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The European crisis puts forward the relations between weak political institutions and powerful financial organizations, the latter appearing sometimes as the real seat of sovereign authority. This illustrates the interest to question the relations between political sovereignty and monetary sovereignty. In order to get theoretical insights on these links, we mobilize the theoretical works of John Rogers Commons (1862-1945) who was a witness and analyst of a time already marked by economic importance and political power of the financial sector. Moreover, before that time, this author had dedicated substantial developments to the study of the evolution of forms of sovereignty and to the genesis of modern rules of law (Commons, 1899-1900). Besides, Commons' critical and constructive contribution to institutional economics gives a major place to money, which he considers to be one of the central institutions of capitalism (Commons, [1934] 1990). But Commons doesn't relate much and explicitly money to sovereignty; his theories of money and of sovereignty are mainly separated. Nevertheless we think that they are implicitly related in his main writings, and in this article, we try to make these relations explicit. For Commons, the history of societies can be reduced to a process of mediation of social violence, from an origin where coercion and bonds of debts “from which anybody cannot be released” prevail. We will demonstrate that, in this process of pacification, law and money hold a similar status as they support “ one man's capacity of influencing the acts of another, by means not of his own strength but of the opinion or the force of society ” (Holland, quoted by Commons, SVS IV, 546). Law and money so constitute two attributes of sovereignty in the modern State. But Commons' analysis also makes possible to consider money in itself, as a possible seat of sovereignty and a potential competitor to the State.
In the first section of the paper, we shall display Commons' political conception of sovereignty. For Commons, “ sovereignty is the authority to settle disputes between transactors, thereby creating order (and sovereignty is ) not singular or absolute, but multiple and relative ” (Dugger, 1996, 427). Then, sovereignty is describe as a process of genesis and transformation of social institutions, and of their modalities of control and whose expression varies along the times. The outcome and the modern form of sovereignty that result from this movement are expressed in Law and the legal institutions. In the second section, we shall present the conception of money developed by Commons. Our interpretation leads to consider that for Commons money is an institution that directly participates in the genesis of modern sovereignty; it can be considered as a component of the government of society whose power is a part of sovereignty just like judiciary power is. However, in its contemporary form of banking and credit relationships, monetary institutions (rules) may be captured by a cohesive group affiliated with banking and financial system in opposition to political sovereignty.
