Epilogue

The mission of scientific inquiry is not to establish definitive “truths” but to tighten the net around puzzles still waiting for an answer. Among the latter, as one of the most outstanding “known unknowns”, is the composition and complexion of the prompting hand and a precise description of its modes of encirclement in and through the respective subgames. So, as announced at the outset, this conceivably is not the end of our story. Ours is, Ulysses-wise, a first step on a longer journey towards the construction of a realist and robust framework for the analysis of the “politics of cohabitation” among rival firms and rival states. At the end of Chapter 1 I confessed to subscribe to the epistemological position that asserts that models are useful only in the instrumental sense of screening, instead of representing, social reality. Well-founded ones— si no è vero — are models that dissolve as soon as they have done their work, lifting the veils of the appearance of reality. Considering our work from this angle may resemble the way the British painter Francis Bacon told viewers to look at the “subjects” that posed as models for his paintings: “the subject is the bait, but the bait shrivels; what remains is the reality of the subject and the bait, the subject, fades away. The reality is the remains of the subject” (Francis Bacon, interviewed by the Dutch literary magazine Raster, no. 35, 1985; my translation).