tomobile, which was raised to the rank of Sovereign Good. Enemies,
excluded parties, and the opposition are, thanks to ethics, going to re-
main not simply entities that have been externalized forever, but also
entities that willhave to bereintegrated, at some later point, in the
form of friends, included parties, and potential allies.
Because of this very equipment, the exigency of external reality
(no. 1) is going to become even more acute, to the extent that the mor-
alist’s scrupleis added to the questioning of all established paradigms
by the scientists and to the danger of being unfaithful felt by the politi-
cians. Those who have been excluded from the collective are going to
come back all the more quickly to knock on the door, to the extent
that the moralists will, so to speak,go looking for themoutside the col-
lective, in order to facilitate their reentry and accelerate their inser-
tion, after accompanying them, during the preceding phase, and cov-
ering them in supplicants’ cloaks. If we bring the combined attention
of scientists, politicians, economists, and moralists to bear, we can
better assess the state of alert or precaution that will characterize the
first house to be shaken up by the slightest of perturbations. We will
even be able to compare collectives with regard to their degree of sen-
sitivity—which does not mean sentimentality—and judge the quality
of their civic life according to that yardstick.^46
More generally, the moralists add to the collective continual access
to its own exterior by obliging the others to recognize that the collec-
tive is always a dangerous artifice. In the eyes of morality, indeed, the
closure of the collective (no. 6) by any global scenarization at all is not
only impossible but also illegitimate. It would presuppose either the
inclusion of the totality of beings in the “kingdom of ends,” as Kant
would have it, or a premature closure that would return too large a
number of these beings to the status of mere means, or else, finally, the
definitive acceptance of a pluralism that would renounce the search
for a common world. Against the politicians and scientists who re-
quire the definition of an inside and an outside, against the econo-
mists who are quickly satisfied to have externalized what they did not
know how to take into account, the moralists thus continually recall
the concern with theresumptionof the work of collection.
Without the moralists, we would risk seeing the collective onlyfrom
within;we would end up reaching agreement at the expense of certain
entities that would be definitively excluded from the collective and
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157