A Philosophy for Progress

Abstract

It was during the eighteenth century that a philosophy of progress first took shape. The seeds sown by Fontenelle in the 1680s were finally brought to full fruition in the work of Condorcet over a century later. Yet the naïvely confident optimism which characterises the latter, and which is often attributed to the French En. lightenment as a whole, is in fact shared only by a minority. Diderot, perhaps the most active and extrovert of the philosophes, could nevertheless confide to Sophie Volland his conviction that it would have been better never to have been born; Voltaire, though in his more complacent moments he could affirm that he lived in an earthly paradise, saw human history as one long chronicle of stupidity and barbarity; for Rousseau, civilisation was almost synonymous with corruption; and the list could be lengthened almost indefinitely.