Michel Serres has often made this observation, and he made it the essential ar-
gument ofStatues(Serres 1987; see especially p. 110). See the fascinating study by Yan
Thomas on the judicial origin of theres:“When [theres] appears in this function, it is
not as a seat where the unilateral mastery of a subject is exercised...Iftheresis an ob-
ject, it has this function above all in a debate or an argument, a common object thatop-
posesandunitestwo protagonists within a single relation” (Thomas 1980, 417). And,
further on: “Its objectivity is ensured by the common agreement whose place of origin
is controversy and judicial debate” (418).
It is in the famous opposition between Boyle and Hobbes (Shapin and Schaffer
that the double proposition has taken on its clearest form for me, but it now
forms the common program of a large part of political epistemology.
Michel Serres commented in advance on the Kyoto conference when he wrote
masterfully about Galileo: “Science won all the rights three centuries ago now, by ap-
pealing to the Earth, which responded by moving. So the prophet became king. In our
turn, we are appealing to an absent authority, when we cry, like Galileo, but before the
court of his successors, former prophets turned kings: ‘the Earth is moved.’ The imme-
morial, fixed Earth, which provided the conditions and foundations of our lives, is
moving, the fundamental Earth is trembling” (Serres 1995, 86).
The new history of the sciences is noticing retrospectively that this was al-
ways the case, even for Galileo (Biagioli 1993), Boyle (Shapin and Schaffer 1985), New-
ton (Schaffer 2002), and Kelvin (Smith and Wise 1989); these great scientists have
never really been seated apart, since they established the division whose genealogy is
traced in detail by the abovementioned historians. We have never been modern, even
in Science—especially in Science.
For once, the epistemology police is in agreement with political epistemology,
but for opposite reasons: such is the background for what have been called the science
wars.
Serres has nevertheless gone furthest in questioning the opposition, thanks to
his original use of law: “So since its establishment, science has played the role of natu-
ral law. This time-honored expression conceals a profound contradiction, that between
the arbitrary and the necessary. Science conceals the same contradiction, in exactly the
same places. Physics is natural law: it has played this role since its dawning” (Serres
1995, 23). But out of disdain for politics and even more for the social sciences, he has
kept the premature oneness of nature intact; indeed, he has given it a new lease on life.
We have already seen this argument in Jonas 1990, and in Serres’s famous “war
of everyone against everything” (Serres 1995, 15).
Such is the question raised in Stone 1985 and Stone 1987. The granting of speech
to humans and nonhumans is further complicated by the obvious difficulties of collec-
tive persons or corporate bodies. “I am sure,” Christopher Stone argues, “that I can
judge with more certainty and meaningfulness whether my lawn needs water, than the
Attorney General can judge whether and when the United States wants (needs) to take
an appeal from an adverse judgement by the lower court” (Stone 1974, 24, also quoted
in a marvelous little book by Miguel Tamen (2001).
This is the innovation, decisive for me, of Serres’sNatural Contract;we shall try
to tease out all its effects. “What language do the things of the world speak, that we
