a civil manner toward the Republic, while aspiring to participate in
the same common world without formulating contradictory demands,
there is no state of war. With a single world, the conflicts will always
be superficial, partial, localized. Everything changes, on the contrary,
if one of the multiplicities demands the destruction of a given collec-
tive, its forced incorporation, or its capitulation. This is the end of the
state of peace. Now, thanks to political ecology, we notice little by lit-
tle thatwe have never left the state of war,thestate of naturethat Hobbes
thought the Leviathan had gotten us out of, whereas we are still deep
in it; we have only passed from oneNaturpolitikto another.^43 The paci-
fying violence of Science defined a single common world without giv-
ing us the means, interpreters, histories, networks, forums, agoras,
parliaments, or instruments we would have needed to compose it pro-
gressively. The power to say what was rational and what was irrational
has been exercised up to now without any counterforces.
Lord knows that history has not been sparing of conflicts. To these
wars, sciences and technologies have contributed more and more each
time by broadening the scale, the scope, the violence, the virulence,
the logistics of these battles. Concerning these offers of service on the
part of engineers and scientists, it has long been claimed that this was
only a deviation from the mission of Science, only an unfortunate di-
version from a project that remained that of knowledge, only a practi-
cal application of a pure and always disinterested intention. At a given
moment, people thought, since scientific objects create consensus and
harmony, Science will end up extending far enough so that conflicts
will be only bad memories. The rationality of the primary qualities
will indeed end up taking the place of the irrationality of the second-
ary qualities*. This will take time, but one day or another we shall en-
ter the land where atoms and particles flow—otherwise we would
have to despair of humanity. The victory of peace is just around the
corner.
Then we encountered, in the writings of journalists, the curious ex-
pression “science wars.” At first it designated only a minuscule matter,
no bigger than a nodule on the skin: it seemed that certain “post-
modern” thinkers would have liked to extend multiculturalism to Sci-
ence, denying nature its unity, denying the project of knowledge its
disinterestedness, denying scientific laws their indisputable necessity.
Against this threat, certain scientists, certain epistemologists were
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