The fundamental concept of classical science is the differential representation of movement. Classical science studies movement between two points or between two instants of time. Peripatetic physics is based on a static scheme of natural positions, and it only considers movement from the point of view of its limiting points. Its theory of movement does not take account of the local state of moving bodies at every intermediate point of their path. Classical science, on the other hand, deals with instantaneous local states, which, in the special case of a body left to itself, do not change; in the general case, the interactions of bodies consist in acceleration that is proportional to the force applied. Thus, the basic concepts for classical science are the limiting relations between the distance traversed and the time taken, and between speed and time; and these lose their meaning in the absence of an integral concept of moving bodies. Classical science appeared when the differential concept of movement became a system of differential laws, and found its essential mathematical formulation in the infinitesimal calculus. There had already existed a vague and unformed concept of a unitary local event, state, or relationship, which could be subjected to scientific analysis to the extent that it was conditioned by preceding events, states and relationships and itself determined subsequent ones. This concept had not yet been connected to the study of movement, it was sometimes applied to areas very remote from mechanics, while at other times it approached very close to physics, mechanics and mathematics, to the ideas of classical science. It approached very close—but it had not yet entered into these ideas. This was the dawn of classical science.

In La Nouvelle Héloïse Rousseau states that everyone uses figurative expressions; he adds that only fools and geometricians express themselves without using metaphor. Can one allow even these two exceptions? It has become increasingly clear in the field of culture that metaphor can be used in a foolish manner: how many doctrines have a dominant analogy at the basis of their reasoning; how many metaphors have become dogmatic as the areas in which they may be applied increase? And if metaphor is central to faulty reasoning and foolish arguments, is it altogether absent from the geometrician's work? The geometrician's categories are certainly limiting in this respect, and it appears paradoxical to wonder whether geometrical concepts, such as a straight line or a point are not figurative expressions borrowed from other fields. However the problem becomes far less paradoxical when one moves from geometry to mathematical astronomy, mechanics and by degrees to the whole of physics. For in most fundamental categories, those which instigate a new field of knowledge, a metaphorical dimension, then become apparent. The further one descends Comte's ladder of science, the more the terminology retains the stamp of the transitional stage from which the concept originated. A straight line, a point, a circle are perhaps first concepts as regards expression and invention. But attraction, natural selection, physiological division of labour, or division of social work bear in their very names the mark of the intellectual transference through which they were formed. With the result that scientific invention does not use non-figurative concepts; it often finds its mode of expression through metaphor. Neither the fool nor the geometrician escape the metaphorical realm of thought, because it is the usual means of expression and conceptualisation. Because of this the metaphor used by the fool and that used by the geometrician link up, and it becomes possible with regard to certain predominating metaphors, to tackle the question of the quality of reasoning and the question of the discovery of knowledge, the study of argument and the study of conceptualisation, together: for beyond the general usage of metaphor, it is the expressive nature of speech itself with which we are primarily concerned.

This paper sketches an analysis of the public realm in Western democracies. It has often been said that there is a decline of public life in advanced industrial societies, and that this decline threatens the nature and function of political democracy. I doubt this. The most that I would claim at this stage is that large masses of the citizenry are excluded from the contemporary political scene, and that the most urgent political problems are discussed by social organizations representing the interest of individuals and groups. This is of philosophical interest; for these organizations, and not individual citizens, are constituting now the public life. It would take me too far afield to show how the new radicalism of the 1960s and many other social and political movements of today reacted against the threatened liquidation of the public realm. My main object is to draw attention to the lack of participation, least of all of political participation, of the citizens, and to answer the question why this happened.

Chosen by English-speaking anthropologists to designate the ritual buffoons discovered among the North American Indians, in Africa and in Oceania, the word “clown” is no misnomer. Our circus clowns are the descendants of these puzzling ceremonial figures, and it is perhaps thanks to their filiation to them (confirmed, as we shall see, by etymology) that our spleenish makers of laughter owe their fascination and their capacity to survive the vicissitudes of the stage. But we shall also see that in tribal society a clown becomes a clown only in a subsidiary way, the origins of this figure going back to a complex of causes having little to do with the jocularity assumed to be his unique purpose to arouse, but which overlays and conceals the true nature of his original role.

Translated by Raoul Makarius.

It is often difficult to distinguish between the animals of fable and those of zoology. The sphinx, the chimera, the centaur and the hippogriff belong, and always have belonged to the first category. But animals such as the unicorn have long been catalogued and described in works of natural science. In the seventeenth century, a catalogue such as John Johnston's A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts, written in Latin, translated into English and published in London in 1678, still distinguishes eight different types with corresponding illustrations. Indeed, a unicorn is no more improbable than a narwhal, whose horn, incidentally, was long thought to be the unicorn's. If we thus confuse real animals with mythological ones, what becomes of the habits, size and appearance given to them by travellers on returning from the far countries where they claim to have seen them?

Our reflections on the objectivity of historical truth will quite naturally begin with the historical fact. It may perhaps be only because we are thinking in a general way—and with justification in a sense—that the divergences amongst historians appear only from the moment when they approach the interpretation of facts; for their structure—if one allows a certain level of knowledge and technique in research—is identical. This being established, it is not necessary to go as far as Ranke's school and ask that the task of the historian limit itself to the presentation of pure facts, without interpretation or commentary; it will be sufficient to state that when we use the term fact in a scientific or historical context, we are expressing ourselves in an unequivocal manner; and that consequently, when someone has established, in a competent way, a historical fact, he has established it for all who are concerned; historical facts as products as well as the work of research carried out to establish them are not, then, influenced by subjective factor in the process of acquiring knowledge, taken in the particular as well as in the social sense.

Industrial societies are seeking a civilization for which they have not as yet found a firm framework of moral and social values, nor definite forms of social life. That is why traditional peasant values and ways of life, and social institutions in rural communities, still appeal so strongly to emotion and remain so strikingly evocative in our urbanized, industrialized world. Village society is still seen as an ideal—and often idealized—social model; industrial societies would like to have something comparable in their vast cities.