the form that the lower house gives them now. With a single but es-
sential difference: the compromises now are reached in an explicit,
public, and licit manner; they are all subject to revision, archiving, and
documentation; and they take the place of surreptitious arrangements
or deals struck in the corridors. We benefit, finally, from a “State of
law of nature.”
The experimentation appropriate to the work of hierarchization by
the lower house can be presented, in a simplified way, as the search for
a list of entities arranged in order of importance, from the friendliest
to the most hostile. The inquiry into the negotiation amounts to get-
ting each proposition to make the following declaration: “Here is the
scenario for the world in which we are prepared to live, with so and
so, and for whose continuity we are prepared to make,contrary to our
positions at the outset,such and such sacrifices.” What was impossible
with essences and interests becomes possible, if not easy, with propo-
sitions and their habits, on condition that they have full latitude to de-
cide about the common world in which they wish to live. One could
not negotiate with essences; one can do so with lists of interchange-
able habits. What is the best of worlds? Here is precisely the task that
must be delegated to no one, neither to God nor to any master, the
task that only the lower house can carry out. Leibniz’s God has come
down from Heaven to Earth. The sovereign finally goes to work to dis-
cuss, through experimentation with possible worlds, the best of deals,
theoptimumthatno oneis allowed to calculate in others’ stead.
There remains the most difficult, the most painful, the cruelest of
tasks: on the one hand, the explicit and formalrejectionof those with
whom one has not been able to come to terms, and on the other hand,
the incorporation of those who are accepted into durable and irrevers-
ible arrangements—in other words, the institution of essences, that of
the enemies, the constitution of an inside and an outside, the external-
ization of impossible worlds, the expression of externalities—in short,
the risk of committing an injustice. This is the second great task of the
lower house: always carried out with shame up to now, it finally redis-
covers its pride. Under the old Constitution, no inquiry was necessary,
for the essences had no need of an institution in order to exist and the
excluded parties did not take the form of enemies but that of nonexis-
tent beings who had never belonged to the real world. While it was
avoiding the constraints of the inquiry whose meticulous obsessive-
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