On the morning of 1 November 1755, the churches of Lisbon were full. It was All Saints' Day, one of the great fixed points of the Catholic calendar, and the city, then among the richest in Europe on the strength of Brazilian gold, had turned out in its ordinary devotion. At around half past nine, the ground moved. It moved for perhaps ten minutes in three separate shocks, the second the worst, and stone churches built to stand for centuries came down on the congregations kneeling inside them. Those who ran for the open ground of the waterfront, sensibly enough, found the sea had drawn back in an odd, glassy silence and then returned as a wave forty feet high. Those who survived the water found, within hours, that the candles lit for the holy day had set the wreckage burning, and the fires took what the earthquake and the flood had not. By the time it was over, something like thirty to fifty thousand people were dead, in a city that had been at prayer.
Reconstructions since have put the magnitude at somewhere between 8.5 and 9.0, among the largest earthquakes known to have struck Europe; the shaking was felt as far away as Scotland and North Africa, and the tsunami crossed the Atlantic and rattled the harbours of the Caribbean. It was one of the great natural catastrophes of early modern history, and it is the right place to begin an account of where the modern belief in progress came from, because that belief has a genealogy, and Lisbon sits at its hinge. The genealogy runs from an ancient world that assumed history declined, through Joachim of Fiore, the twelfth-century abbot who invented a history with a direction, to Leibniz's best of all possible worlds and the critics who fell on it after the earthquake. And it ends in a question that is still live: Karl Löwith's charge that the modern faith in progress is borrowed eschatology, theology with the God removed, set against Hans Blumenberg's defence of progress as modernity's own legitimate self-assertion. That dispute cannot be resolved, only held knowingly. Where hope's shape came from decides what believing in it means.
The man who ran Portugal in the weeks that followed, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, later ennobled as the Marquis of Pombal, is supposed to have answered a courtier asking what should be done now with a sentence that has survived rather better than most eighteenth-century administrative decisions: bury the dead and feed the living. He then did something quietly remarkable. Alongside the theological response to the disaster ran a second one, less discussed. Pombal ordered the ruined lower city rebuilt on a strict grid, with buildings raised on a timber lattice frame, now known as the Pombaline cage, designed to flex rather than shatter when the ground next moved. And he sent a questionnaire to every parish in the kingdom, asking precisely what had been felt, at what hour, for how long, and with what visible effect on wells, animals, and buildings. It was not called seismology, since the word did not yet exist, but that is what it was: an attempt to turn a catastrophe into data, on the reasonable premise that a disaster which cannot be prevented might at least be prepared for. Set this alongside the argument that was about to consume Voltaire, and you have, in miniature, the two responses that will keep reappearing. One tries to explain why the earthquake happened in a universe governed by a good God. The other simply gets on with building better houses. Both, in their very different registers, are attempts to answer the same unbearable question, and it says something about the intervening centuries that Pombal's answer has aged so much more comfortably than the philosophical one.
But it is the philosophical response, not the administrative one, that changed the shape of European thought, because the earthquake did not merely kill tens of thousands of people. It fell, with a kind of pitiless precision, on a specific idea that the educated Europe of the time had spent forty years absorbing: the idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. A philosopher named Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had proposed, with great care and considerable logical machinery, that a perfect God, choosing among every possible arrangement of creation, must have actualised the one containing the greatest achievable balance of good over evil. It was an elegant answer to an old and serious question. It did not survive contact with Lisbon.
Where did the idea come from in the first place: the idea, so pervasive now that it barely registers as an idea at all, that history is going somewhere, that tomorrow is likely to be better than today, that improvement is not just possible but in some sense the default setting of human affairs. Is that a discovery, something we worked out about how history actually behaves? Or is it an invention, a story a particular culture told itself at a particular moment, which then got so deeply wired into the modern mind that it now feels like common sense rather than an argument at all?
The answer is that it is an invention, though an invention is not the same thing as a delusion. Someone had to think it up. Someone had to argue, against the plain testimony of most of human history up to that point, that the arrow of time points up rather than round in a circle or down in a slow decline. It was not an obvious case to make, and the evidence was not helping. The idea has a birthday, or at least a long and traceable childhood, and it survived a series of assaults, of which Lisbon was only the most dramatic, that ought by rights to have killed it. Why it did not die shows what optimism actually is, once you strip away both the caricature of blind cheerfulness and the comforting illusion that history owes us a happy ending.
