From the 2008 financial crisis and the demise of neoliberalism, a bipolar scenario emerges, marked by antagonism between global centres of economic governance and emerging local political subjects, which are predominantly identitary. The article shows that this bipolarity is rooted in modern institutional mechanisms, which isolate state sovereignty and market economy as two separate spheres, removing their common root and, with it, the inseparability of economic value and political power. The emergence of this inseparability, which is the dominant feature of recent decades, should be seen as an irreversible process, but one that induces dangerous social instability and threatens both the legitimacy of the rulers and the self-determination of the ruled at the same time.