The eighteenth century was not ignorant far from it of the play of economic determinations: it had provided explanations of how money could ﬂow into a country or out of it, how prices rose or fell, how production grew, stagnated, or diminished; but all these movements were defined on the basis of a tabulated space in which all values were able to represent one another; prices increased when the representing elements increased faster than the elements represented; production diminished when the instruments of representation diminished in relation to the things to be represented, etc.