De-escalation, Reserve and Invention: Michel Serres on the Natural Contract and Law

In The Natural Contract, Serres argued that the exclusion of the natural world from the social contract had promoted an attitude of violence and domination towards the world that was destroying the conditions on which our existence depends. Serres’s response was to propose a natural contract to establish a three-way relation between individuals, political communities, and the natural world. His proposal calls for changes in the relation of science to political governance, and this is important, but he warns that we should not treat this uniquely as a problem regarding the relation of science and politics, since to do so would perpetuate the exclusion of the natural world. In order to see what a natural contract involves we must: first, re-think the idea of ‘contract’ entirely by going back to his account of the formation of order, which is to say to the relation between order and disorder; second, and more specifically, renew our understanding of empiricism, which is to say how sense is made from our exposure to the natural world. I argue that these considerations allow us to identify principles regarding invention, de-escalation, and reserve that can be seen ‘in translation’ across the natural world, knowledge, and politics. This opens the possibility of communication between the three domains, without establishing a single foundation for them all or making one subordinate to another