is able to know, and what follows for what it can be asked to do. Where the present object is concerned the answer is unusually stark, since Chapter 5 establishes that the arrangement examined here generates no price and therefore none of the information a price is said to carry.

That period closes with a demonstration that prices and distribution may be determined from the technical conditions of production alone, without recourse to marginal utility , which reopened the valuation question rather than settling it.

Questions Introduced by the Institutional and Critical Traditions

Four groups of questions arrived later, and three of them bear directly on this volume.

Incentive and organisation became questions about arrangements rather than about parties. If exchange coordinates, the existence of firms requires explanation, and the explanation offered is that transacting is itself costly, so that activities are brought inside an organisation where the cost of transacting outside exceeds the cost of administering within . Extended, the rules of the game that structure interaction become the determinants of long-run performance . What this introduces is the question Chapter 2 takes up: what holds an arrangement together where the ordinary instruments of enforcement are absent.

Political choice became an object of the same analysis with the application of individual interest to constitutional and collective decisions , which extended the reach of the subject without adding a question to the thirteen.

Two later traditions bear on this volume more heavily than their position in a survey suggests. The capability approach holds that well-being should be assessed by what a party is able to do and to be rather than by the commodities they hold , and the relevance here is direct rather than analogical: Chapter 2 defines the force of an instrument as an alteration in what a person may thereafter do, so the object of this volume is stated in that currency and not in the currency of holdings. Finally, the social-reproduction tradition holds that the economy depends upon work its accounting does not price , and that an order may undermine the social conditions of its own possibility . Chapter 5 reaches a finding of exactly that shape by its own route, and the convergence is recorded there.

Finally, the treatment of the economic process as subject to an irreversible physical limit  introduced foreclosure as a category: the possibility that an arrangement forecloses options permanently rather than merely allocating among them. Chapter 4 works in that category throughout.

Coverage of the Thirteen Questions by the Traditions Surveyed

Twelve of the thirteen questions of Chapter 4 have a tradition that introduced them, and the introductions transfer to the present object with the reformulations that chapter supplied. Production becomes the acquisition of a standing, distribution its spread across positions, crisis the contraction of the practice, and so on down the list.

The thirteenth does not transfer, and the failure is instructive rather than inconvenient.

Valuation, in the form the present object requires, asks what renders accounts drawn from singular and unrepeatable relations comparable with one another. Every answer surveyed above addresses entities of a kind. The marginalist answer presupposes alternatives among which a party chooses, and two accounts of two different relations are not alternatives in that sense, since no party is choosing between the relations. Classical answers presuppose a common substance, whether labour or cost, and there is none: the relations do not share an input that could be measured off against them. The technical answer presupposes a reproducible production process, and a relation between two particular parties is not reproduced. Finally, the institutional answers presuppose a market in which a price forms, which Chapter 5 establishes is absent here.

The valuation question for this object was not answered by the traditions because it was not asked, and the reason it was not asked is that no tradition surveyed took as its object a thing compared through a party rather than through a property. Chapter 1 enters that gap and Chapter 2 occupies it.

Theories of Value and the Form of the General Equivalent

One question stands between the survey of Part II and the claim of Part III, and it is a question about money. Chapter 2 will argue that a standing occupies the position in which accounts are compared, and a reader schooled in the theories of money has an immediate objection ready: whatever occupies such a position is a measure, a measure is a unit of account, and a unit of account without a token, without a commodity behind it, and without an authority proclaiming it is not a recognisable member of the class. If the objection held, the central claim of the volume would assert something the theory of money rules out.

Answering that objection is the purpose of this chapter, and the answer is that the objection rests on two theories of money and fails on two others. Its work is accordingly to sort the theories by what each requires of a measure: those keyed to a token or a proclamation, which the object fails, and those keyed to the unit of account, which permit exactly what Chapter 2 needs. Along the way the chapter imports, from the sociology and anthropology of money, two findings that restrict the volume’s own arguments, which is the opposite of what a survey chapter usually does and is the reason this one earns its place. Five sections follow: the move from the source of value to its form; the theories requiring a token or a proclamation; the theories keyed to the unit of account; the social marking of what measures; and the consequences, stated with their restrictions.

From the Source of Value to the Form of Value

Classical political economy asked what value is and answered by naming a source, whether labour or cost. That question, whatever its interest, is not the one this volume needs answered. What concerns the present argument is different and historically later: not what value is, but what form it takes when one thing comes to express the value of others, and what happens to the thing that so serves.

Marx’s treatment of that question is the one Chapter 2 relies upon, and the reading followed here should be identified, since the treatment has been read in more than one way. On the reading adopted, value has no existence prior to its expression in the equivalent, so that the form is constitutive rather than descriptive . Recovery of the social-form reading that made this position available is Rubin’s , and adjacent statements are available in the systematic-dialectical reconstruction of the argument  and in the account of value as a form of impersonal domination . None of the disputes among these positions is entered here, because nothing in the volume turns on their resolution.

What the volume does take from the form-theoretic reading is a single consequence. If the form is constitutive, then the question of whether a measure must be a thing of a certain sort is a question about the form and not about the material: what qualifies something to serve as the material in which values are stated is its position in the form, and whether a commodity, a token, or anything at all must occupy that position becomes an open question rather than a settled one. Open questions of that kind are what the theories of money dispute, and the two sections following sort the disputants.

Theories of Money Keyed to a Token or a Proclamation

Two positions require that a measure be something material or something official, and they are examined first because they are the positions on which the objection stated at the opening of this chapter rests.

On the metallist position, which the theories examined in the next section were written against, money is a commodity and its capacity to measure derives from what it is. Nothing measures, on such an account, unless it is first a thing, and a thing of value at that. Applied to the present object the position returns an immediate negative: a standing is not a commodity, has no substance, and is not held in the way a metal is held.

On the state position, money is a creature of law, and a means of payment is valid because the state proclaims it so . What this removes is the requirement of a commodity; what it installs in its place is a requirement of proclamation. The token may be anything, and its validity is conferred rather than inherent. In developed form the position holds that the State claims the right to declare what thing answers to the name of the money of account , which separates the money of account from the thing answering to it while keeping the declaration in official hands.

Neither position is satisfied by the object of this volume: a standing is not a commodity and no authority proclaims it. Two readings of that failure are available, and which is correct depends on the sections following. On one reading, the failure shows that a standing is no measure and the objection succeeds. On the other, the failure shows only that the two positions state sufficient conditions for one kind of measure rather than necessary conditions for all, and whether that reading is available is exactly what the credit and sociological theories decide.

Theories of Money Keyed to the Unit of Account

A third family of positions holds that money is not a thing at all, and it is this family that decides the question.

On the credit position, what exists is credit, an abstract measure of obligation, of which coins and notes are tokens rather than instances . Order of priority is the point: the unit of account is prior to any token and would exist if no token did, so that the absence of a token is no evidence against the presence of a measure. A sociological development of the position holds that money is a social relation, a claim upon the issuer, and that its essence is the abstract money of account rather than any object . Historical support runs the same way: units of account precede coinage, so that measured obligation is older than any circulating thing, which is Graeber’s . From the other side, the classical description of money as the pure form of exchangeability, detachable from any particular purpose or substance, states the same separation of function from material .

Between them these accounts establish the point this volume requires, and it can now be stated in one sentence: a unit of account is a position in an arrangement rather than an object in circulation, and something may occupy that position without being a commodity, without being proclaimed, and without any token corresponding to it. The objection of the chapter opening therefore fails, since it treated the requirements of two theories as the requirements of money as such.

How much this establishes should be restricted in the same breath, because the restriction protects the volume from a misreading. What has been shown is that occupying the position of a measure does not require being a token. What has not been shown, and is asserted in no chapter of this volume, is that a standing is money. Chapter 2 claims the position and not the title, and a reader who finds the volume arguing that standings are a currency has found a claim the volume does not make.

Social Marking of What Measures

Two further findings from the sociology and anthropology of money bear on the argument, and both restrict it. Importing restrictions is unusual work for a survey section, and it is the most useful work this chapter does, since each restriction forces a later chapter to rest on its own mechanism rather than on the mere presence of a measure.

One finding concerns homogeneity. Money is not a uniform solvent: it is marked, earmarked, restricted and differentiated by the relations in which it moves, so that sums of identical denomination are treated as distinct according to their source and their destination . Applied here, the finding predicts what Chapter 1 reports as the locality of standings. A standing is not a general measure across all domains but a measure within the domain that recognises it, and on the marking account that is what any measure embedded in relations should be. Locality arrives as an expectation rather than an anomaly.

A second finding concerns corrosion. Introduction of a general measure into a society does not by itself dissolve its relations, since what is measured is assimilated to a distinction between short-term individual acquisition and long-term social reproduction . That point restricts any inference from the existence of a measure to the corrosion of what it measures, and the restriction has a direct address in this volume: Chapter 5 must rest its degradation argument on the mechanism of recharacterisation and not on the presence of a measure, and it does.

One tradition remains to be placed rather than imported. Treating the gift as a total social fact, obliging the giver to give, the recipient to receive, and both to reciprocate , supplies the description under which the practice examined here presents itself to its participants: a favour given within a relation, owed and returned in kind. Chapter 2 argued that the presentation is incomplete, since the consideration moves in a pair the description does not name. Incompleteness of a self-description is a finding about the practice rather than a criticism of the tradition, which describes how the participants understand what they do and describes it correctly.

Consequences for the Argument of the Present Volume

Three consequences carry forward, and each is stated with the restriction that belongs to it.

A measure need not be a token. Chapter 2 may therefore proceed without asserting that a standing is money or a currency in any ordinary sense, and the restriction travels with the licence: the position is claimed, the title is not.

A measure is marked by the relations in which it operates. Locality of standings, reported in Chapter 1, is accordingly what the theories of money would predict rather than an anomaly requiring explanation, and no argument of this volume treats it as a defect of the object.

Finally, the existence of a measure does not by itself corrode what it measures. Degradation, where this volume reports it, requires the mechanisms Chapters 2 and 5 supply, and does not follow from the fact of measurement alone. Of the three consequences this is the one that disciplines the volume most, since a looser argument would have been available and the finding closes it.

Capital Beyond the Monetary Form

This chapter examines the extension of the vocabulary of capital beyond money, identifies the commitments the extended vocabulary carries, and records the tradition that denies the extension for the case that most resembles the present object. Its purpose is to supply Part III with a test rather than with a designation. The chapter states the extension, states the commitments, states the objection from within sociology, and states how the test will be applied.

Extension of the Vocabulary beyond Money

The vocabulary of capital has been extended to holdings that are neither money nor productive equipment. Capital exists in an economic form, immediately convertible into money and institutionalisable as a right of property; in a cultural form, which converts into the economic form under certain conditions and may be institutionalised as an educational qualification; and in a social form, constituted by durable networks of relations . On a related account, a resource inheres in the structure of relations among parties rather than in the parties or in things, and facilitates action that would otherwise be unavailable .

Both accounts are used in Part III and neither is extended. What Part III adds is a case they do not treat, since both are concerned with holdings that convert and this volume is concerned with one that does not.

Commitments Attaching to the Vocabulary of Capital

The extension is intelligible because the designation carries commitments that can be stated apart from money. Four are separable and each may be tested.

Accumulation: the thing is a stock built up by prior activity rather than a natural endowment, and it grows with what is done.

Convertibility: the thing exchanges into other forms under conditions that can be stated. This commitment is what makes the extension an extension of one concept rather than a set of homonyms, since a form that converted into nothing would be a resource under another name.

Return: the stock yields a flow, so that holding it produces something over time.

Reproduction: the stock can be maintained and its conditions restored across time.

Chapters 3 to 5 test the standing of an issuer against these four in turn, and the result is affirmative for three and qualified for the second.

Objection from the Sociology of Stratification

One tradition holds that the object of this volume is not economic at all, and the objection is stronger than the objection that the vocabulary of capital is loosely applied.

On that account, the ordering of a society proceeds along distinct dimensions which do not reduce to one another. Class is determined by position in a market and by the life chances that position confers. Status, by contrast, rests on social honour and is borne by groups sharing a manner of life, and honour of that kind is neither derived from nor exchangeable against economic position .

Applied here, the objection is that a standing is honour and not a holding, that treating it as an economic object mistakes the dimension it belongs to, and that the failure of convertibility reported in Chapter 4 is not a peculiarity of one holding but the mark of a category error.

Two replies are available and the second is the one this volume relies upon.

The first observes that the tradition itself makes honour a determinant of the distribution of power, and that a thing which orders access to positions is an object a political economy may examine whatever dimension it is assigned to.

The second concedes the point and narrows the claim. This volume does not assert that a standing is economic in the sense the objection denies. It asserts that a standing performs a determinate function in an operation of comparison, that the function has the structure Chapter 2 describes, and that the vocabulary of capital applies to it in three respects and fails in a fourth. A finding that a designation applies in part is compatible with the objection and is informative under it, since it locates where the economic vocabulary stops.

