A graduate of École Polytechnique, an administrator at INSEE, and a professor of economics, Michel Aglietta passed away on April 24, 2025, at the age of 87. He was the economic thinker who left his mark on the late^20thcentury with his brilliant ideas. As André Orléan notes, his “intellectual power” set him apart from everyone else. So did his inventiveness. An analysis of his original thinking, as explained by Michel Aglietta himself in an interview he granted to the authors of this text.

Michel Aglietta’s body of work is not that of a teacher-researcher who strictly adheres to the conventions of the academic world. Although unanimously recognized for his brilliant career, his work is first and foremost intellectual, inventive, and captivating. It stems largely from a constant curiosity to delve deeper and further into understanding the dynamics of capitalism, its crises, and its regulatory mechanisms. It also stems from Michel Aglietta’s desire to share knowledge and help it flourish—likea “gardener”—where everyone has the opportunity to cultivate their own plot, just as a gardener tends his garden and encourages others to do the same.

To this end, his reliance on the social sciences (primarily history, sociology, and philosophy) enabled him to carry out this project for more than fifty years. As Michel Aglietta himself acknowledged in an exclusive interview he granted us in September 2018: “For my part, I have not sought to create a dogmatic doctrine. What has always interested me is the flow of new and ongoing research.”

The Origins: The Theory of Regulation

Along with Robert Boyer, Alain Lipietz, Jacques Mazier, and the economists at Cepremap, Michel Aglietta was a founding figure of the theory of regulation, which opened up a new intellectual field in France beginning in the late 1970s. In economics, this was a “new science” that would gain widespread acceptance, to borrow Yamina Tadjeddine’s perspective. Robert Boyer recalls that Michel Aglietta was working at that time with the aforementioned economists on inflation and macroeconomic modeling, particularly within a group of intellectuals critical of INSEE, the Ministry of Finance, the university, and the General Commission for Planning. “In 1975, I organized a seminar on my dissertation. The theory of regulation emerged from the convergence of these two events. As far as I’m concerned, it was an invaluable aid in writing the book *Regulation and the Crises of Capitalism*.”

The title of this book reveals a broader intellectual ambition that took shape very early in his career. The introduction of the concept of regulation clearly shows that Michel Aglietta offers a fresh perspective on macroeconomic phenomena: “We needed to study capitalism as a social formation embedded in history and contributing to its making.”

A project that was already part of his dissertation

This use of history to “conduct” economic analysis was already evident in his dissertation, supervised by Raymond Barre and completed in part in the United States. While there, Michel Aglietta was able to examine the early reflections of American institutionalists on the post-Civil War context, particularly through archival research: “The development of large corporations in the United States beginning in the 1880s sheds light on this question of institutions. There was a great deal of sociological reflection on governance at the time. But, to stay on track, one must have a theoretical grounding in political economy and economic policy; the ideas of regulation and institutional forms came together very quickly in my mind.”

Pure economics does not exist

Thus, for Michel Aglietta, the reference to history as a social science is dictated by the very nature of capitalism, which must be analyzed over the long term—particularly through its crises and its potential for regulation. According to him, this openness to history as a fundamental component of the political economy approach marks a clear distinction between mainstream economists and others. Reflecting on May 1968, he recalls: “Then came the events of 1968, which were a huge surprise and required, in order to analyze them, theoretical foundations other than those taught in post-Polytechnique schools, as well as in university economics departments at the time. In fact, one had to admit that there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ economy […]. I had read Marx, Keynes, and Perroux, and I was familiar with the ideas of the French Historical School, so I already had some knowledge of alternative conceptions of the economy—and not just one.”

But while an economist’s use of history affirms an epistemological choice, one must still know which historical references to draw upon. Michel Aglietta is clear about his intellectual foundations: “First, the importance of history in the development of transformations in growth regimes. The concept of a growth regime became clear to me when I was writing my dissertation. Since history was the guide for my approach, Fernand Braudel was a key source of inspiration. Then I attempted to formulate a hypothesis to explain how the contradictions highlighted by Marx can be overcome through institutional change, which itself is produced by social struggles. “And that is why I focused at that time on institutional change and on what I called ‘forms of regulation’; I formulated this hypothesis of regulation based on a comparison of various empirical elements.”

