the common habitatwill be calculated,they say,and no longer composed.
The bronze laws of economics will have eliminated ecopolitics. The
collective, emptied of its substance, will no longer know how to come
together.^10
It would be pointless to have avoided the danger that the appeal to
Science poses for democracy if we were to retain, at the very heart
of the collective, the stupefying assertion according to which the pro-
duction of values is itself the simple observation of a fact! The “sci-
ence of values,” axiology, would reign in place of political ecology,
short-circuiting both the hierarchization of values and the production
of sciences. No, unquestionably, nothing must intervene to attenuate
the tension between economics and ecology: both are equallypolitical,
but the first takes place apart from due process, while the second
should have the courage to give itself forms that are appropriate to its
historical mission. The clandestine bicameralism of the first, so typi-
cal of modernism, has to yield to the explicit bicameralism of the sec-
ond, so typical of the era that follows—and that has preceded, that en-
compasses, that accompanies—modernization and its quick shortcuts.
Fortunately, economics mixes science with politics: since we have
succeeded in liberating the sciences from the grip of Science, and poli-
tics from the prison of the social world, it must be possible to liberate
economics from its failure to dissimulate the search for values under
already-established facts and the search for facts under already-calcu-
lated values, by making it undergo in its turn the little transformation
of Chapter 3. By asking how it subjects itself to the two powers of rep-
resentation (“How many are we?” “Can we live together?”), it be-
comes much morepresentable,since its capacities forrepresentationare
improved at once. Instead of distinguishing vertically between facts
and values (without ever succeeding), it can easily distinguishhorizon-
tallybetween the top and the bottom of the collective (see Figure 3.1).
So political economics lands on its feet! We can differentiate once
again, as the wisdom of English permits, between economics as a dis-
cipline and the economy as an activity.^11
There is no such thing as an economy, just as there is no such
thing as aHomo oeconomicus,but there is indeed a progressive econo-
mization of relations. We do not find, at the bottom, an economic in-
frastructure that the economists, situated above, would study: the
economizers(in the broad sense of the term, which has to include ac-
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
135