Form of the Test Used in the Chapters Following

The four commitments are tested severally rather than together, and the outcome is recorded commitment by commitment rather than as a verdict on the designation.

This procedure is adopted because the alternative procedures both fail. To ask whether a standing is capital invites an answer that carries all four commitments at once, and Chapter 4 establishes that one of them fails. To decline the vocabulary altogether forfeits the three commitments that hold, and with them the comparison that makes the failure of the fourth informative.

The result of the test is stated in Chapter 4 and its consequence for the framework’s own use of economic vocabulary is stated in Chapter 4.

Boundary of the Present Contribution

Part II has surveyed the traditions and Part III is about to make claims. Between the two, a boundary is owed: a reader should meet each claim already knowing what it is measured against, which ground is occupied, and which questions the occupants left open. Drawing that boundary is the whole business of this chapter, and it is drawn here rather than distributed through Part III so that the concessions of the later chapters can be brief.

Three sections perform the drawing. What the surveyed traditions own is stated first, since a claim can only be sized against what already exists. What they leave open is stated second, and the two openings identified there are exactly the two spaces the volume’s central chapters occupy. What this volume advances is stated last, in three claims of unequal size, each carrying the qualification that attaches to every originality claim in the series.

Claims Owned by the Traditions Surveyed

Four bodies of work own the components of the argument that follows, and each is conceded again at the point it is used. Collecting them here serves a reader who wishes to know, before Part III begins, how much of what follows is inherited. The answer is: the structure, the vocabulary, and the account of comparison. What is not inherited is stated in section three.

Ownership of the structure is Marx’s. A commodity that comes to serve as the general equivalent is excluded from the world of commodities whose value it expresses, and on the form-theoretic reading the form is constitutive of value rather than expressive of it . Extension of that structure beyond the commodity, to a person and to a position within a set, has been made by others, and Chapter 2 concedes each extension by name.

Ownership of the vocabulary is Bourdieu’s, for the extension of capital beyond money , and Coleman’s, for the form that inheres in the structure of relations rather than in persons or things . Part III uses the vocabulary throughout and tests it rather than assuming it.

Ownership of the account of comparison is held jointly. Commensuration as a social process with its own politics is Espeland and Stevens’s ; markets in incommensurable goods equipped with judgment devices, of which a recommendation from a known party is one, are Karpik’s . Between them the two supply nearly everything Chapter 1 says about how comparability is produced, and that chapter states exactly where the two stop.

One further piece is Podolny’s: the analysis of a tie that alters how third parties perceive a party, rather than conveying substance to them . It explains why an institution attends to who wrote an account, and it is conceded wherever that explanation is used.

Questions the Traditions Leave Open

Concession is not surrender, and the reason the volume exists is that the owners named above leave three things undone. Each is stated here with the chapter that takes it up, so that the boundary runs through identified territory rather than along a vague edge.

One opening was established by the survey itself. Chapter 1 reported that twelve of the thirteen recurring questions have a tradition that introduced them and that the thirteenth does not transfer: valuation, in the form this object requires, asks what renders accounts drawn from singular and unrepeatable relations comparable, and every tradition surveyed answers the valuation question for entities of a kind. A question no tradition has asked is not thereby answered by asking it, but it is territory no owner holds, and Chapters 1 and 2 work it.

A second opening lies inside the account of comparison. Both of its owners treat the thing that compares as external to what is compared: a judgment device is external to the goods it helps a party choose among, and a metric is external to the population it orders. The device examined here is a participant in the relation being characterised, and Chapter 1 states why the difference matters rather than treating it as a curiosity. No account was located of a comparing thing that is a participant in the compared set, and the consequences of participation are what Chapter 2 derives.

A third opening lies inside the vocabulary of capital. Its extensions treat convertibility as the interesting case, and a holding that admits no transfer at all is a limit those accounts note and do not develop. Development of that limit is the work of Chapters 3 and 4, and the finding there, that the designation applies in three respects and fails at alienation, would have no interest if the limit had been developed before.

Claims Advanced in the Present Volume

Against that ground, three claims are advanced, and their sizes differ. Stating the sizes is part of the boundary, since a reader should know which claim the volume would defend hardest.

The largest is structural: a standing supplies the comparison between accounts and thereby occupies a position with the structure the analysis of the value-form describes, so that the co-experiences of the party occupying it fall outside the set the operation compares. Everything in that sentence except the application is old. The structure is Marx’s, its extension to persons has prior owners, and the derivation of why an equivalent emerges belongs to the earlier volume on injustice. What is claimed here is the application to a party who measures by issuing accounts, and Chapter 2 both makes the claim and states what would defeat it.

The second is a claim about two designations and their limits: the vocabulary of capital applies to such a standing in respect of accumulation, return and reproduction, and fails in respect of alienation; and the same pattern recurs when the vocabulary of financialisation is applied in Chapter 2. A designation holding in part is a modest kind of result, and Chapter 4 argues that the recurrence of the pattern is itself informative.

The third is descriptive: the practice is exchanged in relations it does not name, its content degrades under unverifiability by two compounding mechanisms, and it is market-inalienable in fact while unprohibited in law. Part IV carries this claim, and its components rest on established literatures to a greater degree than the other two.

Each claim is stated with the qualification recorded in Chapter 1: a bounded search establishes the absence of a located owner rather than the absence of one. The boundary drawn in this chapter is therefore provisional in the way every such boundary is, and Chapter 5 records what a relocation of it would cost.

Standing of the Issuer

Commensuration and the Rendering of Persons Comparable

Selection requires ranking, and ranking requires comparison. An institution holding accounts of several candidates must place those candidates in an order, and it must do so although the accounts before it were drawn from relations that share nothing beyond the bare fact of having occurred. How an ordering becomes possible under that condition is the question this chapter answers, and the answer governs everything Part III goes on to claim.

Three tasks are undertaken here. The first is to establish that comparability in this domain is produced rather than found, which requires showing that the accounts themselves furnish no scale. The second is to identify the process by which comparability is produced, which has an established analysis that this volume adopts without amendment and three prior accounts that must be conceded before anything is added to them. The third is to locate the party through whom the production passes, since it is the position of that party, rather than the fact of comparison, that Chapter 2 takes as its subject.

The chapter proceeds in that order. It states the requirement of comparison that selection imposes, concedes the established account of commensuration together with the three nearest prior accounts, describes what is rendered comparable in the present case and why the description departs from the standard one, and identifies the position through which comparison runs.

Requirement of Comparison in Selection

Consider the situation of an institution that must appoint one candidate from several. Whatever else it consults, it holds accounts of the candidates composed by parties who observed them at work, and those accounts are among the materials from which the appointment is made. To use them at all is to set them against one another, since an institution that could not weigh one account against another would hold information about each candidate separately and no ground for preferring any candidate to any other.

What is set against what, however, resists description as a comparison. Each account is drawn from a relation the receiving institution did not witness, and the relations differ in every respect that might bear on the judgment: in duration, in what was attempted, in what the circumstances made possible, in what counted as success within them, and in the position from which the issuer observed. A doctoral supervision extending over five years and a summer placement extending over eight weeks are not two instances of one thing observed under different conditions. They are different things, and an account of conduct within the first reports on a life that the second does not contain.

A natural objection is that the accounts do supply a common scale, since they are written in a shared vocabulary. Issuers describe candidates as diligent, independent, original, or reliable, and those terms recur across accounts drawn from unlike relations. The objection fails at the point where the vocabulary must do the work. A shared term applied to unlike performances under unlike conditions supplies a common word without supplying a common measure: independence displayed by a student left substantially unsupervised and independence displayed by a student closely directed are not more and less of one quantity, and an institution that treated them as such would be assuming precisely what it needs to establish. The vocabulary permits accounts to be read together. It does not permit them to be ordered.

Institutions nonetheless order them, and do so as a matter of routine. That is the fact requiring explanation. Where the material admits no ranking and a ranking is produced, the ranking has a source outside the material, and the remainder of this chapter identifies it.

Established Account of Commensuration

Transforming qualitative differences into a common metric is a describable social operation, and its analysis is established. This volume adopts that analysis in full and extends it in no respect, which is worth saying at the outset because the contribution claimed later depends on the established account being correct rather than on its being incomplete.

Three results are taken from it. Commensuration is a social process with a structure and a politics rather than a technical step preceding judgment; it discards the information that will not fit the metric, so that what survives the transformation is a residue selected by the metric itself; and a declaration that two things are incommensurable is a refusal to perform the transformation rather than a report about the things . To these is added the finding that measurement alters what is measured, so that a metric introduced to describe a population reshapes the population described, which is established for public rankings .

Each of the three applies to the present object without amendment, and two of them arrive at conclusions the volume has reached already by another route. An account rendered comparable with other accounts loses the conditions that qualified it, which restates in the vocabulary of commensuration the inheritance recorded in Chapter 3. That two literatures reach one result from different premises is a modest form of corroboration and is recorded as such.

Reactivity has the wider consequences here, and they are drawn in later chapters rather than in this one. Issuers write toward the scale on which their accounts will be placed, which bears on the content of accounts examined in Chapter 2; and institutions that rely upon particular issuers make those issuers more relied upon, which supplies one of the compounding mechanisms Chapter 1 assembles. What the established analysis does not supply is the identity of the metric in the present case. It describes what happens once a metric is in place and what such a metric does to the material it orders. Which metric orders accounts of singular relations, and whether anything in this domain occupies the place a metric occupies elsewhere, are questions the literature leaves open, and they are the questions the two sections following take up.

Prior Accounts of Comparison Under Incommensurability

Three bodies of work reach the difficulty stated in section one before this volume does. Each must be conceded, and the concessions are made here rather than later because Chapter 2 would otherwise appear to claim ground that is occupied.

The first is the economics of singularities. Goods that are multidimensional, incommensurable, and of uncertain quality cannot be handled by the standard apparatus, and markets in such goods are equipped instead with judgment devices, among them labels, guides, critics, rankings, and networks personal and impersonal, of which a recommendation from a known party is one . Such markets are characterised by competition over qualities rather than over prices. Three elements of the present volume are anticipated there: that the things compared are incommensurable, that comparability is supplied by a device external to them, and that price is not the medium in which the competition occurs. The concession is the largest in the chapter, since the object examined here is, on that account, an instance of one of its own categories.

Its limit is nonetheless exact. In that account a judgment device stands external to the goods it helps a party choose among: a guide does not appear in the wine, and a critic is not a scene in the film. Here the device is a participant. The party whose standing supplies the comparison is one of the two parties to the relation being characterised, and Chapter 2 argues that this is what places that party in a determinate position with respect to the set compared. A device standing outside what it judges occupies no such position, so the analysis of judgment devices stops short of the question this volume takes up.

The second account reaches the difficulty from the side of justification. Parties who must settle a dispute appeal to principles they expect to command respect, and the principles available are plural: several orders of worth coexist, each organised around a higher common principle by reference to which persons and things may be ranked, and many disagreements are explained by parties appealing to different orders . One of the orders described is constituted by the esteem in which a party is held by others, which is the nearest thing in that account to the object of this volume.

Here too the distance is a difference in what performs the ranking. On that account comparison proceeds by appeal to a principle, and the principle is available to every party, so that a ranking may be contested by invoking it or by invoking a different order. In the present case comparison proceeds through a party. No higher common principle is named when one account is weighed against another, and what is appealed to is the position of the party who wrote. A ranking conducted by reference to a principle may be disputed on the principle’s own terms; a ranking conducted through a party supplies no terms of that kind, which is why Chapter 2 treats the party as occupying a position rather than as applying a criterion.

The third account concerns ties as prisms rather than pipes. A relation between parties may convey substance, and it may instead alter how third parties perceive one of them, so that the tie functions as a signal of quality under uncertainty rather than as a conduit . Applied here, the account explains why an institution attends to who wrote an account and not only to what it says. Its subject is the inference a third party draws; the subject of this volume is the position occupied by the party from whom the inference is drawn.

One distinction answers all three concessions, and stating it once is a stronger position than replying to each separately. In every one of these accounts the thing that performs the comparison stands outside what is compared: a judgment device is external to the goods, a higher common principle is external to the parties invoking it, and a tie observed as a prism is external to the inference drawn from it. In the arrangement examined here the thing that performs the comparison is a participant in what is compared. Whether that difference is consequential is the burden of Chapter 2; that it is a difference, and that no prior account turns on it, is established by the three concessions above.

Material Rendered Comparable

What is rendered comparable in the present case departs from the cases the established analysis treats, and the departure is what makes the position of the issuer necessary rather than merely usual.

