“democracy”—simple white flags waved at the front to suspend hostil-
ities.
If I have sometimes offended against good sense, it is because I
wanted to rediscover common sense, the sense of the common. Peo-
ple who speak of nature as if it were an already constituted unity that
would make it possible to throw back onto social representations ev-
erything that calls for disunion—such peopleexercise a kingly power,
the most important of all, a power superior to all the purple mantles
and all the gilded scepters of civil and military authorities. I ask no
more of them than one minuscule concession: since you have granted
yourselves the power to define what unites us and what drives us
apart, what is rational and what is irrational, show us also the proofs
of your legitimacy, the traces of your election, the motivations for your
choices, the institutions that permit you to exercise these functions,
thecursus honorumthrough which you have had to make your way.
Starting from the moment when you agree to redefine public life as
the progressive composition of the common world*, you can no lon-
ger exercise this power under cover of the “indisputable laws of na-
ture.” If there are laws, there has to be a Parliament. “No reality with-
out representation.” No one is asking you to abandon all power, but
simply to exercise itas a power,with all its precautions, its slowness,
its procedures, and especially its checks and balances. If it is true that
absolute power corrupts absolutely, then the power that made it possi-
ble to define the common world under the auspices of nature cor-
rupted you more than any other. Is it not time to free yourselves of
that absolutism by rising to the dignity of representatives, each of
whom must learn to doubt?
The science wars bring us back today to the situation of the reli-
gious wars that forced our predecessors in the seventeenth century to
invent the double power of politics and Science, while thrusting faith
back into the inner self. When each reader of the Bible, in direct con-
tact with his God, could come to reverse the established order in the
name of his own interpretation, it spelled the end of public order.
There was no more common world. That is why our ancestors had to
secularize politics and relativize religion, which had become a simple
private conviction. Must we carry out the same neutralization, now
that each of us can rise up against public authority with his or her own
interpretation of nature in the name of direct contact with the facts?
POLITICS OF NATURE
222