The Optimum: from Theology to Science and Fiction[L'optimum : de la théologie aux sciences et aux fictions]

The idea of the optimum plays a major role in many scientific and political domains, while fiction tends to confront it. I examine it here in light of its historical origins in theological optimism (God created "the best of all possible worlds"), the subject of my 1995 dissertation in the history of optimism from its emergence in the early eighteenth century to its seeming disappearance during the French Revolution. If the theological origin of the idea of the optimum is so difficult to perceive now, it is because the history of optimism, one of the most consequential ideologies ever to have existed, is also the history of its occultation. This ideology, all the more powerful in being embedded in a blind spot, is disseminated through apparently secular discourses and fields of knowledge. Optimism is a fatalism. It also takes the form of an economic fatalism : nature, society or the market function providentially or naturally at their optimum, or reach their optimum in historical time. Yet the idea of the optimum can also inspire powerful heuristic hypotheses in sciences emancipated from theology, or progressive political actions seeking an optimum. As for fictions they either corroborate optimism (or pessimism, the inverted double of optimisme), or they invent instead, as in Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, forms of writing and thought that escape this ideology. Investigation into the optimum will permit discovery of a vast continent of our culture along with its major investments. It could constitute a multi-disciplinary research program covering the modern period from the eighteenth century to today.