or its epistemology, but rather to offer to nature a power in the man-
agement of human affairs that the most arrogant of its older zealots
would never have dared give it. The indisputable nature known by Sci-
ence defined the order of respective importance of entities, an order
that was supposed to close off all discussion among humans hence-
forth about what it was important to do and whom it was important
to protect. Political ecologists have been content to give a coat of ap-
ple-green paint to the gray of the primary qualities. Neither Plato nor
Descartes nor Marx would have dared to go that far toward emptying
public life of its proper forms of discussion, to short-circuit them by
the incontestable viewpoint of the very nature of things in themselves,
whose obligations are no longer only causal but also moral and politi-
cal. It has become the disreputable job of ecological thinkers, espe-
cially those among them who claim to have broken “radically” with
the “Western outlook,” with “capitalism,” with “anthropocentrism,”
to bring this culmination of modernism to fruition!
Fortunately, as we have seen, ecological crises bring about more
profound innovations in political philosophy than do their theoreti-
cians, who are unable to wean themselves from the advantage offered
by the conservation of nature. What might be called the “state of law
of nature,” and which we now have to discover, requires quite differ-
ent sacrifices and a quite different, much slower pace. The old Consti-
tution claimed to unify the common world once and for all, without
discussion and without due process, by a metaphysics of nature that
defined the primary qualities, meanwhile abandoning the secondary
qualities alone to the plurality of beliefs. It is understandable that peo-
ple find it hard to give up the conveniences procured by such an arbi-
trage between the indisputable and the disputable. The Constitution
that we seek to draw up affirms, on the contrary, that the only way to
compose a common world, and thus to escape later on from a multi-
plicity of interests and a plurality of beliefs, consists precisely innot
dividing up at the outset and without due process what is common
and what is private, what is objective and what is subjective. Whereas
the moral question of the common good was separated from the phys-
ical and epistemological question of the common world*, we main-
tain, on the contrary, that these questions must be brought together so
that the question of thegoodcommon world, of thebestof possible
worlds, of thecosmos,can be raised again from scratch.
A NEW SEPARATION OF POWERS
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