ABSTRACT
The coining of diplomacy allowed for the first proper separation of politics into a foreign and a domestic branch. While these practices, up until the French Revolution, had both been referred to as politics, the naming seems to imply that both of them now contained what seemed to be separate social links. While subjects under an absolute monarchy served their sovereign, that is, the people’s compliance ensures the continuation of the monarch’s power through their servitude, the presence of another sovereign posed an existential threat to the Master’s very possibility for survival. However, through calling for a diplomacy of trade and commerce, making possible the analogy between the market of the state and the global market, the metaphor is able to intervene through a “substitution of one signifier for another in a chain”, replacing an antagonism internal to politics with a choice between the true and the false approach to both politics and diplomacy.
