Chapter 2 of The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (1995). Originally published as Le Contrat Naturel (1992).

Featuring Marx, Descartes, Plato, Homer.

0:06 Time and Weather
2:10 Peasant and Sailors
5:39 Long Term and Short Term
11:26 The Philosopher of Science
12:52 War, Once Again
14:06 The Clean and the Dirty
16:33 Reversal
18:30 The Jurist. Three Laws without a World
20:21 Natural Law
23:24 Use and Abuse: The Parasite
26:12 Equilibria
27:44 The Natural Contract
32:31 The Political
38:44 Of Governing
44:08 History, anew
50:33 The Religious
56:02 Love

‘To be sure, we can slow down the processes already under way, legislate reductions in fossil-fuel consumption, massively replant the devastated forests...all fine initiatives, but together they amount to the image of a ship sailing at twenty-five knots toward a rocky bar on which it will inevitably be smashed to pieces, and on whose bridge the officer of the watch advises the engine room to reduce speed by a tenth without changing direction.’

‘I've often remarked that, just as certain animals piss on their terri­tory so that it stays theirs, many men mark and dirty the things they own by shitting on them, in order to keep them, or shit on other things to make them their own. This stercoraceous or excre­mental origin of property rights seems to me a cultural source of what we call pollution, which, far from being an accidental result of involuntary acts, reveals deep intentions and a primary motiva­tion.’

‘Why must we now seek to master our mastery? Because, unregu­lated, exceeding its purpose, counterproductive, pure mastery is turning back on itself. Thus former parasites have to become sym­bionts; the excesses they committed against their hosts put the parasites in mortal danger, for dead hosts can no longer feed or house them. When the epidemic ends, even the microbes disap­pear, for lack of carriers for their proliferation.

Not only is the new nature, as such, global, but it reacts globally to our local actions.’

‘From the time the pact was signed, it is as if the group that had signed it, casting off from the world, were no longer rooted in anything but its own history.’

‘Since remotest antiquity, sailors (and doubtless they alone) have been familiar with the proximity and connection between subjective wars and objective violence, because they know that, if they come to fight among themselves, they will condemn their craft to shipwreck before they can defeat their internal adversary. They get the social contract directly from nature.’

‘There's nothing weaker than a global system that becomes a single unit. A single law corresponds to sudden death. The more plural an individual becomes, the better he lives: the same is true for societies, or for being in general.’

‘The social con­tract long protected mobile social subsets in a broad and free environment, equipped with reserves that could absorb any dam­age, but a unified, compact group that has reached the strict limits of objective forces requires a natural contract.’

‘From now on, those who govern must go outside of the human sciences, outside the streets and walls of the city, become physicists, emerge from the social contract, invent a new natural contract by giving back to the word nature its original meaning of our natal and native conditions, the conditions in which we are born-or ought to be reborn tomorrow.’

‘the scientific truth contract succeeds brilliantly in show­ing us the object’s point of view, as it were, just as the other contracts showed us, by the bond or ligature of their obligations, so to speak, the point of view of the other partners in the accord. The natural contract leads us to consider the world's point of view in its totality.’

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