Valore | prezzo di mercato, Sociologia | Economics

Boltanski and Thevenot have defined economic value as price justification. This definition imposes to consider the value and current market price as not necessarily coincident: in social reality, both collective processes of price formation and collective processes meant to justify them or to consider them unjustified are to be found. The author reminds that such tension between value and price has been constant in the European economic thought since Summa theologica until the late Spanish Scholasticism of the XVII century. Already thwarted by the first treatises on currency, it has gained new strength in the theories of value/labour from Smith to Ricardo, to Marx until, finally and partially, Mill. In this stage it has been attempted to make labour a measure of value and hence the final criterium of price definition in situations of balance between supply and demand. The difficulties of such measurement attempt have certainly fostered the so-called marginalist revolution, which is characterized by the abolition of the tension between value and price and for having chosen as object of study the prices alone.As in the scientific revolutions theorized by Kuhn, the new paradigm has got rid from the tangles and aporias of the former paradigm but has paid the cost of a depletion of socio-economic analysis: it would fit to speak of a regressive revolution. From the same book by Boltanski and Thevenot, the Enrichissement, one can find an example of the permanence of the need for justification based on broadly shared criteria: the current spread of a particular market, the one of collectibles, whose shared justification regards their capacity of indefinitely duration and escape from consumption.The essay frames the issue and its arguments within a more general reflection upon the relationships between sociology and economics.