Grappling with History in the Age of the Enlightenment: The Dead Ends of D’Alembert’s Discours préliminaire

Abstract

Around 1750, the philosophes began to consider themselves as the representatives of a new spiritual power destined to free reason once and for all from the “ecclesiastical yoke” and to guide “humanity” towards a new epoch of progress. The realization of this mission, however, would have been devoid of any foundation without the elaboration of a historical reflection capable of legitimizing the role that the hommes de lettres had begun to arrogate to themselves. Thus, this article sets out to explore the way in which the French Enlightenment was forced to grapple with a question whose posing goes back to medieval Christianity and which eighteenth-century thinkers inherited as an unavoidable debt—what is the meaning of history understood as a whole? It is a question of examining this “historical mortgage” through the study of one of the fundamental texts that tried to answer this question with the help of a set of new means: the Discours préliminaire by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, published in 1751 at the head of the first volume of the Encyclopédie. The philosophy of history that D’Alembert outlines in this writing makes clear both the certainties and strategies of the Enlightenment and the tensions arising from its attempt to find a new conception of the historical process.