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Writer's pictureSabrina Abib

Regulation & Time

Updated: Jan 24, 2018

Georges Canguilhem was a French philosopher and physician who specialized in epistemology and philosophy of science.


He wrote in 1968 the article « Regulation » for the Encyclopaedia Universalis :


"Le concept de régulation occupe aujourd’hui la quasi-totalité des opérations de l’être vivant : morphogenèse, régénération des parties mutilées, maintien de l’équilibre dynamique, adaptation aux conditions de vie dans le milieu. La régulation c’est le fait biologique par excellence. C’est la raison pour laquelle l’interprétation actuelle des processus de régulation cherche ses modèles les plus expressifs dans la théorie de l’information et dans la cybernétique. Un système cybernétique est un ensemble de variables dont la constance à travers le temps est contrôlée et assurée par un détecteur de perturbations, dont l’action en retour, ou si l’on veut la réaction active, déclenchée par un signal d’écart, a pour effet, l’annulation de la cause perturbatrice et le maintien de la valeur fonctionnelle inscrite comme norme dans la structure même".


The concept of regulation is described by Canguilhem as a "government of the time", where the controled modalities are carried out "in time, on time and by time itself and by the setting up of devices of re-turn to a constant beforehand".


This reflection leads us to establish the link with our subject of study specific to finance. How to regulate a finance that fits in a short time? It turns out that the major challenges of any regulation today is the control of time. We observe thereafter multiple ramifications of time : the legislative time, the political time, the financial time.


An efficient regulation would imply de facto "a government of time", dilated disparately by many actors such as lawmakers, politicians, markets players that all strive to obtain a monopoly of time.


Thus, regulation implies an efficient governance of time. And the governance of time can only be effective by annihilating it.


We have to underline that Time is nowadays accelerating especially with the rise of new technologies and has therefore to lead us think about new operational methods of governance especially dealing with ethical questions in the economic arena.

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