ABSTRACT
The market is a place of exchange and competition, where all comers do their best to improve their own lot. The starting point of any market-rational attitude is the assumption that a smoothly functioning market is in fact to the greatest advantage of the greatest number. The holding of elections, their timing, the system by which votes are translated into seats, when and how parliament is constituted, how the president is selected—all these are rules of the game in the market sense, with their ultimate sanction, perhaps, in a constitutional court. Plan rationality presupposes the possibility of certainty; whoever assumes this possibility takes a step down the path that all too predictably ends in the dogmatizing of error. Market rationality, by contrast, presupposes the fundamental uncertainty of our knowledge; the rules of the game keep all results reversible, for the game in question, the political process as a whole, has no end.