In the standard case a metric is applied to entities of a kind. Institutions are ranked against institutions and publications counted against publications, and the entities so ordered exist independently of the metric that orders them. Two consequences follow from that independence and both are ordinarily taken for granted. A metric may be defended, criticised, or replaced by reference to properties the entities share, since the shared properties are available to anyone examining the entities. A metric may also be normed, since a population of comparable entities exists against which any particular entity can be placed.

Neither consequence is available here. The material is a relation, and a relation between two particular parties has no counterpart elsewhere. An account of what a person did within a supervisory relation is not a measurement of that person taken under standard conditions; it is a report from inside a singular arrangement, composed by the party who occupied the other position in it. No population of comparable arrangements exists against which such a report could be normed, because what would have to be held constant across the population is the relation itself, and relations are the very thing that differs.

It may be replied that supervisory relations do form a kind, that doctoral supervisions resemble one another in structure, and that a population is therefore available after all. The reply mistakes the level at which the comparison operates. What is compared is not the relation but the conduct reported within it, and conduct is qualified by conditions the relation supplies: the same act performed under close direction and under none are not one act observed twice. A kind of relation is not thereby a kind of measured entity, and the resemblance among supervisions supports a claim about their form while supplying nothing that would norm a report of what occurred inside any of them.

The conclusion is the one section one anticipated and section two could not supply. Where entities of a kind are ranked, comparability is supplied by the material and the metric may be defended by reference to it. Where relations are singular, comparability cannot be supplied by the material, and it must therefore be supplied from outside the accounts. Identifying what supplies it is the work of the section following.

Position Through Which Comparison Passes

What supplies comparability is the issuer, and the practice is conducted openly on that basis rather than in spite of it. An institution comparing two accounts of two relations it did not witness proceeds by reference to who wrote each. An account in identical words carries a different weight according to the position of its author, which is the property Chapter 2 defined as a standing. Where two accounts must be ranked and nothing in their content supplies the ranking, the standings of their issuers supply it.

Three features of the arrangement should be recorded before Chapter 2 takes it up, since each of them will be needed there.

Comparison so conducted is transitive in practice. An institution treating accounts from one issuer as weightier than accounts from a second, and the second as weightier than a third, thereby orders the three, and does so without at any point comparing the relations the accounts report. An ordering has been produced over material that admits none, and the transitivity is inherited from the standings rather than from the accounts.

Comparison so conducted also runs in a single term. Whatever the accounts say, the operative comparison passes through the standings of those who wrote them, and those standings are ordered against one another rather than against anything external to the set of issuers. Nothing outside that set is consulted, which is the feature that distinguishes this arrangement from the three conceded in section three, in each of which the comparing thing lies outside the compared set.

The party whose experience is reported, finally, takes no part in the operation. The person described contributed the material from which the account was drawn and appears in the comparison only as its object, having neither composed the account nor selected its author’s standing nor any say in the weight that standing carries. Chapter 4 takes up what is owed to that party, and Chapter 1 takes up how the weight came to be distributed as it is.

Taken together the three features describe an operation in which a set of parties supplies the measure by which accounts of relations are ordered, in which those parties are ordered only against one another, and in which the parties whose experiences are reported stand outside the operation entirely. Whether a party so placed stands in a determinate relation to the accounts compared, and what that relation is, is the subject of the chapter following.

Issuer in the Position of the General Equivalent

Everything to this point has been preparation for the claim this chapter makes. Chapter 1 established that accounts drawn from singular relations cannot be compared on anything their contents supply, and that what supplies the comparison instead is the standing of the party who wrote them. If that is right, then a standing is doing something more particular than lending weight to a document. It is serving as the material in which other things are expressed, and a thing that serves in that office stands in a determinate relation to the things expressed in it.

That relation has been described before, for a different object, and describing it is the whole of what this chapter borrows. The chapter proceeds by setting out the structure and its owner, conceding the extensions others have already made beyond the object the structure was built for, placing the issuer in the position so described, marking the boundary toward the earlier volume that derives the position’s emergence, and stating the findings that would defeat the placement.

Structure Borrowed and the Owner Conceded

Consider what happens when many things that share no common measure must nonetheless be set against one another. Each may be expressed in terms of any other, which yields as many expressions as there are pairs and no ordering at all. An ordering requires that one of them be adopted as the material in which the rest are stated. Once that adoption occurs, something has changed for the thing adopted.

This is the movement Marx traces through the forms of value, and no part of it is claimed here. A commodity that comes to serve as the general equivalent acquires that role by being set apart: the world of commodities obtains a unified expression of value by excluding one commodity from itself, and the excluded commodity, having become the material in which the value of the rest is stated, can no longer stand in the relative form alongside them . What deserves emphasis is that the exclusion is not a cost of the role or a consequence that follows it. The exclusion is the form the role takes. A thing that measures the others cannot be measured in the same operation, because the operation is conducted in it.

Whether that structure may be carried from a commodity to a person is the question this chapter turns on, and it is worth noticing that Marx himself carries it, in a smaller key and for a different purpose. He observes that a man relates to himself as a man only by relating to another man as his equal, and that the other thereby becomes for him the form of appearance of the kind . The remark is offered to illuminate the value-form rather than to make a claim about persons. This volume takes it as a warrant for the transposition rather than as an argument for it, and the difference matters: a warrant licenses the attempt, and the attempt must still be justified by what it yields.

One further inheritance should be recorded before the extensions are conceded. The reading of the value-form on which this chapter relies holds that value has no existence prior to its expression in the equivalent, so that the money-form is constitutive rather than expressive; that reading was developed in the literature which returned to these passages in the second half of the twentieth century  and rests on the earlier recovery of the social-form reading . Adjacent readings state the same structure differently, as a systematic dialectic in which money is the existence of value , as a form of impersonal social domination mediated by abstract labour , as a representation of labour rather than a measurement of it , and, in the tradition that places the money-form as the unifying moment of the value-forms, as a question about the levels at which the analysis is conducted . None of these is extended here, and the chapter would stand on any of them.

Prior Extensions of the Structure Beyond the Commodity

Readers familiar with twentieth-century social theory will already have recognised the shape of the argument, and they are right to. The structure has been carried well beyond commodities, and the extensions own most of what such a reader will find familiar in what follows. They are conceded here, before the present extension is stated, rather than in a note afterwards.

Sohn-Rethel carries it to cognition. On his account the abstraction performed in exchange is a real abstraction rather than a mental one, and the forms of thought bear its impress .

Žižek carries it to a person, which is the extension closest to this chapter. A man is a king because others treat him as one, and the misrecognition consists in the participants taking the relation to run the other way, so that they believe they treat him as a king because he is already, in himself and outside the relation, a king . That is the fetish structure of the general equivalent applied to a person, and the application belongs to him.

Laclau carries it to a position within a set. An element of a chain is emptied of its particular content in order to represent the chain as a whole, and the element performing that office is thereby set apart from the others . Agamben carries it to a person constituted by exclusion, whose sovereign is included in an order precisely by standing outside it . Beyond that, the explicit identification of Marx’s general equivalent with the emptied element of a chain of equivalences has itself been made , which forecloses any claim here to have first connected the two.

Given how much has been conceded, it is worth being exact about what remains. None of the extensions above concerns a party who measures others by issuing accounts of them, and none concerns the exclusion of such a party from the set whose co-experience the accounts report. The structure is old and the application is new. The qualification stated in Chapter 1 applies here as elsewhere: a bounded search establishes the absence of a located owner rather than the absence of one.

Placement of the Issuer in the Equivalent Position

With the structure conceded and its extensions marked, the placement itself follows from Chapter 1 in three steps, none of which introduces a premise that chapter did not establish.

Accounts of co-experiences must be compared, since a selection decision requires a ranking and the accounts are among the materials from which the ranking is made. Nothing in their content supplies the comparison, because the relations they report are singular and share no property against which they could be normed. Comparison therefore proceeds through the standings of those who issued them, which is what the practice does and what its participants acknowledge doing.

A standing is accordingly the material in which the accounts are compared. It is what the receiving institution reads when it ranks, and the accounts are ordered by being referred to it.

Now consider the relation between a standing so used and the accounts compared in it. The accounts express something in terms of the standing. The standing expresses nothing in terms of the accounts. That asymmetry is not an accident of how institutions happen to proceed; it holds for the same reason it holds in the case Marx describes, which is that a measure cannot be a term of the operation conducted in it.

Claim 2.4. Where the accounts issued by a party serve as the material in which accounts of co-experiences are compared, the co-experiences in which that party itself participated are not among those so compared.

Read carelessly the claim says something obviously false, so its narrowness had better be stated at once. It does not hold that such a party is unassessed. Assessments of issuers are made constantly, and are made by other issuers. What it holds is that the particular set constituted by this operation, the set of co-experiences rendered comparable through this standing, excludes the experiences of the party whose standing does the rendering. The exclusion is local to the operation. It is a property of the operation rather than a fact about the party’s life, and a reader who takes it for the latter has taken it for something the chapter does not assert.

Two questions arise immediately from the placement and neither is answered here. The first is what accrues to a party while that party occupies such a position. The second is whether what accrues answers to any description the vocabulary of economics supplies, given that the position is occupied rather than owned. Chapter 3 takes up the first and Chapter 4 the second.

Boundary toward the Volume on Injustice

Since the volume on injustice in this series treats an object that overlaps this one, the division of labour between them should be stated exactly, so that neither treatment is mistaken for the other.

That volume derives the emergence of the position. Where experiences admitting no common measure must nonetheless be circulated and compared, a general equivalent is forced into existence, and the party who comes to occupy it is alienated into serving as the measure. The derivation supplies necessity: it explains why such a position exists at all, rather than merely observing that one does.

This volume begins where that derivation ends. It takes the position as given and asks what follows once accounts issued under such a standing circulate generally: what accumulates to the party occupying it, whether that accumulation may be transferred, on what terms the accounts are exchanged, and how the arrangement degrades. Put briefly, the earlier volume owns the emergence and the alienation, and this volume owns the circulation.

Conditions Under Which the Placement Fails

Because the placement carries the weight of Parts III and IV, the findings that would defeat it should be stated in a form specific enough to be looked for.

Suppose it were shown that receiving institutions compare accounts by a procedure passing through none of the standings of those who issued them. A demonstration that comparison proceeds by reference to a property of the accounts themselves, or to a scale external to all issuers, would remove the material in which the comparison is conducted, and with it the position this chapter describes. This is the most direct defeat available and the one a critic should attempt first.

Suppose instead that the ordering of standings against one another were shown to be intransitive or unstable in a way preventing any one of them from serving as the material of comparison. The argument requires that a standing hold still enough to be read. Were standings read differently by every institution, there would be many local measures and no general one, and the chapter would have described a practice that does not occur.

Suppose finally that a party whose standing serves as the measure were shown to have its own co-experiences compared within the same operation. The exclusion asserted above is an exclusion from one set under one operation, so a single clear case of inclusion would refute it as stated.

Accumulation of a Non-Transferable Standing

Chapter 2 placed the issuer in a position with respect to the accounts compared. A position is not yet a holding, and the vocabulary of political economy is a vocabulary of holdings, so the question this Part must answer is whether anything the issuer possesses answers to that vocabulary at all. Four commitments attach to the designation of capital, as Chapter 3 set out, and this chapter takes the first of them.

Its purpose is to establish that the standing of an issuer accumulates, to identify the mechanism by which it does, and to bring out the respect in which the object departs from every stock the vocabulary of capital was built for. That departure is not incidental. A standing cannot be handed to anyone, and the consequences of the fact reach Chapter 4, where the designation is tested and found to hold only in part, and Chapter 1, where the distribution of standings is shown to admit no correction by transfer.

The chapter describes how a standing grows and notes a property of the growth that the outline of this volume did not anticipate; concedes the established account of cumulative advantage and states what in that account is not extended here; establishes the absence of transfer and records that no prior owner was located for it; and draws three consequences, each of which a later chapter takes up.

Growth of a Standing Through Exercise

A standing grows by being exercised, and the mechanism is visible in what happens after a single account has been acted upon. An institution that relied on an account and found the reliance answered has learned something it did not know before: that accounts from this party may be relied upon. It weighs the next account from the same party in the light of what it learned. The issuer is thereby in a stronger position than before, not through any act performed after the account was sent, but through the institution’s having used it.

An account issued and disregarded leaves the position where it was, which is worth stating because it identifies what the growth actually consists in. Composing accounts does not build a standing. Having accounts relied upon builds one, and reliance is conferred by the receiving institution rather than earned by the issuer unilaterally. Repetition of the first case is the ordinary route by which a party comes to be one whose accounts carry weight, and the route runs through institutions rather than through the issuer’s own effort.

The growth has a further property, and it is the one the outline of this volume did not anticipate. Most stocks are diminished by use. A quantity of a good consumed is gone; a sum spent is no longer held; a stock of goodwill drawn upon too often is drawn down. A standing exercised is not diminished, and under the ordinary case is increased. Exercise and accumulation, which for other holdings stand opposed, are here the same operation viewed from two sides.

