mon sense offers the collective the form that it might have in the
future.
When modernism is remote enough to be studied dispassionately,
historians of ideas will remain astonished by the bizarre character of
its political organization. How will we be able to explain to our grand-
children that the trades and professions summoned from all around to
build the edifice of public life had received all the talents, all the com-
petencies, all the tools they needed, but that they lacked a single direc-
tive: the designation of the edifice to be built! What strange glitch al-
lowed certain workers to be told: “The edifice exists already, solidly
constructed, but no one built it; it has been standing there for all eter-
nity, already unified, already solid, and it is called nature, so we don’t
need your services,” whereas other artisans were being ordered to
build, under the name of Leviathan, a totally artificial being, but were
deprived of all the materials that could give it solidity, durability,
form, and justice? The one existed already and was not to be built; the
other was to be built, but out of thin air! How can we explain to our
descendants that we had wanted to establish democracy by putting
construction on one side but not the materials, materials on the other
side but not the construction? They will not be surprised that public
life, like the Tower of Babel in the Bible story, collapsed in on itself.
Still, no defect of form explains the collapse of the collective that we
have just described. Neither the jealousy of God nor the pride of men
nor the poor quality of the bricks or mortar caused the scattering of
peoples in a plurality of incommensurable cultures. All Republics are
badly formed, all are built on sand. They hold up only if they are re-
built at once and if the parties excluded from the lower house come
back the next morning, knock at the doors of the upper house, and de-
mand to participate in the common world, thecosmos,the name the
Greeks gave, as Plato put it, to the well-formed collective. To grasp the
competencies of the two houses, we are now going to have to look into
the dynamics of their arrangements. Thelogosin fact never speaks in a
clear voice: it looks for words, it hesitates, it stammers, itstarts over.
SKILLS FOR THE COLLECTIVE
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