Expanding on this line of thought: “Polanyi is the author who has inspired me greatly because he examines the Industrial Revolution as a transformation of social relations. He studied the period during which capitalism destroyed the institutional forms and organic relationships of past civil societies. And I was working on the need for other institutional forms to be rebuilt based on the political compromises made possible by the organization of wage-earning workers.”

The Need for a Long-Term Perspective

These remarks clearly confirm that, according to Michel Aglietta, a macroeconomic study of economic relations can only be conducted if they are viewed over the long term. The long term has a lasting impact on social relations, which in turn transform the dynamics of a society.

Because understanding and explaining social relations is one of the goals of sociology, Michel Aglietta is therefore also interested in this social science as a way to further enrich his analysis. In this regard, the sociologist who had the greatest influence on him was Pierre Bourdieu, whom he recalls “having known at ENSAE, as a teacher.”  ” “Bourdieu was something of a turning point for me at a certain stage, particularly in understanding how institutional forms were shaped by the dynamics of society. What I wanted to understand was collective bargaining as a fundamental mechanism for stabilizing capitalism.”

Currency as a Bargaining Tool

However, one subject of study emerged at the heart of collective bargaining as a fundamental mechanism for stabilizing capitalism—one that interested Michel Aglietta from very early on: money. His analysis would open up new horizons for “his” approach to political economy, grounded in an openness to the social sciences.

“Money is the fundamental social bond of market societies. This is the primary truth of political economy,” Michel Agliettanoted, again during our interview.”

Money is indeed what enables exchange, but it is defined primarily through its function as a unit of account. Indeed, the institutionalization of the unit of account is the result of collective negotiations—and thus a political choice—regarding the definition of value, that is, what each person is willing to give up in terms of their possession of “things” in order to acquire other “things.” From this perspective, the unit of account embodies both the opportunities and the tensions between the universal and the particular, between liberation and constraint. In other words, money relates to the issue of regulation because it is “violent.” It is this dimension of money that Michel Aglietta, together with André Orléan, reveals in the groundbreaking and seminal work *La Violence de la monnaie*(* The Violence of Money*), published by PUF in 1982.

This book represents a true break from the standard approach because, according to Michel Aglietta, “what was missing was a theoretical reflection on money. We needed to develop a conceptual framework for money in order to understand what Marx was saying about the reversal of the forms of value M-A-M, leading to their inversion into A-M-A”—that is, the logic of finance: making money from money.

Currency: A Cornerstone of the Social System

After reading Georg Simmel and Max Weber, Michel Aglietta revisits the value of drawing parallels with René Girard ’s anthropological thought.

“André Orléan and I came across René Girard’s *Violence and the Sacred*, where we read about the logic of the endogenous process of expelling the violence of desire for the Other into the scapegoat through mimetic polarization. This process applies to the expulsion of liquidity from the world of commodities, because liquidity is what everyone desires precisely because everyone desires it. We were the only ones to draw a connection between Girard and economics. The application of this process to analyze money—as a collective entity resulting from unanimous polarization—defines a collective trust arising from the mimetic model” […]

“In this genesis of money, the link to sociology was theoretical. It was exactly what we needed. However, this form of expulsion is not stable in and of itself, since the point of convergence can be arbitrary; thus, it can be destroyed by polarization around another focal point. Indeed, money experiences existential crises. But at the same time, what Girard showed us was the possibility of institutionalizing expulsion, and for him, of course, this represented another level of anthropological analysis […]. For us, this expulsion in market societies was institutionalization through sovereignty—that is, through an entity that legitimizes money as a public good; hence the notion of ambivalence. The ambivalence of money allows us to understand both that money is truly a fundamental institution and that it eludes political discretion, even as it is legitimized by the constitutional order. This “concept” of money is effective for interpreting debates on monetary doctrine, the responsibilities of central banks, the role of rules, and the limits of discretion in monetary policy.”