That property explains a result recorded earlier and left unresolved there. Chapter 4 reported consumption as the one question of the thirteen whose form for this object is indeterminate, and the indeterminacy has its source in a divergence between two levels. At the level of the individual act, nothing is consumed: the issuer writes, the institution relies, and the issuer holds what was held before and a little more. At the level of the practice, something may be exhausted, in the manner Chapter 5 describes, where a practice degraded by recharacterisation contracts. Consumption is therefore not indeterminate in the sense of being unanswerable. Its answer differs at the two levels, which is a determinate result and is reported as one.

Established Account of Cumulative Advantage

That advantage compounds in the domain of recognition is established, and the account here borrows the mechanism rather than adding to it. Eminent contributors receive disproportionate credit for contributions equivalent to those of the less eminent, and the disproportion feeds the eminence that produced it ; the later statement extends the analysis to the symbolism of intellectual property and to the reward structure that sustains it . The mechanisms by which such advantage compounds, and the conditions under which compounding may be distinguished empirically from persistent differences in underlying attributes, are set out in the review literature .

Applied to the present object, the mechanism operates through three channels and each raises the rate at which further exercise occurs. A party whose accounts have been relied upon is asked for accounts more often, so the opportunities for exercise multiply. Such a party is asked by institutions whose reliance counts for more, so each exercise contributes more than the last. Such a party also enters relations with parties who sought the relation out because of the standing, so the material from which future accounts are drawn is itself supplied by the standing already held. Compounding in this domain therefore requires no assumption beyond the three, and the third is the strongest, since it makes the stock a source of its own inputs.

One qualification belongs here rather than in the chapter on limits, because it bears directly on what the present section may be taken to have shown. The review literature is careful that an observed divergence may reflect compounding or may reflect stable underlying differences present at the outset, and that distinguishing the two requires longitudinal data of a kind this volume does not have. Chapter 5 recorded that the volume estimates nothing. The claim advanced here is accordingly that the compounding mechanism is available in this domain and that its three channels can be specified, not that compounding has been measured in it or that observed inequalities among issuers have been shown to arise from it.

Transferability of a Standing

Nothing established so far distinguishes a standing from any other stock that grows by use. The distinguishing property appears when the question is asked whether a standing may be given to another party, and the answer is that it may not.

Three operations look like transfers and none of them is one. An issuer may recommend a colleague to an institution seeking an account, in which case the institution acquires an account from the colleague and whatever reliance it already had in the colleague; the issuer’s standing is exercised and is not divided. An issuer may sign an account another party composed, in which case what the institution relies upon is the signature and therefore the signatory’s standing, which has moved nowhere. An issuer may lend a name to a body, in which case the body acquires the benefit of an association while the standing remains attached to the party who lent it and departs with that party. In each case what passes is an exercise. The stock stays where it was.

That is the respect in which the object departs from the holdings for which the vocabulary of capital was developed, and the departure is one of degree carried to a point where it becomes one of kind. Economic capital is transferable by its nature and is institutionalised in rights of property. The cultural and social forms are described as convertible into the economic form under stated conditions , and social capital in the network sense inheres in the structure of relations rather than in any party , so neither of those transfers in the manner of a title. A standing in the present sense is less transferable still. It inheres in a party; it is constituted by the reliance of others upon that party; and reliance upon a second party is a different fact about the world rather than the same fact relocated. Transfer would require that the reliance survive the substitution of its object, which is to require that it cease to be the reliance it was.

No prior owner was located for the accumulation of a stock with this property, and the absence is stated in the text rather than in the chapter on limits so that a reader may weigh it where the claim is made. The literature on cumulative advantage describes recognition accruing to persons and does not treat non-transferability as a feature requiring separate analysis, since its interest lies in the rate of accrual. The literature on forms of capital treats convertibility as the interesting case and non-transferability as a limit condition. The account given here is accordingly constructed from those two literatures rather than taken from either, and the construction is the author’s, with the bounded-search qualification of Chapter 4 attaching to the claim that no owner exists.

Consequences of Non-Transferability

Three consequences follow from the absence of transfer, and each is taken up by a later chapter. They are collected here because the argument for each is short once the preceding section is granted, while the chapters that use them are distant from one another.

A concentration of standings admits no correction by transfer. Where a stock is transferable, an uneven distribution can in principle be evened by moving some of it, and the disputes about whether it should be moved are disputes about redistribution, conducted in a vocabulary of entitlement and desert. Here there is nothing to move. A party holding a large standing cannot pass any of it to a party holding none, and no institution can require the passage, since the requirement would have no object. A policy addressed to the distribution must therefore operate on the conditions of acquisition, which is a different kind of policy answerable to different objections. Chapter 1 takes this up.

A standing ends with the party holding it. Inheritance is unavailable for the same reason transfer is: what would be inherited is the reliance of institutions upon a particular party, and that reliance does not survive the party. The successor to a position inherits the position and the relations it supplies, and begins accumulating afresh. Concentration in this domain is therefore bounded by mortality in a way that concentration of transferable holdings is not, and the bound is one of the few features of the arrangement operating against concentration without anyone intending it. Its strength should not be overstated, and Chapter 1 weakens it: a bound that redistributes nothing removes a large standing without conferring it on anyone.

A standing is acquired only by occupying positions from which accounts may be issued. Since it cannot be received from a holder, the sole route of acquisition is the exercise described in section one, which requires relations from which accounts can be drawn, which in turn requires positions in which such relations occur. Whoever controls entry to those positions thereby controls entry to the practice, and controls it without any decision about the practice having been taken. Chapter 5 examines what supplies those positions, and the answer given there is what makes this consequence the most consequential of the three.

Convertibility and the Limits of the Capital Designation

Chapter 3 established that a standing accumulates and that it admits no transfer. Accumulation is one of the four commitments carried by the designation of capital, and a stock satisfying one commitment while failing another is neither capital nor not capital until the commitments have been taken severally. This chapter takes them severally.

Its purpose is to state what the designation commits its user to, to test the present object against each commitment, and to record the respect in which the test fails. Something turns on the order of those tasks. A reader who asks whether a standing is capital invites an answer carrying all four commitments at once, and receives either an affirmation importing a transferability the object does not have or a denial forfeiting three findings that hold. The procedure followed here avoids both by declining the undifferentiated question, and Chapter 3 gave the reasons for declining it.

The chapter states the commitments and disposes of the three that are straightforward; examines convertibility, which is the contested one, and distinguishes the exercise from the stock; and states the qualified designation that survives, together with two consequences that later chapters collect.

Commitments Carried by the Designation

To call something capital is to commit to four claims about it, and the claims are separable in the sense that each may be assessed without the others being settled.

The first is accumulation. The thing is a stock built up by prior activity rather than a natural endowment, and it grows. Chapter 3 established this for the present object and identified the mechanism, which is exercise, and the channels through which compounding operates.

The second is convertibility. The thing exchanges into other forms under stated conditions, and the conditions can be given. This commitment carries the weight of the extension of the vocabulary beyond the monetary form , since a form of capital convertible into nothing would be a resource rather than a form of something held in common with money, and the extension would then be a metaphor rather than an analysis.

The third is return. The stock yields a flow, so that holding it produces over time what would not otherwise be produced. Nothing in the present case makes this difficult. A party holding a standing receives requests, invitations, and access that a party holding none does not, and the flow is observable to anyone who compares the correspondence of the two.

The fourth is reproduction. The stock can be maintained across time and its conditions restored, so that what is held does not simply run down. Chapter 5 takes this up and reaches a conclusion uncomfortable for the position of this series.

Of the four, the first and the third are satisfied without difficulty and the fourth is deferred to the chapter that examines it. Convertibility is the difficulty, and it is the difficulty precisely because Chapter 3 established that nothing leaves the party. A holding from which nothing departs appears at first sight to convert into nothing at all.

Distinction between Exercise and Stock

The object fails a straightforward test of convertibility and passes a modified one. Which test is the right one to apply is the question this section settles, and the distinction it turns on carries through the remainder of the volume.

On the straightforward test, a form converts where a holder exchanges some of it for another form, so that after the exchange the holder has less of the first and more of the second. A standing does not convert in that sense. No operation exists by which any part of it leaves the party, and a party therefore cannot exchange standing for money, for a position, or for any other holding. Chapter 3 established the premise and the conclusion follows immediately from it.

On the modified test, what converts is not the stock but its exercise. A party holding a standing may issue an account, and the issuing produces effects the party may value: an obligation incurred by the party assisted, a relation with the receiving institution, an increment to the standing itself. In some arrangements the exercise is exchanged for consideration outright, and Chapter 2 examines the terms on which it is. A standing is therefore the source of a stream that converts, while remaining itself unconverted and undiminished.

An analogue clarifies the structure and then sharpens the difference. A title to land may be sold, or the land may be let, and letting produces a rent without the title moving. Both operations are available to the holder of land, and the availability of the first is what makes the holding an asset in the ordinary sense: it can be realised, valued against realisations by others, and pledged against a debt. Here only the second operation exists. There is no sale, so the entire economic life of the holding consists in its exercise, and the party is bound to the holding in a way the holder of a transferable asset is not. A landowner who tires of letting may sell and be free of the land. An issuer who tires of issuing may only stop, and stopping ends the flow without releasing anything.

That asymmetry is the finding of the chapter, and it explains why the straightforward test is the wrong one to apply here without being the wrong test in general. A test framed around what leaves the holder is well suited to holdings that can leave holders. Applied to a holding that cannot, it returns a negative result that reports the framing rather than the object, and the modified test recovers what the negative result conceals: a stream exists, it converts, and it has a source that stays.

Terms of the Qualified Designation

The designation is therefore available with a stated qualification, and the qualification should travel with it wherever the vocabulary of capital is used in this volume.

A standing is capital in respect of accumulation, of return, and of the reproduction examined in the chapter following. It is capital in respect of convertibility only at one remove, since what converts is the exercise and not the stock. It is capital in no respect that presupposes alienation, which rules out in a single line every operation treating a holding as a thing that may change hands: sale, gift, inheritance, security, and pooling. A reader who retains only one sentence from this chapter should retain that one, since each of the five operations recurs later as something the arrangement cannot support.

Two consequences are recorded here and developed elsewhere.

The first bears on Chapter 2. Operations that convert a future stream into a present transferable claim require that something be assignable, and here the stream is inseparable from the party who generates it. Any account of the financialisation of such a holding must therefore either locate an assignable claim or restrict itself to those senses of the term not requiring one. That chapter takes the second course and declares the cost of doing so.

The second bears on Chapter 4. A vocabulary developed for alienable holdings has been applied to a holding that cannot be alienated, and the application succeeded in three respects and failed in one. Failure of that kind is informative rather than embarrassing, since it locates exactly where the economic vocabulary stops and does so without abandoning the three respects in which it holds. Whether the pattern recurs, and what the framework should conclude from a designation holding in part, are questions Chapter 4 takes up once Chapter 2 has supplied the second instance.

Reproduction of the Conditions of Issuance

One commitment of the four remains. A stock that accumulates, returns a flow, and converts at one remove would still fail the description of capital if it could not be maintained, since a holding running down as it is used and incapable of restoration is a windfall rather than a stock. This chapter examines whether the conditions under which a standing is exercised can be reproduced, and finds that they can.

How they are reproduced is the more consequential result, and it is uncomfortable for the position this series has taken. Its purpose is to identify what an issuer requires in order to go on issuing, to show that the requirement is a relation rather than a resource, and to state where such relations come from. Institutional hierarchy answers the last of the three, which is to say that what supplies the conditions of issuance is the same asymmetry the earlier volumes of this series have criticised. A practice reproduced by the arrangement that makes it troubling poses a question about what the criticism was for, and Chapter 4 is obliged to answer it.

Three sections follow: what the requirement is, how it is met and two features of the manner in which it is met, and what the answer entails for the chapters on concentration and on implications.

Requirement of a Continuing Supply of Relations

An issuer without relations has nothing to report. Material for an account is a co-experience, and a party who ceases to enter relations from which such experiences arise ceases, after an interval, to be in a position to write anything an institution would request.

Two elements of that statement carry weight and are worth separating. One is that the material must be first-hand: Chapter 2 restricted the object to accounts composed by a participant, and an assessment assembled from records by a party who never observed the person falls outside the practice examined here. A second is that the material ages. A standing exercised on stale material declines, since receiving institutions discount an account drawn from a relation that ended long ago, and the earlier volume on governance argued that the discount should be formalised rather than left to the reader of the account. Between them the two elements fix what the requirement is a requirement for: recent, first-hand relations of a particular kind.

