other. Their flair will help us sense in which direction to lead the col-
lective—provided that we add to it the remarkable flair of politicians
for detecting the possible reversal of power relations in any situation.
They too know how to recognize the subtle difference between static
and dynamic situations, while finding in circumstances the opportu-
nity to make them change. They know how to modify in this way the
basis of the “us” they are charged with representing, as they keep to a
steady course. But the collective will find itself even more alert if it
can count on the economists’ infallible nose for characterizing the
health of a learning curve. They have multiplied the instruments—
profit margins, balance sheets, economic indicators, bureaus of statis-
tics, stock exchanges—that allow them to designate the unstable dy-
namics to which they have entrusted all their treasures. The moralists
have not been left behind, since they well know that moral qualifica-
tion is always judged by movement, intention, direction, effort, and
not only by acts or simple respect for formalism. Combining the skills
of the various professions, we can thus say about the learning curve
that it derives its virtue from being at once a productive research pro-
gram, a dynamic political culture, a prosperous economy, a scrupulous
and uneasy morality, and a well-documented procedure.
Good government is not a government that offers politics the sense-
less privilege of defining the common world in the place of all those
whom politics assembles, but the power to follow up (Box 5.1), which
exploits the combined skills of administrators, scientists, politicians,
economists, and moralists to choose the trackless path that goes from
a less articulated collective to the better-articulated next state.
By seeking to install itself in comfort, political economy seems to
tend toward a surprising result: just as we have had to deliver the sci-
ences from Science and the collective from the social, we require a
State that is no longer paralyzed by politics, by Science, or, of course,
by economics. To the liberal State is opposed theliberatedState, a
State freed of all forms of naturalization. A new power, strong but lim-
ited strictly to the art of governing, has to succeed in preventing all the
powers, all the partial competencies, from interrupting the explora-
tion of the learning curve, or from dictating its results in advance. All
the scientific, moral, administrative, political, and economic virtues
must converge to keep intact this power to follow up that turns out to
be invested not with a general will engendered by the social contract,
POLITICS OF NATURE
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