to the requirement of consultation, but without awareness of the enor-
mous amount of work it would take to produce opinion-holders arti-
ficially. How could one claim to have consulted about a problem those
to whom no opportunity to reformulate the terms of the question had
been given?
There was a wish, naturally, to escape the totalitarianism of a single
too rapidly defined universe by way of a pluralist democracy, but with-
out either leaving the plurality of worlds the time to unfold or leaving
the unification of the common world the means to become unified.
How could one call pluralism the hypocritical respect for beliefs to
which one refuses to grant the status of reality? There was a wish, ev-
eryone’s wish, to discover the optimum, but by disparaging as cynical
and sordid the meticulous work on deals and compromises that could
therefore no longer meet the requirement of publicity. How could one
reach agreement, if the threat of a superior transcendence intervened
to humiliate all the petty compromises in advance? As for the require-
ment of closure, the Old Regime could fulfill it only clandestinely, for
it stubbornly opposed the truth, on the one hand, to all the real, mate-
rial, institutional means that make it possible to ensure, install, ex-
tend, and diffuse the truth, on the other. Closed minds with respect to
the outside, which was supposed to be made master of politics; conde-
scension with respect to those who were supposed to be consulted;
cynicism with respect to those whose compromises were to be inter-
rupted by deals even more remote from the State of law; hypocrisy,
finally, in that realism was always denied the means to make its rights
heard: a fine palette of virtues for those who love to give lessons in
morality and reason to all the other collectives, which are deemed ir-
rational.
What a long way we have come since the first chapter! We have to
make an effort to remember the time when a two-house politics para-
lyzed all these movements, all these callings, all these investigations.
How well political ecology’s new clothes fit! What comfort in these
forms of life that are only new in appearance! Have we not rediscov-
ered the self-evidence that the good sense of tradition had ended up
concealing? It is the Old Regime that appears, in contrast, to be an in-
sult to common sense, a word whose meaning we now understand: it
is thesense of the common,the sense of the search for the common
world. If good sense defines the state of the collective as it was, com-
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