The requirement is therefore not a resource in the ordinary sense, and the difference matters for what a policy could reach. An issuer does not need funds, materials, or time in order to hold a standing, and holding one costs nothing. Stocks maintained by expenditure can be run down by withdrawing the expenditure, and a party unable to meet the cost ceases to hold them. Nothing of that shape operates here. What is needed is a continuing supply of relations in which the issuer is placed to observe another party at work, and the supply is not purchased. Where it comes from instead is the subject of the section following, and the answer is what makes this chapter’s finding unwelcome.

Manner in Which the Requirement Is Met

Relations of the required kind arise where one party is positioned to observe another over a period, which is to say in relations of instruction, supervision, direction, and care. Positions supplying such relations are the senior positions of the institutions in which the practice occurs, and no other source of them has been identified.

Two features of the arrangement follow, and both are consequential for later chapters.

Supply of relations is a function of position rather than of conduct. A party occupying a supervisory position acquires the relations that produce issuable material by occupying it, and would acquire them whatever the quality of the supervision. Conduct affects what the accounts say, and affects the standing over time through the reliance those accounts do or do not earn. Supply itself is settled before any conduct occurs. That separation is what allows Chapter 1 to derive a concentration mechanism in which no party selects for concentration: the input to accumulation is distributed by institutional arrangement rather than by anything the parties do.

Parties on the other side of those relations are, at the time, positioned to observe less than the issuer does. A junior party in a supervisory relation is not placed to write an account of the senior party that any institution would request, and would not be asked for one. Asymmetry of position is what generates the material, and the material is generated in one direction only. That one-sidedness gives the practice the shape it has, so that an arrangement in which observation ran both ways would yield a different practice rather than the same practice more evenly distributed.

Institutional Sources of the Conditions of Issuance

The consequence is the finding of this chapter and it runs against the position of the volumes preceding it.

Conditions under which accounts can be issued are reproduced by the hierarchy of positions within institutions, and by nothing else that the survey identified. A senior party has relations with junior parties because the institution is arranged that way, and those relations supply the material from which accounts are drawn. Were the arrangement flattened, so that observation ran in both directions equally, the material would be differently distributed and the practice would take a different form. The practice this series has examined across five volumes therefore depends for its reproduction on precisely the asymmetry that makes it troubling.

Three consequences are recorded, and they are given in ascending order of difficulty for the framework.

Commitment four of Chapter 4 is satisfied. Satisfaction comes, however, in a manner tying the holding to an institutional arrangement rather than to the party’s own activity: a standing is reproduced where the positions supplying relations continue to exist and the party continues to occupy one. Reproduction of the stock is thus parasitic on reproduction of the institution, which distinguishes this holding from stocks a holder maintains by private effort.

Entry to the practice is controlled by whoever controls entry to those positions. Chapter 3 established that a standing may be acquired only by exercise and never by transfer, and the present chapter establishes that exercise requires a position. Taken together the two give Chapter 1 its mechanism, and the mechanism operates without anyone selecting for it, since each party is doing no more than occupying a position and issuing accounts from it.

A reform of the asymmetry would alter the reproduction of the standing. This is recorded as an observation rather than as an argument for or against such a reform, and Chapter 4 takes up what the framework should make of it. What is observed is that the arrangement examined here and the arrangement criticised in the earlier volumes are not two arrangements, so that a change to one is a change to the other. Nothing in this chapter indicates which way that consideration cuts. It indicates only that the series has not yet said, and that a programme recommending reform of an arrangement on which the object of its own analysis depends owes an account of what it expects to remain.

Circulation, Exchange, and Degradation

Objects Moved in the Transmission of an Account

This chapter identifies what moves when an account is transmitted and what stays where it was. Its purpose is to establish that the transmission carries some things and leaves others behind, and that the separation is the condition of everything examined in the remainder of this Part. The chapter states what travels, states what does not, describes the mechanism of the separation, and draws the consequence for the analysis of exchange.

Transmission of the Document, the Expression, and the Force

Three things reach the receiving institution.

The document travels, and its movement is the least consequential of the three. A physical or electronic artefact passes from one party to another and may be filed, copied, and forwarded. Nothing in the argument of this volume turns upon it, and it is named because the layer it occupies is one the law does allocate, as Chapter 3 records.

The expression travels. The receiving institution reads what was written and can repeat it, quote it, and place it beside other expressions. This is the layer a reader would ordinarily take to be the whole of what is transmitted, since it is the only one that appears on the page, and Chapter 2 argues that it is the layer least closely connected to what the parties transact for.

Third, the force travels, in the sense given in Chapter 2. The alteration in the relational conditions available to the person described occurs at the receiving institution and occurs because the instrument arrived. The force is what the institution acts upon and what the parties transact for, and it is the layer for which no vocabulary of ownership is available, on the inheritance recorded in Chapter 3. Of the three, the first is allocated by property, the second by copyright, and the third by nothing.

Retention of the Relation, the Conditions, and the Standing

Three things remain where they were, and their remaining is what makes the practice the object of a political economy rather than of a theory of communication.

The relation stays. What the issuer and the person described made together continues to exist in whatever sense it does, and none of it is transferred by the writing of an account. What travels is a characterisation of it.

The conditions stay. An observation made within a relation is valid for that relation, on the result inherited in Chapter 3, and the qualifying conditions do not accompany the characterisation. A later reader receives a statement about a person and receives nothing about the circumstances under which the statement holds.

Third, the standing stays. Chapter 3 established that a standing cannot be handed to another party. What reaches the receiving institution is an exercise of a standing and never any part of the standing itself, which remains with the issuer and is increased rather than reduced by the transmission.

Mechanism of the Separation

The mechanism has been described for inscriptions generally. A record acquires its power in a network by being mobile and stable at once, so that it may be carried anywhere while remaining unaltered, and may then be combined with other records at a centre remote from where any of them was made, by parties who witnessed none of what they record . An account of a co-experience is an inscription in this sense, and its capacity to travel intact while the conditions of its making stay behind is the property that analysis identifies. This volume adds no part of it.

What the analysis of inscriptions does not supply is the standing. It describes how a record acquires force in a network and treats the record as the carrier. Here the record is not the carrier, or is not only the carrier, since two records in identical words carry different forces according to the standing of those who wrote them. The mobile and stable thing and the thing that gives it weight are separate, and only the first of them moves.

A comparison from the theory of money makes the shape of this plain. Money is described as the pure form of exchangeability, a means that has become detachable from any particular purpose and can therefore stand between any two things . What travels in an exchange is the token, and the exchangeability is a property of the arrangement rather than of the token. The present case exhibits the same division, with the standing occupying the place of the arrangement and the instrument occupying the place of the token.

Consequences for the Analysis of Exchange

Two consequences follow and both govern the chapters that follow.

The first is that any account of what is exchanged must specify which of the six things above is meant. A statement that an instrument was supplied leaves open whether what passed was a document, an expression, or a force, and the transactions examined in Chapter 2 differ according to the answer.

The second is that the party who supplies the force parts with nothing. This is unusual and it is the source of much that follows. In an ordinary exchange the supplier gives up what the recipient acquires, and the terms of the exchange concern the rate at which the two move. Here the supplier retains the standing undiminished, and what the recipient acquires is an effect rather than a holding. Chapter 2 takes up what may be given for a thing of this kind, and Chapter 3 takes up who gives it.

Terms of Exchange and the Consideration Given

Chapter 1 established what moves when an account is transmitted and what stays behind. What remains to be established is the terms: between whom the movement is an exchange, what each party gives, and what each receives. Answering that question turns out to require re-describing the practice against its own self-description, which is the sharpest thing this chapter does.

Its purpose is threefold: to identify the parties between whom something passes, and to show that there are three such pairs where the practice speaks of one; to account for the cohesion of a practice in which what is transacted has no legal description and no obligation follows from issuance; and to account for two features of the content of accounts that follow from the absence of any verification of what is written. Three sections take the three tasks in that order, and the last of them supplies one of the two degradation mechanisms that Chapter 5 meets from the other direction.

Relations in Which Something Passes

Three pairs of parties stand in an exchange relation, and the practice is ordinarily described as though only one of them existed. Setting out all three is not a taxonomic exercise: which pair is treated as the transaction determines what the practice appears to be, and the ordinary description picks the wrong one.

Consider first the pair the ordinary description overlooks entirely: the issuer and the receiving institution. An instrument passes between them and nothing ordinarily passes back; no fee is paid and no obligation is incurred, which is why the pair does not look like an exchange. It is one nonetheless. What the issuer receives is an increment of the kind Chapter 3 described, since the institution has now relied upon this issuer and will weigh the next account accordingly. Consideration is therefore given and received, and it is settled in a medium that neither party names, which is precisely the medium this Part has been examining.

Consider next the issuer and the person described, which is the pair the practice does name. Their relation is prior to the instrument and supplies its material. What the person described gave was the conduct the account reports, and the giving was not made in contemplation of the account: nobody conducts a supervision as a performance for a future letter, or if they do, the account has already been corrupted in the manner section three describes. Where an account is later requested, the person described gives a further thing, which is the request itself and the acknowledgment of dependence it carries, and Chapter 3 examines the case where what is given goes further still.

Between the person described and the receiving institution, finally, the instrument is supplied on the first party’s behalf and at the second party’s requirement. Neither member of this pair composes anything, and the instrument passes between them without either having made it. Their relation fixes the occasion of the exchange without being the exchange.

Now set the three side by side. The practice describes itself as a service the issuer renders to the person described: a favour, discharged out of goodwill or obligation, in which the institution figures only as an address. On the account above it is better described as a transaction between the issuer and the receiving institution, conducted in a medium that accrues to the issuer, using material supplied by a third party who is present in none of the three relations as a principal. The re-description is not offered as an unmasking. Each party’s self-understanding is accurate about the pair it attends to; what the self-description misses is which pair the consideration moves in.

Cohesion of the Practice Absent a Legal Description

A practice so described faces the stability question of Chapter 4 in an unusually sharp form. What is transacted has no legal description; no obligation follows from issuance; no party could sue on an account withheld, delayed, or carelessly written. An arrangement held together by nothing enforceable should, on the ordinary view, fall apart. It does not, and the question is what holds it.

Two things hold it, and neither is legal.

Repetition holds it first. Issuers and receiving institutions transact repeatedly, and each has an interest in the other’s continued participation. An issuer whose accounts prove unreliable is relied upon less, which is a cost borne in exactly the medium in which the issuer is paid; an institution that treats accounts carelessly finds issuers less willing to supply them. Between repeat players, the sanction that law would supply is supplied by the prospect of the next round, and the medium of payment identified in section one is what makes the sanction bite.

Absence of an alternative holds it second. A receiving institution requires some purchase on parties it has not observed, and the instruments examined here are the available means. Evidence that the requirement is felt comes from the market-design literature, which describes selection markets in which the difficulty of conveying credible information leads participants to construct further devices for the purpose . Instruments retained despite a documented difficulty are instruments without a substitute, and a practice without a substitute coheres because exit leads nowhere.

Neither ground is a warrant of quality. Repetition disciplines reliability only as far as unreliability is detected, and section three shows how little is detectable; necessity retains the practice whatever its condition. Cohesion, in other words, is compatible with degradation, and the section following shows the two operating together.

Content of Accounts Under Unverifiability

Nothing in the arrangement verifies what an account says. The receiving institution cannot check the characterisation against the relation, since it did not witness the relation and, on the result inherited in Chapter 3, no position outside the relation would settle the matter. What happens to content under that condition is established by two literatures, and the two mechanisms they establish compound here.

One mechanism runs through discounting. Where quality is unverifiable and sellers know more than buyers, the market selects against the better instances and may fail to form . Transposed here the mechanism cannot operate through a falling price, since there is no price to fall, but its informational core survives the transposition intact: an institution unable to distinguish a careful account from a careless one discounts all accounts toward the average. What follows for the careful issuer should be stated exactly, because it explains conduct that would otherwise look irrational. An issuer who writes carefully bears the cost of the care and receives none of the benefit, since the account is read as though it were average; care is thereby made a private subsidy to a common pool, and the rational response to that arrangement is to stop supplying it.

A second mechanism runs through inflation. Where messages are costless and the sender prefers a higher assessment, communication inflates, and the formal literature establishes that inflated messages arise in equilibrium where senders may misreport at low cost and receivers partially discount . Empirical support of a bounded kind exists: the study of reference letters in one professional market, drawn from a corpus of some twelve thousand letters, is consistent with systematic differences in the language used of different candidates , which is evidence that what is written is shaped by something other than what occurred. The finding is from one market and one period, and no generalisation is rested on it.

Now put the two together, since their interaction is worse than either alone. Inflation raises the average; discounting follows the average; so the account that would have been informative is read as though it were the inflated one, and the informative issuer subsidises the inflating one. Each mechanism supplies the condition under which the other operates more strongly, which is what compounding means here. Chapter 5 takes up what happens to supply when the arrangement is disturbed from outside, and Chapter 3 records that the present chapter rests on the analytical route alone, since the framework supplies no account of message inflation.

