Societal Tectonics and the Art of the Deal

This is a preliminary draft of the seventh of what will be eight chapters in a book titled Politics as a Peculiar Business: Public Choice in a System of Entangled Political Economy. This chapter explains that collectively organized economic activity is catallactical in nature, as those activities are instantiations of a generalized art of the deal. To be sure, political catallaxy operates under different institutional arrangements than market catallaxy. Market transactions are at base reducible to dyadic interactions. In contrast, political transactions are necessarily triadic. This difference in transactional structure generates a continual flow of societal tectonics of varying magnitudes, but which are baked into the cake, so to speak, all the same.