The last months of 2008 saw the outbreak of the most severe economic crisis since 1929.

This crisis may represent a major reconfiguration of world economic councils (from G7 to G20) and also mark profound changes in the relationship between states and the economic and financial domains. Sociological reasoning cannot restrain from reflecting on the instruments that were central to the crisis, on these weapons of mass destruction of the economy: financial innovations, and especially the most responsible for the subprime crisis, financial derivatives. Although addressed in some studies (Allen and Pryke, 2000, Mackenzie and Millo, 2003; Arnoldi, 2004; LiPuma and Lee, 2005), the present context requires an approach which describes the role of derivatives as an instrument of financial domination. This is an indispensable initiative towards an understanding of how this technology sabotaged financial hegemony from the inside. Derivatives are financial innovations which allow risk control. This is an interesting way to define these instruments, because it presents them as an economic symptom of the "risk society" (Beck, 1986). But how does the economy deal with the perception that their activity is something surrounded by threats? The economic system understands things on its terms (Luhmann, 1998); its understanding and control of risk are based on pricing and transactions in the market. The construction of risks according to the understanding of the economy requires, however, a series of operations. Bruno Latour (1987) and Michel Callon (1986) provide a list of such operations, which can be summarized as the following: visualization, disentanglement and standardization. If we go back to Adam Smith's trade of the pin-maker, it is not difficult to see how even this prosaic capitalist production site is subject to a myriad of risks. Our pin-maker is exposed to fluctuations in the market price of his pins, which may fall and reduce his profits to zero. This is the so called market risk. His customers may buy pins on term and, at one point, they can simply stop paying. This is the so called credit risk. The taxonomy of economic risks is very diverse and rich, showing how people are attentive seeing and classifying different types of menaces in the economy. This is a first step towards the exploitation of risks by financial innovations: it needs to be categorized, it has to be visible. Once visible, risk may be disentangled. This is arranged through a negotiation between the company that wants to disengage from risk and a bank or other financial institution that wants to take it. An example can be draw from the simplest of derivatives, the forward contract. The pinmaker buys its raw materials from abroad and, therefore, in order to avoid exposure to exchange rate changes of the post-Bretton Woods world, he goes to a bank and negotiates the delivery of a certain amount of foreign currency, in a specified future date, but at a price determined in the present. Both visible and disentangled from the economic activity of a specific company, risk becomes then mobile. It can be dissociated from the place where it is created and can circulate and be transfered among different hands. The acceleration of its mobility depends yet on another operation: risk needs to be standardized and combinable. The contract for the transfer of risk, which our pin-maker signed the last paragraph, is not standardized. But if contracts are drawn up with equal terms and and the same values, they can be traded by banks in aftermarket. Risk can thus circulate freely and can also change hands anonymously without any apparent limit. The perception of production as something surrounded by risks combined with the financial tools to deal with them are responsible for a reconceptualization of economic activity. The traditional idea of economic activity in the manufacturing sector emphasizes the importance of organizational or entrepreneurial (or yet exploitational) values, but this view is fiercely challenged by the idea of an economy of risk. Producing a good means incurring in various exposures to losses; production no longer means organization (or exploitation) of productive factors, but prevention from threats. Economic activity seen as risk management corresponds to the work of institutional investors and

other financial institutions, which effectively confine themselves to the control of the adequate exposure level of financial investments, balancing speculation and hedging. This correspondence points to the original location from which this new cognitive scheme about the economy has sprung. Not only did the financial world found this new way of looking at economic reality, but it did also promote finance to the status of translator of other economic agents' interests. Finance translate their interests in its terms and, thus, reconstruct their goals so they have to go through the financial world to carry out their objectives (Callon, 1986; Akrich, Callon, Latour, 2002). The relation of companies with derivatives constitute the possibility of action at distance (Latour, 1987) on its financial costs. Nevertheless, this is not a remote action in geographical terms, as in cartographic or techno-scientific inscriptions (Latour, 1990). Rather, derivatives allow control over the action of future facts (Tarde, 1901), i.e., they allow action at temporal distance and control of future events. Thus, companies may know at which price they may acquire foreign currency for its international operations in the future by means of currency options or yet they may also know the value of a debt's services with a variable interest rate through an interest rate swap. While money potentially controls geographically scattered resources, financial innovations enable control over resources scattered over time. The hegemony of financial power is a recurring theme in sociological thought (Hilferding, 1981; Mintz and Schwarz, 1985; Orlan, 1999). Financial innovation is one of the main instruments by which financial actors maintain that position. These actors are the center of a network; they have the ability to enroll several other players on their program and, hence, assume the size of a macro-actor (Callon, Latour, 1981). The world, according to the ambition of this logic, moves neither under the dominance of efficiency (cit industrielle), nor under the dominance of flexibility and willingness to projects (cit de projets) (Boltanski; Chiapello, 1999). Financial institutions associate themselves with an array of different actors, companies, government regulation agencies, people, mathematical models, contracts, placing themselves at the center of a chain of elements (irreversibly) stabilized and taking in their hands the construction of the economy. The recent crisis denaturalized financial hegemony and showed how this setting can be reversed not only by resistance of counterhegemonic programs, but also by instruments of its own. Akrich, M.; Callon, M.; Latour, B. (2002) The key to success in innovation, part I: the art of interessement. International Journal of Innovation Management. 6(2), pp.187206. Arnoldi, Jakob. (2004) Derivatives: Virtual values and real risks. Theory, Culture & Society. 21(6), pp.23-24. Beck, Ulrich. (1986) Risk society. London: Sage. Boltanski, Luc; Chiapello, ve. (1999) Le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Paris: Gallimard. Callon, Michel. (1986) Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of Saint Brieuc Bay. in: Law, John (Ed.). Power, Action and Belief: a new Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp.196-233. Callon, M.; Latour, B. (1981) Unscrewing the big Leviatan: how actors macro-structure reality and how sociologists help them to do so. in: Knorr, C.; Cicourel, A. (Eds.). Advances in social theory and methodology: towards an integration of micro and macro sociologies . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp.277-303. Hilferding, Rudolf. (1981 [1921]) Financial capital. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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