tions, dispersed everywhere; one allows it to catch hold of the multi-
tudes without crushing them, and the other allows it to get them to
speak in a single voice without scattering. If we are to begin to under-
stand the collective’s new functions in a positive way, we still have to
add to it the contributions of the other professions: market organizers,
moralists, and later, in Chapter 5, administrators.
The Contribution of Economists
With the economists of the Old Regime, the collective was stifled,
obliged to define itself as a natural and self-regulated domain, subject
to indisputable laws capable of producing values by simple calcula-
tions. All this changes if the discipline of economics-as-discipline is
freed of the obligation to reflect the economy-as-infrastructure.^33 The
economists, or rather the economizers, the “economy performers,”
will then be able to contribute in a decisive way to the creation of a
scenario for the common world (no. 6), since they are becoming capa-
ble of reinforcing the difference between the inside and the outside of
the collective. Talking about economics as a specific sphere reduces
politics to a rump agency that cannot do the job. Offering the col-
lective as a whole ascale modelthat designatesexplicitlywhat is taken
into account (internalized) and what is rejected, thrown out (external-
ized)—this is what will make it possible to dramatize, to theatricalize
the general accounting of the collective at a given moment of its explo-
ration of the common world. WhenHomo oeconomicusdesignated the
foundation of universal anthropology, the inquiry into the composi-
tion of the world ceased at once. But if we use the term “global econ-
omy” to designate a provisional version offered to the collective that
will allow it to accept one list of entities and reject another, then eco-
nomics, like all the social sciences, plays an indispensable political
role: itreflexively represents the collective to itself.Neither the sciences
nor politicians manage to dramatize the states to such an extent, since
they never end up with one single bottom line. The simplistic charac-
ter of which economics is so often accused becomes on the contrary
its most striking quality, the only one that can produce a scale model
of the common world. Thinking they had come across an instance of
self-regulation, the adherents of natural equilibria made a small mis-
take on the placement of the prefix “self.” Yes, economics is aself-
POLITICS OF NATURE
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