Les Lumières contre le progrès ? La naissance de l'idée de perfectibilité

Florence Lotterie : Enlightenment against progress ? The birth of the idea of perfectibility. With his Discourse on the origins of inequality, Rousseau coined a neologism that was to become one of the great concepts of Enlightenment thinking, namely perfectibility. But he defined it as a simple potentiality, only activated when man enters history and society. The 'paradox of perfectibility' thus measures, in human evolution, the portion of corruption and loss associated with the successive forms of progress of the species. Despite the ideal of civilisation and natural sociability which apparently dominates the thought of the Philosophes, this historical anxiety is profoundly rooted ; it is also present in the empiricists, who considered human perfection as a fact of nature which did not imply a dramatic break in the order of culture. Thus the idea of progress is always, willy-nilly, limited by the normative reference to an origin.Lotterie Florence. Les Lumières contre le progrès ? La naissance de l'idée de perfectibilité. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°30, 1998. La recherche aujourd'hui, sous la direction de Michel Delon. pp. 383-396