What did the English bring to colonize America? Did they bring grand projects? Not at all. They arrived with "limited views." They had no other project than the immediate advantage of each, or rather, each had in mind only the limited view of their own project. As a result, industry was active and settlements flourished. Consequently, the economy, understood as a practice but also as a type ofgovernment intervention, as a fonn. ofaction of the state or sovereign, can only be short~sighted, and if there were a sovereign who claimed to be long-sighted, to have a global and totalizing gaze, he would only ever see chimeras.

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, loc. 1449