Résumé en anglais

The recent history of the prudent investment standard, which provides clear evidence of the changes under way in American capitalism, is recounted by examining three processes: legislative, regulatory and judiciary. By bringing these three into a single study, we can follow up on how this standard has circulated through multiple historical processes of production and institutionalization. Its meaning has been negotiated both at the junction between the federal government's regulatory authority and the political power wielded by employers and financiers and at the junction between the procedural autonomy of judges and the intellectual authority drawn from economic theories. This method leads us to observe that there is no legal definition of this "prudence" but, instead, several overlapping acceptations of the phrase. This suggests that the force of the law is based on this semantic diversity, the latter being put to use in the structural evolution of financial capitalism.