The Wheel Before the Arrow
Consider first how odd the idea of progress would have seemed to almost anyone born before, roughly, the seventeenth century. The default assumption of the ancient and classical world was that time does not go anywhere. It turns.
Take Hesiod, a Greek poet working somewhere around 700 BC, whose Works and Days lays out a scheme of five ages of man that any farmer of the period would have recognised as more or less obviously true. First came the Golden Age, when men lived like gods, without toil or grief, and the earth gave up its fruit unasked. Then came Silver, worse: men who lived a hundred years as children and then died almost as soon as they reached maturity, foolish and quarrelsome. Then Bronze, an age of war, men who ate no bread and delighted in violence and destroyed themselves. Then, in a slight complication to the downward slide, the Age of Heroes, the men of the Trojan War and Thebes, nobler than the Bronze men who preceded them, some of whom were rewarded with the Isles of the Blessed. And then, finally, the Age of Iron: Hesiod's own age, and ours. An age of toil and grief by day and decay by night, where the bonds between parent and child fray, where guest turns on host, where might makes right and the wicked prosper and shame no longer restrains anyone. Hesiod does not think this will improve. He thinks, if anything, it will get worse before some final catastrophe closes the story, and he says, with the weary candour of a man who expects to be believed, that he wishes he had been born earlier or later, anywhere but now. The complaint is personal rather than theoretical. Works and Days is, among other things, a long letter of advice to Hesiod's feckless brother Perses, who had already sued him over their shared inheritance and appears to have regarded litigation as his principal crop, about how to survive on a hard farm in a hard age, and the five ages are the cosmology that makes sense of the hardness: things are difficult because difficulty is the direction the world runs in.
This is not a fringe view. It is close to the default view. The Stoics, several centuries later, gave the same basic intuition a more rigorous physical form in the doctrine known as ekpyrosis, from the Greek for conflagration. The Stoic cosmos was not heading toward some culmination. It burned itself out periodically in a universal fire, was reborn from that fire in exactly the same configuration, and ran through exactly the same events again, in the same order, down to the smallest detail, forever. Not a wheel that merely resembles its previous turn. The same wheel, the same turn, repeated. Chrysippus had, on his own account, already written his defence of the doctrine infinitely many times before, which must at least have relieved him of any anxiety about its reception. Time, on this account, is not a line at all. It is a loop with no exit.
The Stoics did not regard this as a grim doctrine, oddly enough. Chrysippus and his successors thought the periodic conflagration, followed by what they called palingenesis, a rebirth of the world in identical form, was actually a mark of the cosmos's rationality: a perfectly ordered universe, governed by the same unchanging reason throughout, would naturally produce the same unchanging sequence of events each time it ran, in the way a well-made clock strikes the same hour in the same way on every revolution of its hands. There is a strange comfort available in this picture that the modern mind, trained on the arrow, tends to miss: if everything recurs exactly, then nothing is ever truly lost, and nothing is ever truly new to fear either. The wheel offers its own consolation. It simply is not the consolation of getting somewhere. None of which has prevented the Stoics from being revived, some twenty-three centuries on, as a productivity technique, their exercises for facing the conflagration of the cosmos now recommended for difficult mornings, a reduction in scope they would presumably have borne calmly.
You find versions of this in Indian cosmology, in the Aztec conception of successive worlds each destroyed and remade, in the Norse expectation of Ragnarok followed by a renewed world that will, on a long enough view, presumably meet the same fate again. Not every ancient culture agreed on the details. Almost none of them assumed, as a matter of course, that history was a story of net improvement, that the accumulated efforts of one generation would compound into an advantage for the next, that the arc of the whole thing bent anywhere in particular. Progress, in the modern sense, the sense in which most people now hold it without much reflection, is a comparatively recent and comparatively local invention. It had to be argued for, against several thousand years of the opposite assumption, and the argument had to be won more than once.
Nor was the wheel ever quite retired. Nearly two and a half thousand years after Hesiod, in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche put forward what remains the most startling attempt in modern philosophy to think about time without any progress in it whatsoever. In The Gay Science, in a passage he called "the greatest weight," Nietzsche asks his reader to imagine a demon creeping up on them in their loneliest hour and announcing that everything they have lived, and everything they will live, they will have to live again, and again, countless times more, in exactly the same sequence, down to every pain and every joy, with nothing new in it, ever. The question the demon poses is not whether this is true, since Nietzsche is not, at bottom, making a physics claim in the way the Stoics were. The question is whether you could bear to hear it. Would the thought crush you, or would you fall to your knees and call it the most divine news you have ever received? Nietzsche does not record many results.
