One particularity of modernity is its self-definition following the normative category of autonomy, in contrast with the heteronomous external foundation of religious societies. As products of this mythical conception (whose characteristic is to negate its being a myth), idealism and the free market constitute the paradigmatic answers of modern thought in search of an autonomous moral. After briefly highlighting how these morals are heteronomous and arguing that the modern project of autonomy is in itself unachievable, in other words that democracy and humanism do not suffice to counter capitalist illimitation, this article suggests that the idea of nature such as it appears in contemporary ecological discourse opens onto the possibility of a new political ecology, i.e. of a democratic regime whose accepted constitutive heteronomy is Nature.