Payment by the Party Assessed

Chapter 2 identified the exchange relations of the ordinary case. One arrangement remains, and it deserves a chapter of its own because it inverts the ordinary case: the party assessed supplies the consideration for the assessment. An arrangement of that shape has been studied closely in one other domain, which gives this chapter its method. A developed analogue exists, its mechanism is established, and the work here is to determine how much of the analogue transfers.

Its purpose is accordingly threefold: to state the analogue and extract what it establishes; to examine the form the arrangement takes in the present practice, which turns out to differ from the analogue in the currency of payment; and to mark the limits of the comparison, the last of which returns the volume to its own central distinction. Three sections follow that order.

Analogue of the Rated Party Paying the Rater

One arrangement has been studied in which a party issuing an assessment is compensated by the party assessed. In the rating of debt instruments, the agencies producing the ratings are ordinarily paid by the issuers of the instruments rated, and regulatory reliance upon the resulting ratings entrenched the position of the incumbent agencies . Formal analysis of the arrangement establishes that under it ratings inflate, and that the inflation is sustained by the ability of the party assessed to seek assessments from several agencies and to publish the most favourable .

Of what the analogue establishes, two results transfer to the present object and one does not, and the sorting matters more than the analogue itself.

Direction of distortion transfers. Where the party assessed determines whether the assessing party is engaged, assessments become more favourable than the underlying material warrants, and the mechanism requires no dishonesty on anyone’s part: each participant acts reasonably given the arrangement, and the distortion is a property of the arrangement rather than of any participant. That is exactly the structure Chapter 2 found in the inflation of content, reached there from the economics of communication and here from an institutional case.

Role of reliance transfers as well. The rating literature establishes that the distortion was sustained by third parties relying upon the assessments in a manner that removed the incentive to examine them. Reliance of that kind is not an occasional feature of the present practice but its ordinary condition, since a receiving institution requests an account precisely because it has not observed the person described, and a party that could examine the material would not need the account.

Pooling of assessments does not transfer, and the reason it does not is instructive. The rating case turns on the ability to obtain several assessments of one thing and to publish the most favourable, which requires that the assessments be substitutable measurements of a common object. Here they are not. Two accounts of the same person by different issuers report different relations, and Chapter 1 established that no population exists against which either could be normed. The shopping mechanism therefore has no purchase, and whatever distortion exists here arises without it.

Form the Arrangement Takes in the Present Case

Payment by the party assessed occurs in this practice, and it takes a form the rating case does not exhibit: what is supplied is labour rather than money.

In the arrangement most often documented, the person described composes the text and another party signs it. Chapter 1 distinguished the expression from the force, and this arrangement separates them completely. The expression is supplied by the party assessed; the force is supplied by the signatory, who contributes nothing to the text and everything to its effect. Consideration flows to the signatory in two parts: the saving of the labour of composition, and the increment described in Chapter 3, since the account will be relied upon and the reliance will accrue to the signatory. Payment in labour, in other words, purchases the exercise of a standing, which is the only thing Chapter 4 found purchasable.

Two features of the arrangement deserve statement, and each is intelligible only on results established earlier, which is some evidence that the earlier results carve the practice correctly.

Participants do not treat the arrangement as forgery, and the professional literature that discusses it treats it as an ethical difficulty rather than as a misrepresentation of authorship. On its face that is puzzling: a document presented as one party’s assessment was written by the party assessed. The puzzle dissolves on the account of Chapter 1. What the receiving institution relies upon is the standing, and the standing is genuinely present, since the signatory did sign; the represented thing is the reliance-worthiness of the signatory, and that representation is true. What has been misdescribed is the expression, which Chapter 1 showed to be the least of the three things transmitted.

Invisibility is the second feature. Chapter 5 recorded that the volume yields no series, and this arrangement is the sharpest instance of the reason: a document composed by one party and signed by another is indistinguishable, on its face, from one composed by the signatory. No corpus study of the kind cited in Chapter 2 could detect the arrangement, since the observable object is identical in both cases. Whatever frequency the arrangement has, it has it invisibly.

Limits of the Comparison

Three limits bound the transfer from the rating case, and they are given in ascending order of consequence for the volume.

Institutions differ from persons. An agency may be reconstituted, sold, or wound up; a standing in the present sense ends with the party holding it, on the result of Chapter 3. Remedies discussed in the rating literature operate by altering who pays and by removing regulatory reliance, and each presumes an institutional counterparty that may be restructured. No corresponding lever exists here.

Measurement differs as well. The rating case has a price, so the direction and the size of its distortion can be estimated. What the party assessed supplies here is labour, an obligation, or an acknowledgment of dependence, and none of these is recorded anywhere. The mechanism transfers and the measurement does not, which is the pattern Chapter 5 led the reader to expect: mechanisms without magnitudes.

Deepest is the limit at which the vocabulary of transferable holdings resumes. The rating case involves an assessment of a thing; the present case involves an assessment of a party by another party with whom the first shared an experience, and the assessing instrument is an exercise of a standing that cannot be alienated, by a party bound to it in the manner Chapter 4 described. An agency’s reputation is an asset of a firm and may in principle be conveyed with the firm; a standing may not. The comparison accordingly holds for the mechanism of distortion and fails at precisely the point where every comparison in this volume has failed, which is the point of alienation. The recurrence is noted for Chapter 4, which collects it.

Loop Closure and Deficit in the Circulation of Standing

An apparatus exists, developed by the author elsewhere, for the analysis of circulation: it traces value around a closed circuit and computes a deficit, which is the amount by which what returns falls short of what was contributed. This chapter applies the apparatus to the circulation of accounts and standings, and does so for two reasons. Application to a new object is the honest test of an apparatus one owns, and the circuit examined here has a feature, identified in the chapters preceding, that the apparatus should be expected to struggle with. Whether it does is itself a finding, and the chapter reports it.

One statement belongs at the outset, because the apparatus is easily misread and the separate work in which it is developed says so in its own opening. The quantity the apparatus supplies is an observable and not a criterion. A circuit may fail to close without any wrong having been done, since consumption and freely given contribution both open a circuit; a circuit may equally close exactly while capacity accumulates at one position. Nothing in this chapter therefore licenses an inference from a computed quantity to a judgment, and the separate work establishes that no function of the quantity alone could support one.

Four sections follow: the circuit is traced; closure and accumulation are distinguished, which is where the chapter’s principal result lies; the distribution of the circuit record among the parties is examined; and the results are collected together with the limitation the application exposes.

Trace of the Circuit

Four positions and four movements constitute the circuit examined here, and tracing them in order shows where the circuit is ordinary and where it is not.

Contribution comes first: the person described contributes conduct within a relation, which is the material from which an account may later be drawn. Composition follows: the issuer composes an account and transmits it. Action follows composition: the receiving institution acts upon the account, which alters the relational conditions available to the person described. That alteration then returns to the person described, closing the circuit at the position where it began. Up to this point the circuit is unremarkable, and a reader could be forgiven for expecting the computation to be routine.

What makes the circuit repay examination is a pair of further movements running alongside the four. Transmission of an account increases the standing of the issuer, on the result of Chapter 3; reliance of the receiving institution upon that issuer is itself increased, so that the institution and the issuer are drawn into a continuing relation that none of the four primary movements produces. Neither of these side movements has an obvious return leg, and whether the apparatus can see them is the question section two answers.

Circuit Closure and the Accumulation of Capacity

The circuit closes in an important sense and fails to close in another, and distinguishing the two senses is the work of this section. Everything the chapter establishes flows from keeping them apart.

Closure holds in the sense that something returns to the person described. Conduct was contributed, an account was drawn from it, and an alteration in relational conditions came back. Where the alteration is favourable, the return may exceed in value what was contributed, and the person described has reason to be glad of the arrangement. This result deserves emphasis rather than embarrassment, since it runs against the easy reading: any description of the arrangement as simple one-directional extraction is foreclosed by it, and nothing in the apparatus registers a wrong in such a case. This volume asserts none.

Closure fails in the sense that one movement has no return leg at all. The increase in the standing of the issuer accrues at the issuer’s position and returns to nobody. Where that increase comes from must be stated carefully, because the obvious answer is wrong. It is not taken from the person described: Chapter 3 established that a standing is not transferred and that nothing leaves any party. It is generated at the issuer’s position by the act of transmission itself. The arrangement therefore produces, at each turn of the circuit, an increment that stays where it is made, without anything having been removed from anywhere.

Now bring the apparatus to bear on that structure. The separate work identifies exactly this case, a circuit that closes while capacity accumulates at one position, and names it as invisible to the quantity the apparatus defines. The reason for the invisibility is structural rather than accidental: the apparatus computes a deficit around a circuit, and an accumulation at a position is a different kind of object, sitting at a node rather than on the legs, so that a measure defined on the legs reports nothing however large the accumulation grows.

What follows for this volume should be stated plainly, since it is the chapter’s principal result. The apparatus does not detect what Chapters 3 and 1 identify as the principal economic feature of the arrangement. That is a limitation of the apparatus with respect to this object, not a finding that the feature is absent, and the separate work anticipates it. An application that had flattered the apparatus would have been worth less than this one.

Distribution of the Circuit Record among the Parties

Computing anything around a circuit requires a record of every leg, and asking who holds that record turns the apparatus from a computational instrument into a diagnostic one.

Set out what each party knows. The issuer knows what was contributed within the relation, what was written, and to whom it was sent. The receiving institution knows what it received, from whom, and what it decided. The person described knows what was contributed and, in the ordinary case, learns of the decision without learning what was written or by which of its features the decision was affected. Where the confidential reference is exempted from access, as one jurisdiction has provided, the person described holds the least complete record of the three parties.

That ordering matters because of a corresponding result in the separate work: the invariant that would detect an imbalance is computable only by parties holding the whole-circuit record, and those are the parties best positioned to benefit from an imbalance. The present case exhibits the structure in an acute form. The party with the strongest interest in computing the quantity is the party least able to obtain the record, and the exemption that produces this is a legal provision rather than an accident of bookkeeping, so the asymmetry is reproduced as reliably as the practice itself.

Results and Limitation of the Apparatus in the Present Application

Three results and one limitation are recorded, and the order runs from the result most favourable to the arrangement toward the one least favourable to the apparatus.

Closure in the sense of an existing return is established, which forecloses any description of the arrangement as simple one-directional extraction. Compatibility of that closure with accumulation at a single position is established next, so that a demonstration of closure settles nothing about the distributive character of the arrangement; a defender of the practice who points to the return has pointed to something real and concluded nothing. Unequal holding of the record is established third, and the inequality runs against the party with the most at stake.

Last comes the limitation. The apparatus fails to detect the accumulation itself, which is a limitation of the instrument with respect to this object and is recorded as such where the volume’s own limits are collected, in Chapter 5. Chapter 3 records the present chapter as resting on the framework route, since every step above depends on the apparatus and on results internal to the series.

Inalienability and the Contraction of a Practice Under Pricing

Two findings from different literatures, which have never met, are brought together in this chapter, and the argument is that they describe one mechanism. A practice organised as a gift degrades when payment is introduced; the practice examined in this series contracts when exposure is raised. Neither finding was sought with the other in mind, and their convergence was not anticipated when the survey behind this volume was commissioned, which is some reason to think the convergence reports a structure rather than an arrangement of the evidence.

Its purpose is accordingly to establish three things: that the instrument belongs to a class of things that may be given and not sold, and belongs to it in fact rather than by prohibition; that the blood case and the exposure case exhibit one structure; and that the structure admits a general statement, which is the chapter’s contribution and carries a consequence for governance that Chapter 4 is obliged to answer. Four sections follow: the legal category, the gift-organised practice under payment, the present practice under exposure, and the general mechanism.

Legal Category of Market-Inalienability

Between full commodification and full inalienability a legal category exists, occupied by things whose transfer is permitted as a gift and forbidden as a sale . Its ground should be stated, because the ground is what transfers here: the category is not a compromise between two positions but a distinct treatment, resting on the claim that some holdings are constitutive of persons rather than fungible, so that permitting their sale would alter what they are.

Where the instrument of this volume stands with respect to that category is the question of this section, and the answer divides: structurally inside it, legally outside it, and the divergence between the two answers is the finding. Structurally the instrument is given: an account is supplied without payment, at the request of a party to whom the issuer stands in a relation, and the parties describe the supply as a favour or an obligation rather than as a sale. Legally nothing forbids the sale. The jurisprudential volume of this series established that the force of such an instrument has no description in property law, so there is nothing for a prohibition to name; the volume on governance established that a prohibition on exchanging it would fail in any case, because non-occurrence is unobservable.