Eternal recurrence is, among other things, a deliberate provocation aimed at exactly the century that produced it: a century thoroughly convinced, by both its inherited Christianity and its newer secular faith in progress, that history moves forward and upward, toward salvation in one telling or toward improvement in the other. It is, in effect, Hesiod's wheel reintroduced into a culture that had spent the intervening two thousand years building an arrow, and Nietzsche's whole later philosophy of the "eternal yes," the amor fati he urges on his readers, is his attempt to answer his own demon's question in the affirmative. Whether he succeeds is a separate question. Set against the demon, the belief in an arrow, in cumulative and directional time, looks neither obvious nor inevitable. It was strange enough, even at the height of the nineteenth century's confidence in progress, that one of its sharpest minds felt the need to build an entire alternative cosmology just to remind everyone that the wheel was still an option.
So where did the arrow come from? Not from observation of history, which offers plenty of evidence for cycles and decline and precious little unaided evidence for a guaranteed upward trend. It came from theology, and specifically from one particular and highly unusual theology: the Judeo-Christian expectation that history has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that the end is not simply more of the same but a culmination.
Borrowed Time
Ordinary Jewish and Christian belief, at least from a fairly early stage, held that history was not a wheel. It was heading somewhere. There was a creation, a fall, the working out of a covenant, a first coming, and eventually, in Christian teaching, a Last Judgement and the establishment of a Kingdom. This was not progress in the modern sense: nobody was promising that the world would get steadily better on its own recognisance between now and the end, and the medieval Church was not, on the whole, in the business of predicting worldly improvement. But it was linear. It had direction and it had an ending that was also, in an important sense, a fulfilment rather than a mere stopping point. Time was going somewhere, even if getting there required divine intervention rather than human effort.
This basic structure, a line with a beginning and a culmination, is the raw material out of which the modern idea of progress was eventually built, and one of the clearest places to watch the transfer happening is in the work of a twelfth-century Calabrian abbot named Joachim of Fiore. Joachim, who died around 1202, was a serious and by most accounts deeply devout monastic reformer, not a crank, though his ideas would go on to have a long and often disreputable afterlife among people considerably less careful than he was. His central claim, worked out through an elaborate reading of scriptural patterns, was that history unfolds in three great ages, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. First, the Age of the Father, roughly the era of the Old Testament, characterised by law and fear. Second, the Age of the Son, the era of the Church, characterised by grace and filial obedience, the age Joachim believed he himself was living through. And third, still to come, the Age of the Spirit: a final era of direct spiritual illumination, in which the institutional structures of the Church, having done their historical work, would in some sense be superseded by a more immediate and universal understanding, a contemplative freedom available to all rather than mediated by priesthood and sacrament.
The Church, understandably, was never entirely comfortable with this, since a doctrine that anticipates its own institutional obsolescence is not the easiest thing for an institution to embrace, and Joachim's ideas were formally condemned in certain respects after his death, though he himself avoided serious censure in his lifetime. But the shape of his thought proved extraordinarily durable, far more durable than the theological details anyone actually believed. Here is the pattern: history divides into a small number of great epochs; each epoch supersedes the one before it while also, in some sense, growing out of it; the final epoch represents not just another stage but a qualitative leap, a resolution, an age in which the deepest tensions of the earlier ages are finally overcome. It is a three-act structure with a happy ending, and it has never since lacked for professionally cheerful readers prepared to announce that the third act was at last beginning, usually in their own lifetime, and usually in their own neighbourhood. That shape keeps reappearing for the next eight hundred years, dressed in entirely different clothes.