In short, Michel Aglietta and André Orléan show that money is much more than an economic phenomenon. Having always been the cornerstone of social cohesion, it thus embodies, in turn, mimetic violence as well as institutional trust—a theoretical breakthrough made possible by drawing on Girard’s work. While this strong connection to Girard’s thought is well known, Bourdieu’s influence on Michel Aglietta is less so.

“The merit of thinkers like Bourdieu—even though money was not his primary focus—was to show how society creates forms of organization that transcend the individual and make it possible to achieve collective goals and to bring about changes in certain social relations.”

The Role of the Planning Commission

Consequently, the power of Aglietta’s thinking on money lies precisely in his ability to integrate money as a social relationship into the heart of macroeconomic analysis by linking modeling with the institutional approach to money: “Collective bargaining was my idea from the very beginning, because in France we could see how it worked. […] With the planning efforts of the 1960s, there were business associations and labor unions, all of which came together around a table within an agency called the Commissariat du Plan. The advantage of INSEE, which supported these programs, was that it provided the tools for modeling five-year scenarios that helped frame the debate. I saw these political mechanisms for forging social compromises in action. That’s what set me on the path to formalizing and theorizing the concept of intermediate institutional forms and the role of intermediation. Later, in finance, this proved to be very important. When I joined CEPII, I generalized this approach to the international context.”

Today, Michel Aglietta’s original methodological approach demonstrates its exceptional scope and incredible relevance when it comes to making sense of recent developments in the international monetary system, the role of the U.S. dollar, or the rise of Chinese capitalism: “I believe that the structuring around key currencies is a phase of history that is coming to an end. Replacing the dollar with another key currency? No, we need to think in terms of multilateralism. What form will an international currency compatible with multilateralism take? What’s quite interesting , though , is that I had already written *The End of Key Currencies* as early as 1987. It was an intuition stemming from the theory of money as a collective good. In a multipolar world, trust must be anchored in a form of safe, ultimate asset that is not the debt of any single country. The idea was not new. I was rereading Keynes’s writings from 1941–1943, when he was preparing his report for Bretton Woods. He, of course, viewed it in the context of the conditions of the time, within the logic of systems where capital was controlled. But it can be done within a regime of complete globalization. That’s why, among other things, I’m working extensively on the factual, empirical evidence that shows just how much the world is becoming multipolar—with both divergent forces driving fragmentation and the need for a global common good required by climate finance.”

The Unsurpassed Model of the Economic Engineer

Ultimately, it is not possible to fully capture the breadth of an economist’s thought such as Michel Aglietta’s. Through the spontaneous and fruitful dialogue with other social sciences that he has outlined for us, however, it is easy to perceive the scope and inventiveness of the advances made by this tireless contributor to a resolutely comprehensive political economy. He is the quintessential example of the French engineer-economist who has devoted his thinking to understanding the central focus of economic science—one that Marx and Keynes grappled with before him: providing an understanding of capitalism and its underlying mechanisms. This understanding is based on an original theoretical framework that remains consistently concerned with normativity (how should an economy be regulated?) and social justice—principles that he has always placed at the heart of his commitments.

Throughout a life devoted to political economy, Michel Aglietta essentially embodied the “wisdom of the great” through his ability to:

• be a brilliant macroeconomist, skilled at working with numbers but, above all, at building models;

• to forge links with other social sciences, with the aim of strengthening the relevance of its macroeconomic approach. As we have shown elsewhere, drawing on various concepts and authors is in fact never opportunistic, but always appropriate, as it is guided by a desire to enhance the interpretive power of economic analysis;

• to be an approachable intellectual who is always committed to educating and empowering others.

In his history of economic analysis, Schumpeter believed that an economist must master the four basic methods of economic analysis: theory, statistics, history, and economic sociology. By this standard, Michel Aglietta is undoubtedly a truly great economist—an independent French economist and a passionate contributor to both theoretical and applied economic thought. His exceptional ideas are well worth exploring for younger generations of economists.