What results is a thing that is market-inalienable in fact and unprohibited in law. Nothing forbids the sale, and the sale nonetheless degrades what is sold. That sentence is the hinge of the chapter, and it depends on both earlier volumes: without the property finding, prohibition would be available; without the observability finding, prohibition would be effective. The two remaining sections supply the mechanism the sentence asserts.

A Gift-Organised Practice Under the Introduction of Payment

One practice organised as a gift has been studied through the introduction of payment, and it supplies the first arm of the convergence. Comparison of voluntary and commercial arrangements for the supply of human blood found the voluntary arrangement superior in supply and in the quality of what was supplied, and argued that the introduction of payment degrades the relation through which the giving occurs rather than merely adding an alternative motive .

How the finding is used here needs stating, because the finding is contested and the use survives the contest. Disputed at the time and divided in the subsequent literature is the empirical settlement: whether paid supply was in fact worse, and by how much. Relied upon here is the structure of the claim rather than its settlement, and the structure is this: a practice in which a party gives because the giving expresses a relation is altered by the introduction of a price, because the price supplies a different reason for the same act and the two reasons do not simply add. A party who gave because of the relation may decline to sell; a party who sells is doing something else. Whether the alteration degraded blood supply in one country in one decade may remain open while the structure stands, and it is the structure the next section matches.

Practice Under Raised Exposure

A finding of the same shape was reached by a different route in the volume on governance in this series, and it supplies the second arm. Where exposure attaching to the issuing of accounts rises, issuers issue less: the documented response of the practice is contraction rather than adjustment, and a legislative correction addressed to the issuer’s incentives was enacted across many jurisdictions without measurable effect. Magnitude is undocumented, and following the rule of Chapter 5, no comparison resting on magnitude is made here; direction alone is used.

Now place the two findings side by side, since the literatures that produced them have not. In the blood case the intervention is payment; in the reference case it is exposure. On their faces the two interventions share nothing: one adds money, the other adds liability. What they share appears one level down. In both, an act performed within a relation and for reasons belonging to the relation is brought under an external characterisation, and the party who performed it responds by performing it less. Common to the two cases is neither payment nor liability but the recharacterisation itself, and a mechanism identified twice, from two literatures, under two interventions, is a candidate for general statement.

Statement of the General Mechanism

Stated for the general case, the mechanism is this chapter’s contribution.

Where an act is performed within a relation and derives its intelligibility from that relation, an arrangement that supplies an external reason for the act, in place of or alongside the internal one, alters the act’s character for the party performing it. Why the alteration occurs deserves a sentence, since the mechanism is often misread as a change in incentives. It is not a change in the balance of motives, because the two reasons are not commensurable and do not sum; a party cannot hold the relational reason and the external reason as two weights on one scale. What changes is what the party takes themselves to be doing, and an act whose description has changed is a different act to perform or to decline.

Three consequences follow, given in ascending order of difficulty for this series.

Supply falls. Some parties who acted under the internal characterisation decline to act under the external one, and no party is recruited by the change who was not already available, so the movement is one-directional.

Composition shifts. Parties who continue are those for whom the external reason suffices, and their accounts are written toward the external characterisation. This meets the degradation of content described in Chapter 2 from the other direction: that chapter derived corruption of content from unverifiability, and this one derives it from recharacterisation, and the two operate on the same documents.

Hardest is the third. The practice becomes more difficult to govern rather than easier, since the governance instruments examined in the preceding volume operate by supplying external reasons, and each therefore carries the mechanism described here as a cost. A framework whose own criteria require that the field of what a person may become be left open has thereby been shown to pay, in the currency of that requirement, for every instrument it proposes. Chapter 4 takes up what follows, and takes it up as a question rather than as an embarrassment to be managed.

Consequences and Standing of the Results

Concentration in the Distribution of Issuing Capacity

This chapter examines how the capacity to issue accounts that carry weight is distributed. Its purpose is to assemble the mechanism from results already established, to identify what operates against concentration, and to answer the question of power recorded in Chapter 4. Five sections follow: the mechanism; the concession owed to the analysis of the arrangement that succeeded personal assessment; the tendencies that operate against concentration; what follows for any policy addressed to the distribution; and the answer to the question of who fixes the terms.

Derivation of the Mechanism from Established Results

Four results already established combine into a mechanism, and no further premise is required.

A standing may be acquired only by exercise, since Chapter 3 established that it is never transferred. Exercise requires relations from which accounts can be drawn, and Chapter 5 established that such relations are supplied by positions within institutional hierarchies. Exercise increases the standing rather than depleting it, and the increase raises the rate at which further exercise occurs, which is the compounding structure the literature on cumulative advantage describes . Fourth, accounts are compared through the standings of those who issued them, on the argument of Chapter 1, so an institution choosing whom to ask has reason to ask the party whose accounts it has relied upon before.

Together the four produce concentration without any party selecting for it. Each step is individually unremarkable and each is what a reasonable participant would do. An institution asks the issuer it knows; the issuer’s standing rises; the next institution has more reason to ask the same issuer; and parties in positions that supply no relations acquire nothing whatever their conduct.

One further mechanism reinforces the first. Where a measure is publicly available, the parties measured orient themselves toward it, and the orientation alters the distribution the measure was introduced to describe . Applied here, parties seeking accounts approach the issuers whose accounts are known to carry weight, which raises the exercise rate of exactly those issuers.

Analysis of the Arrangement Succeeding Personal Assessment

One body of work analyses an arrangement that stands to the present one as successor to predecessor, and it must be conceded here because it owns the consequences of sorting persons.

Market institutions increasingly employ actuarial techniques to divide and sort individuals into classification situations that shape their life chances, and the resulting pattern of advantage and disadvantage is cumulative; the analysis proposes that such classification situations may have become the engine of modern class situations . Their illustration is the transformation of consumer credit, and the account records that the officers who formerly assessed creditworthiness relied upon personal knowledge of the party assessed before scoring displaced them.

Two things follow for this volume and the second is the more useful.

Ownership of the consequences of sorting persons into positions that govern their prospects lies with that analysis, and Chapter 1 claims no part of them. Where this chapter reports that the capacity to issue concentrates and that the concentration governs who may be vouched for, the consequence for life chances is theirs.

Moreover, the arrangement they analyse is the one that displaced the arrangement examined here. Chapter 2 excluded from this volume’s object every assessment composed from records by a party who never encountered the person, and that exclusion marks exactly the boundary between the two studies. Their subject is what personal assessment became where it was replaced by scoring; this volume’s subject is the domain in which it was not replaced. Between them the two studies are complementary rather than competing, and a full account of the sorting of persons would require both.

Tendencies Countervailing the Mechanism

Anything operating against concentration here must operate on acquisition, since Chapter 3 closed the route that redistribution would use: where nothing can be moved, nothing can be moved back. Two features of the arrangement meet that condition, and it is worth recording that both were found in the object rather than designed into it, since a mechanism that concentrates without anyone intending it turns out to be checked, such as it is, by features nobody intended either.

A standing ends with the party holding it, on the result of Chapter 3. There is no inheritance, since what would be inherited is the reliance of institutions upon a particular party. Concentration in this domain is therefore bounded by mortality, which is a limit that concentration of transferable holdings does not face. Real and weak at once, the bound redistributes nothing, and the positions that supplied the relations remain, so a successor in the position accumulates afresh.

Second, standings are local to domains. A party whose accounts carry weight in one field carries less in a field that does not know the party, so the concentration is a concentration within domains rather than a single ordering across them. Locality of that kind limits the reach of any one standing without limiting the concentration inside a domain.

Consequences for a Policy Addressed to the Distribution

Chapter 3 established that concentration here admits no correction by transfer, since nothing can be moved from a party holding much to a party holding none. What remains for policy is accordingly restricted in a manner that has no counterpart in the distribution of transferable holdings.

Three kinds of instrument remain available and each addresses a different step of the mechanism.

An instrument may address the supply of relations, by altering who occupies the positions from which accounts may be drawn. This is an instrument of institutional appointment rather than of anything this volume examines, and it operates slowly.

An instrument may address the comparison, by requiring institutions to rank accounts on some basis other than the standings of their issuers. The jurisprudential volume of this series established that no standard is available by which the content of an account could be assessed, so an instrument of this kind would replace one basis of comparison with another rather than with a correct one.

Further, an instrument may address duration, by limiting the period over which reliance upon an account persists. The volume on governance examined an instrument of this shape and found it the one requiring no act by any party. Its effect upon concentration is a question this volume leaves open, since the effect depends on magnitudes that Chapter 5 placed outside reach.

Determination of the Terms of the Practice

Chapter 4 recorded power as the thirteenth question and gave it the form of asking who fixes the terms on which the other twelve are settled. An answer follows from the mechanism above.

The receiving institution fixes what will be asked for and from whom, and thereby fixes which standings are exercised and which grow. The issuer fixes what is written and, by accepting or declining requests, fixes whose experiences enter circulation at all. The person described fixes nothing. That party supplies the material, is the subject of the account, bears the alteration the account effects, and takes no part in determining the terms on which any of it occurs.

This is the same allocation the jurisprudential volume reported from the side of rights, arrived at here from the side of the economy, and the convergence is recorded in Chapter 3. The two descriptions are of one arrangement.

Financialisation of Relational Standing

This chapter asks whether the standing of an issuer can be said to be financialised. Its purpose is to state the criteria the literature supplies, to test the object against each, and to record a result that is affirmative in part and negative in part. The chapter states the criteria, applies them, examines the instrument that satisfies the criterion the present object fails, and states what remains sayable.

The author has elsewhere used a term of his own for the object of this chapter. A search conducted for this volume located no prior literature under that term or its equivalents, so it is treated here as a coinage naming something to be established rather than as a term with a settled meaning.

Criteria Supplied by the Literature

No single definition commands agreement, and the literature has been mapped into three strands: financialisation as a regime of accumulation, financialisation of the non-financial firm, and financialisation of everyday life . Disagreement of that kind obliges a choice of procedure, and the choice matters here more than usually: a chapter testing an object against a single criterion selects its own result, since a criterion can be found on which the object passes and another on which it fails. Testing against the full set is what makes the split informative, and four criteria may accordingly be drawn from the field. They are not equivalent, and they are given in descending order of ease.

Broadest is the increasing role of financial motives, markets, actors, and institutions in the operation of an economy . On this criterion almost any spread of financial reasoning qualifies.

Most demanding is a pattern of accumulation in which profits accrue primarily through financial channels rather than through trade and commodity production . This is a claim about where returns are generated in an economy, and it is measured against national accounts.

A third is the conversion of ever-new domains into income-yielding asset streams .

A fourth is the spread of the valuation techniques of finance into non-financial domains, so that a thing comes to be assessed by the discounting of expected future flows .

Application to the Standing of an Issuer

The object satisfies two criteria and fails two, and the division is clean.

It satisfies the valuation criterion. A standing is assessed prospectively by the parties who deal with it: an institution deciding whom to ask, and a party deciding whose relation to seek, are estimating what the standing will yield in future rather than what it has yielded. Chapter 4 established that the holding produces a stream, and the stream is what the parties value.

It satisfies the criterion of conversion into an income-yielding stream in the weak sense that a standing does yield a stream, which is the return commitment of Chapter 4.

It fails the accumulation criterion. No profit accrues through any financial channel, no market exists in which the holding is traded, and nothing in the arrangement enters national accounts. On the most demanding criterion in the literature the object is not financialised at all.

Finally, it fails the criterion the other three presuppose without stating: that there be an assignable claim. Chapter 4 established that the designation of capital holds here in no respect that presupposes alienation. A stream inseparable from the party generating it cannot be pooled, divided, or sold, and every apparatus of finance operates upon claims that can be.

Income-Share Contracts and the Criterion of Assignability

One instrument shows what the object would have to be in order to satisfy the criterion it fails. Contracts pledging a share of a person’s future income to investors have been developed and analysed, and the legal analysis addresses their regulation as financial instruments .

Such a contract succeeds as a financial instrument for the reason the present object fails. What is pledged is a claim upon income, and a claim is assignable whatever its source. The person remains where they are and the claim moves. The standing examined here supports no such claim: what it produces is not income but requests, access, and reliance, none of which is owed to anyone and none of which could be pledged to a party other than the one who generates it.

That comparison locates the difference precisely. Financialisation of a person’s prospects proceeds by separating a claim from the person. The standing of an issuer admits no such separation, and the arrangement examined in this volume is constituted by the inseparability rather than obstructed by it.

Sense in Which the Designation Applies

What results is a restricted affirmative, and it should be stated in the restricted form wherever the vocabulary is used.

The standing of an issuer is financialised in the sense that it is valued prospectively, by the discounting of an expected future stream, by parties who deal with it. It is financialised in no sense that requires a market, a transferable claim, or a channel through which returns accrue. A statement that such standings have been financialised, made without the restriction, asserts what this chapter has shown to be false on two of the four criteria available.

