on two billion years! That would satisfy no one. The diplomat goes much further: he
demands that we put on the table what a God is and what an Earth is. This is the entire
advantage of an experimental metaphysics over the head-on clash of a metaphysics of
nature* struggling with the “traditions.” The same is true of the painful debate over
abortion in the United States.
- Moreover, this is why the Leviathan, “that Mortal God, to which we owe under
theImmortal God,our peace and defense,” appears so monstrous. It no more represents
politics than nature represents the sciences. Such is the error I committed, in the book
on the moderns, by trying to establish symmetry between the artifact of Science and
that of Politics. This is indeed why I have since abandoned the principle of symmetry,
replacing it with an equal respect for sciences and for politics. I hope it is now clear, at
the end of this book, that I have simply attempted to sketch a more realistic portrait of
a Leviathan ending the state of nature for good. - This was already the theme of the littleTractatus scientifico-politicusthat I wrote
just as the Cold War was ending, stressing the parallelism between the wars of religion
and the science wars (Latour 1988). At the time, I saw no solutions other than the dis-
tinction between force and power for getting away from the already obsolete opposi-
tion between relations based on reason and relations based on force. I thought that the
principle of generalized symmetry would make it possible to extricate ourselves. I had
not yet grasped, at the time, the properly constitutional work of modernism that ren-
dered such a move impossible. - See the section on anthropology in Chapter 1, and the work of Descola and
Palsson (1996).
NOTES TO PAGES 217–220
285