emies, to the moralists’ ability to “fish out” those who are excluded
(see below), the same aptitude for calculation becomes one of the
most reasonable ways to articulate one’s preferences in a vocabulary
that fulfills both the requirement of publicity and that of closure.
To honor economics even while stigmatizing it, people have called it
a dismal science, on the pretext that it introduced the cruel necessity
of Malthusian nature into dreams of abundance and fraternity. Freed
from its dream of hegemony, economics becomes on the contrary the
slow institutionalization of the collective, the progressive and painful
passage from scattered propositions by humans and nonhumans to a
coherent but provisional calculation about the optimum way of divid-
ing up the common world. This calculation has been somewhat down-
sized to the dimension of the spreadsheets filled in offices by a few
thousand specialists, tens of thousands of statisticians, hundreds of
thousands of accountants.^38 Economics is no longer politics: it no
longer dictates its terrifying solutions in the name of laws cast in
bronze that would be external to history, anthropology, and public
life; it participates humbly in the progressive formatting of problems,
in setting down on paper arbitrages that no other procedure would
manage to reduce. Dangerous as infrastructure, economics becomes
indispensable as documentation and calculation, as secretion of a pa-
per trail, as modelization.
We shall say little about the tasks of perplexity and consultation, for
the dominion of modernism has been such that political economics
thought it described them, whereas it scarcely touched them at all.^39
This is the astonishing paradox of a movement that does not even
have words to speak of the intimacy of the relations it has woven,
more than any other collective, between goods and people! The old
version of economics, consisting of objects to be bought or sold and of
simply rational subjects, blinded us to the depth and complexity of
the connections that humans and nonhumans have always woven to-
gether, links ceaselessly explored by merchants, industrialists, arti-
sans, innovators, entrepreneurs, and consumers. It would take a very
different anthropology to begin to account for this immense world,
common to the old worlds and the new, other than by ersatz econom-
ics.^40 That is not the goal of the present book. Let us simply realize
that no one is better able to detect invisible entities and involve them
in the collective (no. 1) than those who are on the alert for the possible
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
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