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The social world is full of collective entities. But how do collective entities emerge, and what are they made of? What supports their public existence? This book offers a theoretical and empirical response to these questions, through the case of one of these entities: the national economy in France. The national economy exists as an entity, with its own agency and sometimes even its own personality, in France as in almost every country. Journalists, politicians, trade unionists, business leaders, economists, and the general public closely follow the developments of the national economy and debate its potential for growth or decline.

This book offers a biography of the French economy, backtracking the successive events that, over the course of the twentieth century, helped establish it as an autonomous domain. Drawing on interviews, as well as institutional archives, Thomas Angeletti determines how economists and their devices invented the French economy and how, once present on the public scene, this entity developed a life of its own.