ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I have sought to demonstrate that the ideological stereotype which sets the logic of property and civil law at right angles to that of power and public law naturalized a fragile and transient conjuncture in the genealogy of Western juridical and political philosophy. But the ontological distance which was perceived between the realms of property and power-the differential sharpness with which the line of demarcation was drawn-is not the only variable present. The liberal dichotomy, as was intermittently noticed, simultaneously presumed a definite order of causal priority, which established the realm of production as infrastructural and basic, and set up property as an unlimited right of exclusion which could not be infringed by the public power. Although likewise presented as a natural fact, this sequence of causal and productive primacy turned out to be equally contextual and historically fragile as the idea of the divide itself. Indeed, it constituted a reversal of an older sequence in which the sphere of politics was characterized as most decisive, and in which sovereignty was depicted as a radiating substance from which property rights ultimately depended and derived.
