Thanks to the economic calculation, all these entities become at least
commensurable.If we imagine for a moment that this calculation de-
scribes their deepest values in the way that the primary qualities*
were supposed to define the ultimate meaning of things under the Old
Regime, we are obviously on the wrong track. But under the new Con-
stitution, no one would make this error any longer, since the distance
between the reality of the things that are produced, purchased, appre-
ciated, consumed, rejected, or destroyed and the fragile surfaces on
which the accounts are inscribed now appears fairly visible. Once
again, economics draws its strength from its weakness.^35 Instead of de-
fending its virtues by imagining a metaphysics, an anthropology, and a
psychology entirely invented to serve its own utopia, as was done in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps in the twenty-first
century we may finally recognize from its account books that econom-
ics has the unique capacity to givea common languageto those whose
task is precisely to discover thebestof thecommonworlds.^36
There has surely been enough complaining about the economizers’
hardness of heart; they are accused of reducing the rich universe of
human relations to the icy calculation of interest! They are being
blamed, however, for a vice that can never be theirs. Goods cannot be
reduced to economization any more than people can. What economi-
zation allows, however, is to give the provisional version of the com-
mon world (no. 4) thejustifiablecharacter of the result of a calculation.
The modeling of relations in the form of accounts makes visible some
consequences that no other method could reveal and makes it possible
to close off the debates with an argument. By documenting the whole
set of arbitrations in the form of statistical tables, economic theories,
forecasts concerning speculative movements, we can add to the tren-
chancy of a political decision, to the consensus of a scientific decision,
the revelation of the bottom line. If we want to institute the common
world so that it will last, this result is better than we could have
hoped: the State of law is expanded and not reduced by economiza-
tion. Provided that we do a good job measuring the advantage we gain
from having the various callings collaborate on the same functions:
isolated from politicians, scientists, and moralists, the aptitude for cal-
culations came down to short-circuiting all other forms of debate, in
order to decide about externalities.^37 Added to the scientists’ ability to
institute the chain of causalities, to the politicians’ ability to make en-
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