There is no doubt that the market as a reality and political economy as a theory played an important role in the liberal critique. But liberalism is neither the consequences nor the development of theses; rather, the market played, in the liberal critique, the role of a "test", a locus of privileged experience where one can identify the effects of excessive governmentality and even weigh their significance; the analysis of the mechanism of "dearth" or more generally, of the grain trade in the middle of the eighteenth century, was meant to show the point at which governing was always governing too much. Therefore, an analysis to make visible, in the form of evidence, the formation of the value and circulation of wealth-or, on the contrary, an analysis presupposing the intrinsic invisibility of the connection between individual profit-seeking and the growth of collective wealth-economics, in any case, shows a basic incompatibility between the optimal development of the economic process and maximisation of government procedures. It is by this, more than by the play of ideas, that the French or English economists broke away from mercantilism and cameralism; they freed reflection on economic practice from the hegemony of the "reason of state" and from the saturation of governmental intervention. By using it as a measure of "governing too much," they placed it "at the limit" of governmental action. Liberalism does not derive from juridical thought any more than it does from an economic analysis. It is not the idea of a political society founded on a contractual tie that gave birth to it; but in the search for a liberal technology of government.
Which of the following played a role in the liberal critique?
