- Darwin is obviously innocent of the Darwinisms committed in his name. De-
spite his borrowings from Malthus, he is in no way guilty of naturalism, since the evo-
lutions of which he speaks haveneither unity, nor optimum, nor totalization.For Darwin,
evolution unifies nothing at all—as Stephen Jay Gould showed with such persistence
(Gould 1989). Darwin would have had no trouble speaking of multinaturalism, since
ultimately each living creature possessesits ownnature. As soon as one resorts to theo-
ries of evolution to speak of “nature” in the singular, one loses the realities of the
pluriverse and keeps only its function as shortcut. This is why it is so important to dis-
tinguish the appeal to external realities from the procedures for unifying the world that
belong, properly speaking, to politics itself, even if we are talking about genes, pro-
teins, whales, cockroaches, or physiology.
- We find an indication of this in a stunning passage in Karl Polanyi: “Here was
a new starting point for political science. By approaching human community from
the animal side, Townsend by-passed the supposedly unavoidable question as to the
foundations of government; and in doing so introduced a new concept of law into hu-
man affairs, that of the laws of Nature. Hobbes’ geometrical bias, as well as Hume’s and
Hartley’s, Quesnay’s and Helvetius’ hankering after Newtonian laws in society had
been merely metaphorical: they were burning to discover a law as universal in society
as gravitation was in Nature, but they thought of it as a human law...If,toHobbes,
man was as wolf to man, it was because outside of society men behaved like wolves,
not because there was any biological factor which men and wolves had in common.
Ultimately, this was so because no human community had yet been conceived of which
was not identical with law and government. But on the island of Juan Fernandez
there was neither government nor law; and yet there was balance between goats and
dogs....Nogovernment was needed to maintain this balance; it was restored by the
pangs of hunger on the one hand, the scarcity of food on the other. Hobbes had argued
the need for a despot because men werelikebeasts; Townsend insisted that they were
actuallybeasts and that, precisely for that reason, only a minimum of government was
required....Nomagistrates were necessary, for hunger was a better disciplinarian
than the magistrate. To appeal to him, Townsend pungently remarked, would be ‘an
appeal from the stronger to the weaker authority’” (Polanyi 1957 [1944], 114–115).
- This question is going to be turned into an artifact: Should the economy be en-
trusted to the market or to the State? This is as artificial as asking whether scientists
are realists or constructivists; or the one that asks whether politics should be anthro-
pocentric orphusicentric. See Chapter 5 on the power to follow up. We find an argu-
ment similar to Polanyi’s in Dewey 1954 (1927), 91.
- See the analysis of economics as a short-circuiting of the political in Carl
Schmitt: “A domination of men based on pure economics must appear a terrible de-
ception if, by remaining nonpolitical, it thereby evades responsibility and visibility”
(Schmitt 1976 [1963], 77). For Schmitt, the economy, in the nineteenth century, follows
religion, in the eighteenth century, and precedes technology, in the twentieth century,
in the devices invented to oust politics from playing any role.
- Even though Marxism also criticized the naturalization of the economy, its goal
was not to rehabilitate politics but to subject it still further to the laws of the first natu-
ralization, that of Science. This is the strong criticism that Polanyi, apoliticalsocialist
rather than ascientificsocialist, addresses to Marx: “The true significance of the tor-
NOTES TO PAGES 132–135
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