Trade, Politics and Freedom The Dialectic of Reversal by Jean-François Melon

The article shows that to deal with the political questions raised by trade, Melon uses an original methodological process, which is described as a dialectic of reversal. First, he applies this process in his novel Mahmoud le Gasnévide to grasp the specificity of economic questions, and then reuses it in his Essai politique sur le commerce, to bring out paradoxes, antinomies and mise en abyme, characteristics of the Baroque spirit. Far from corresponding to an incoherent thought, this approach opens the possibility of qualifying Melon as a baroque economist and therefore of conceiving the premises of a baroque political economy.