chosen, that of institution, allows us to do much more justice tothe
whole set of mechanisms for attributing shape and distributing causali-
tiesthrough which a new entity becomes a legitimate and recognized
member of public life. The word “theory,” in contrast, limits too se-
verely the number of agents responsible for the regrouping and stabili-
zation of the facts.^24 Instruments, bodies, laws, habits, language, forms
of life, calculations, models, metrology, everything can contribute to
the progressive socialization and naturalization of entities, without
any need to distinguish in this list between what might belong to the
old universe of the “sciences” and what seems to depend on the old
domain of the “political.”
Thus we believe we are capable of doing justice to the work of shap-
ing and stabilizing, all the more so because, as we saw in Chapter 1, we
have abandoned the notion of social representation that made it im-
possible, earlier, to give a positive meaning to the term “institution.”
The notion of articulation allows us to connect the quality of reality
to the quantity of work supplied. We do not have the pluriverse on one
side and the ideas humans hold about it on the other. When an entity
becomes a state of the world, this does not happen in appearance and
in spite ofthe institutions that support it, but “for real” andthanksto
the institutions. This solution, impossible before the development of
the sociology of the sciences and political ecology, has become the key
to our effort at elucidation. We are thus going to be able to bring back
into the collective all thevariations in degreein the production and pro-
gressive diffusion of a certainty that the fact-value distinction man-
aged only to crush into a single opposition between knowledge and ig-
norance.^25
We have already explained our position on the third clause, since we
proposed to shift the normative requirement from foundations to the
details of the deployment of matters of concern. Still, as proof will not
be provided before the next chapter, let me leave this point aside for
the moment. Let us simply prepare ourselves to modify the role of the
moralist as much as that of the scientist, the politician, the adminis-
trator, or the citizen.
Let us now turn to the fourth clause, seemingly more difficult to
fulfill. The only justification for the fact-value distinction was to pre-
vent the double smuggling through which unscrupulous rascals caused
their partisan preferences to be taken for ineluctable states of nature
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