Two consequences are recorded.

One is that the vocabulary imports expectations the object defeats, and the defeat is informative. Chapter 4 reached the same result for the vocabulary of capital, and in both cases a designation developed for alienable holdings applies in part and fails at the point of alienation. The recurrence of that pattern across two chapters is itself a finding and Chapter 4 takes it up.

The other is that this chapter is the least supported in the volume. No prior literature was located for its object, its affirmative result rests on one of four criteria, and the criterion it relies upon is the one furthest from what the word ordinarily conveys. Chapter 5 records it accordingly.

Convergence and Divergence of the Analytical Routes

This chapter collects the route markings made across the volume and reports the standing of each result, so that a reader who accepts one route and rejects the other may determine what survives. It lists the results carried by both routes, those carried by one, and the point at which the routes conflict. Nothing new is argued.

Results Reached by Both Routes

Three results are reached along both routes.

That comparability between accounts must be supplied from outside the accounts themselves is reached by the framework, since the ontology inherited in Chapter 3 denies that any position settles what a relation amounted to, and by the analytical route, since the established treatment of commensuration holds that a common metric is produced rather than found .

That the person described determines nothing about the terms on which accounts are composed, transmitted, or relied upon is reached in Chapter 1 from the mechanism of concentration, and was reached in the jurisprudential volume of this series from the allocation of rights. The two descriptions converge upon one arrangement, which is the strongest convergence the volume records.

Third, that the introduction of an external reason for an act performed within a relation reduces the supply of that act is reached from the empirical study of a gift-organised practice  and from the finding on contraction inherited from the volume on governance.

Results Reached by a Single Route

Four results rest on the analytical route alone: the degradation of content under unverifiability, which combines discounting toward the average with inflation of what is written ; the direction of distortion where the party assessed supplies the consideration ; the compounding of advantage in the domain of recognition ; and the restricted affirmative on financialisation . Common to the four is that the framework supplies no account of any of them, so a reader who rejects the analytical route loses the volume’s descriptions of how the arrangement behaves while keeping its account of what the arrangement is.

Four results rest on the framework route alone: the placement of the issuer in the position of the general equivalent, which depends upon the derivation inherited from the volume on injustice together with the argument of Chapter 1; the analysis of the circuit in Chapter 4; the finding that the conditions of issuance are reproduced by the asymmetry the series criticises; and the statement of the mechanism of recharacterisation in its general form. A reader who declines the framework’s premises loses these four, and Chapter 3 recorded in advance which premise carries which.

The asymmetry between the lists repeats the pattern reported in the preceding volumes of this series. The analytical route contributes descriptions of how the arrangement behaves; the framework route contributes an account of what the arrangement is. Neither half would carry the volume alone.

Point at Which the Routes Conflict

One conflict is genuine and it has the shape reported in the preceding volume, which is self-defeat rather than contradiction.

The analytical route describes a standing as a holding that accumulates, yields a return, and is valued prospectively. A vocabulary of that kind carries a practical recommendation, and the recommendation is that a holder should manage the holding: issue where issuance will be relied upon, decline where it will not, and attend to the effect of each exercise upon the stock. Nothing in the analytical route forbids this, and the parties who reason in these terms are reasoning correctly within it.

Chapter 5 established that an act performed within a relation is altered by the supply of an external reason for it, and that the supply of such a reason reduces the supply of the act and shifts the composition of what remains. A party who manages a standing has supplied themselves with an external reason, and the account they write is written toward it.

The analytical description of the object, applied by the parties described, degrades the object described. This is not a disagreement between the routes about what is the case. Both routes agree that a standing accumulates and both agree that recharacterisation degrades. The conflict is that the vocabulary in which the first is stated is itself an instance of the second. Chapter 4 states what follows.

Implications for the Generative Relational Framework

A framework that examines a practice must accept examination by its own results, and two results of this volume examine the framework harshly. Chapter 5 found the practice reproduced by the asymmetry the series criticises; Chapter 5 found the instruments of reform carrying a contraction of the practice as their cost. Neither finding was sought, both survived the checks applied to everything else in the volume, and a framework that recorded them without drawing consequences would have failed its own standard of honesty.

Drawing the consequences is this chapter’s purpose. It states what the framework must give up, and what the volume hands forward, in three steps: the discipline required upon the framework’s use of economic vocabulary, which follows from a pattern two chapters share; the question the framework must now answer about its own aim, which follows from the two findings above and is the most consequential thing in the volume; and the results transmitted to later work. Throughout, the method is application of the volume’s findings to its own premises, which is the only method a chapter of this kind can honestly use.

Discipline Required upon the Vocabulary of Holdings

Two chapters reached the same result about two different designations. Chapter 4 found that the vocabulary of capital applies to the standing of an issuer in respect of accumulation, return, and reproduction, and fails in respect of alienation. Chapter 2 found that the vocabulary of financialisation applies in respect of prospective valuation and fails in respect of the assignable claim. In both the designation was developed for holdings that change hands, and in both it failed at exactly that point.

The framework has used economic designations for relational objects without stating which commitments it intends by them, and the recurrence just stated shows what that costs. A designation carries several commitments which are separable, and a use that does not say which are meant will be read as asserting all of them.

The discipline that follows is stated as a requirement upon the framework’s own writing rather than as a revision to a principle. Where an economic designation is applied to a relational object, the commitments intended should be enumerated and those declined should be named. The enumeration costs a sentence and it prevents a reader from supplying, on the framework’s behalf, the operations of transfer that the objects examined here do not admit.

Aim of the Research Programme

Chapter 5 reached a finding uncomfortable for the position this series has taken across five volumes, and Chapter 5 reached a second of the same kind.

One is that the conditions under which accounts can be issued at all are reproduced by the hierarchy of institutional positions. Material for an account is a co-experience observed from a position of greater observational reach, and such positions exist because institutions are arranged with seniors and juniors. The practice depends for its continuation on the asymmetry that made it worth examining.

The other is that the instruments the volume on governance examined operate by supplying external reasons for the act of issuing, and that supplying an external reason for an act performed within a relation reduces the supply of the act and shifts the composition of what remains. The apparatus proposed to improve the practice carries, as a cost, a mechanism that contracts it.

Taken together these pose a question the framework has not answered and should. The series has proceeded as though its aim were the reform of a practice: better allocation of authority over an account, a forum in which the person described may participate, preservation of the materials of reopening, expiry of reliance. The findings of Chapters 5 and 5 indicate that the practice’s conditions of existence are the conditions the framework objects to, and that the instruments of reform carry a contraction of the practice as their cost.

The framework must therefore state which of two aims it holds. On the first, the practice is to be reformed and the contraction is a cost to be weighed, in which case the framework requires a magnitude that Chapter 5 placed outside this volume and that the volume on governance reported as unmeasured. On the second, the practice is to be reduced, in which case the contraction is not a cost at all and the instruments examined are to be assessed by a different criterion entirely.

This volume takes no position between them. It records that the two aims have not been distinguished in the series, that they recommend opposite readings of the same finding, and that the distinction is now unavoidable.

Results Transmitted to the Later Volumes

Four results are handed forward.

To the volume on justice across domains: the allocation reported in Chapter 1, in which the party supplying the material determines nothing about the terms, was reached independently from the side of rights and from the side of the economy. A convergence of that kind constrains any account of what is owed here.

To the volume on conversion between heterogeneous value systems: the standing examined in this volume is a measure that admits no conversion into any of the things it measures, which is a limiting case for any theory of conversion and should be treated as one.

To the framework generally: the discipline stated at the opening of this chapter, and the observation underlying it, which is that the framework’s objects fail the economic designations at the point of alienation with sufficient regularity that non-alienability may be a general feature of relational holdings rather than a peculiarity of this one.

Finally, to the series as a whole: the question of section two, which is prior to further work on remedies and which no later volume should be written without answering. Of the four transmissions the last is the one that binds, since the first three inform later volumes and the fourth conditions whether some of them should be written at all.

Limits of the Account

This chapter states what the volume leaves unresolved and where its support is weakest. It records the limits arising from the object, from the method, from particular chapters, and from the conduct of the survey.

Three limits arise from the object. The volume examines one instrument in a small number of domains, so the generality of its results is the generality of that instrument. It takes the instrument rather than co-experience in general as its object, on the division of labour recorded in Chapter 2, so nothing here establishes anything about co-experience as such. Moreover, it treats a practice conducted privately, so every description of how the practice operates is a description of what the parties report and of what the surveyed literature records.

Three limits arise from the method. The volume establishes no magnitudes, and several of its results would be differently weighed if magnitudes existed: whether concentration is severe, how far content is inflated, and how large a contraction follows an intervention are questions this volume frames and does not answer. Its negative claims are claims about a bounded survey, so a finding that no tradition asks a given question or that no literature treats a given object is a finding about what was searched. In addition, the premises of the framework route are inherited rather than defended, so results resting on that route carry whatever standing those premises have.

Three limits attach to particular chapters and each is recorded where it arises.

Chapter 4 applies an apparatus developed elsewhere and reports that the apparatus does not detect the accumulation that Chapters 3 and 1 identify as the principal economic feature of the arrangement. The limitation belongs to the instrument in this application. A reader should not conclude from a closed circuit that the arrangement is balanced, and the chapter says so.

Chapter 2 is the least supported chapter in the volume. No prior literature was located for its object, its affirmative result rests on one of four criteria drawn from the field, and that criterion is the one furthest from what the term ordinarily conveys. A reader who declines the restricted sense loses that chapter and loses nothing else, since no later chapter depends upon it.

Further, Chapter 1 rests on a survey of the traditions that received less independent verification than the remainder of the bibliography. Its attributions of questions to schools should be treated as orienting rather than as established, and any first edition carrying argumentative weight should be checked before it is relied upon.

Two limits concern what the volume declines. It reaches no recommendation, since it describes an arrangement and proposes none, and the question of Chapter 4 would have to be answered before any recommendation could be framed. Finally, it excludes from its bibliography every source that could not be verified against a publisher, journal, or institutional record, which means that several bodies of work bearing on its subject are absent rather than dismissed.

Conclusion

An account of a co-experience is composed by one participant in a relation and used by a party who took no part in it. Earlier volumes in this series asked what such an account warrants, what rights attach to it, and what apparatus could govern it. This volume asked a political economist’s questions of the same object: what circulates when it moves, on what terms it is exchanged, and what accumulates to those who issue such accounts. Answers were reached to all three, and they are collected here in the order the volume reached them.

On what circulates, the finding is a separation. What moves is a document, an expression, and a force; what stays is the relation, the conditions that qualified it, and the standing of the party who wrote. Accounts drawn from singular relations admit no comparison from their content, so comparison is supplied from outside, and what supplies it is the standing of the issuer. A party whose standing serves in that office stands to the accounts compared as a measure stands to what is measured, and the co-experiences in which that party participated are not among those the operation compares. Nothing in that structure is new except its application: the structure is Marx’s, its extension beyond the commodity has been made by others, and what this volume adds is the application to a party who measures by issuing accounts.

On what accumulates, the finding is a holding of an unfamiliar kind. A standing accumulates by being exercised and is not diminished by exercise; it cannot be transferred, so a concentration of standings admits no correction by transfer, and the sole route of acquisition runs through positions in institutional hierarchies. Tested against the vocabularies built for holdings, the object splits both of them the same way. Capital applies in respect of accumulation, return, and reproduction, and fails at alienation; financialisation applies in respect of prospective valuation, and fails at the assignable claim. Recurrence of that failure across two designations is itself a result, and it raises the possibility, handed to later work, that non-alienability is a general feature of relational holdings rather than a peculiarity of this one.

On the terms of exchange, the finding is a re-description. Three relations carry the practice, of which it names one; it is better described as a transaction between the issuer and the receiving institution, settled in a medium that accrues to the issuer, conducted upon material supplied by a party who is a principal in none of the three. Content degrades under unverifiability by two mechanisms that compound, since inflation raises the average and discounting follows it. Finally, the instrument is market-inalienable in fact while unprohibited in law: nothing forbids its sale, and pricing degrades what is sold, by a mechanism of recharacterisation that payment and regulation trigger alike.

Two findings run against the position this series has taken, and the volume ends on them deliberately. Conditions under which accounts can be issued are reproduced by the asymmetry that made the practice worth examining, and the instruments proposed to improve it carry a contraction of it as their cost. Together they pose a question the series has not answered: whether the aim is the reform of the practice or its reduction. Reform makes the contraction a cost requiring a magnitude nobody has; reduction makes it no cost at all and changes the criterion by which every instrument is assessed. The two recommend opposite readings of the same evidence, and no further work on remedies should proceed before the question is settled. A volume that set out to describe an arrangement ends, as honest description sometimes does, by returning the question of what the describing was for.