It reappears, for instance, in the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's account of history as the progressive self-realisation of Spirit through three broad movements toward a final state of complete self-understanding, of which more later. It reappears, more starkly, in Karl Marx's division of history into stages, primitive communism, slave society, feudalism, capitalism, culminating in a final, classless communist society in which the state itself, like Joachim's Church, is expected to wither away because its historical work is done. It reappears, with almost comic exactness, in the French thinker Auguste Comte's law of three stages, put forward in the 1830s as the founding claim of what he called positivism: human thought, Comte argued, passes through a theological stage, in which events are explained by the will of gods or spirits, then a metaphysical stage, in which the same events are explained by abstract forces and essences, and finally a positive stage, in which explanation is grounded entirely in observed, verifiable law, the stage Comte believed his own nineteenth century was on the threshold of completing. Swap in Comte's own vocabulary and you have Joachim's three ages again, right down to the sense that the third and final age represents not merely another step but a qualitative liberation from everything that came before it. Comte himself went on to found a Religion of Humanity, complete with a calendar of secular saints and himself as high priest, which suggests the theological stage was not quite as finished as he had announced. It reappears again, in a wholly secular and technological register, in the futurist Ray Kurzweil's account of an exponential curve in computing power that will eventually produce a Singularity, a moment of such radical transformation that human intelligence as we currently understand it will effectively give way to something else entirely. None of these thinkers, so far as anyone can tell, sat down and consciously modelled their scheme on a medieval Calabrian abbot. The likeness is not a matter of direct borrowing so much as a structural habit, a template so deep in the culture that it kept being reinvented independently, the way a particular shape of arch or vault gets rediscovered by builders who have never read each other's blueprints because it is simply the shape a stable roof wants to take.
This is close to the observation the German philosopher Karl Löwith made the centre of his 1949 book Meaning in History, one of the quietly disturbing works of twentieth-century thought precisely because it refuses to let modern secular thinking feel as secular as it likes to believe it is. Löwith had earned his suspicion the hard way. A student of Heidegger, of Jewish descent, he was driven out of Germany in 1934 and watched from exile, first in Italy, then in Japan, finally in the United States, as two political movements tore Europe apart while each claimed to know exactly where history was going: one promising a classless society at the end of the class struggle, the other promising a thousand-year Reich. He noticed, as other scholars have since, that the very phrase Third Reich carries a genealogy running back through nineteenth-century mysticism toward Joachim's third age, though the men who adopted the slogan neither knew nor cared where their branding came from. A man who had seen at close range what people do when they believe history has a destination, and that they are its appointed executors, was never going to treat philosophies of history as a harmless academic genre.
His argument, stated plainly, is that the modern philosophy of history, the whole apparatus of progress, of historical stages, of humanity moving toward some fuller realisation of itself, is secularised eschatology. Eschatology is simply the theological term for teaching about last things, the end of history and what follows it, and Löwith's claim is that when the Enlightenment and its heirs stopped believing in God's plan for history, they did not stop believing that history had a plan. They kept the plan and removed the planner. The furniture of a Last Judgement, a Kingdom of God, a culmination of all things, got moved into a new house and relabelled: not divine providence now but the progress of reason, the unfolding of freedom, the maturation of the human mind, the ascent of the productive forces. The structure, the sense that history is going somewhere in particular and that the somewhere is better than where we started, survived the death of the god who had originally guaranteed it. Modern historical optimism, on this reading, is eschatology wearing the overcoat of a philosophy of history: the same body, dressed for different weather, unwilling to admit that it is cold outside.
The method of the book matters as much as its thesis. Löwith works backward, starting with the modern philosophers of history, Burckhardt, Marx, Hegel, Comte, Voltaire, and descending layer by layer to their biblical foundations, and at every layer he finds the same result. The ancients, he argues, had no philosophy of history at all, because a cosmos that turns in circles offers nothing for such a philosophy to be about; one does not write the biography of a wheel. The Christians, strictly speaking, had no philosophy of history either, but something categorically different: a faith in fulfilment that stood outside history and judged it, locating the meaning of events not in the historical process but beyond it. The moderns, wanting the fulfilment without the faith, produced a hybrid that Löwith regards as unstable at its core, the reasoning method of the Greeks grafted onto the hope of the prophets, each half quietly disabling the other. The graft can flourish for generations, he concedes, but it cannot, in the end, explain itself.
This is a serious and unsettling thesis. If Löwith is right, then the entire modern faith in progress, including the confident secular optimism of a great deal of contemporary life, from Silicon Valley's talk of building a better future to the quiet, unexamined assumption most of us carry that our children's lives will probably be materially easier than our own, rests on a borrowed and unacknowledged religious foundation. Pull the theology out from underneath it, on this reading, and the floor was never really there. Modern optimism, in other words, might be less a discovery about how the world works than a kind of ghost limb: we still feel the shape of the Kingdom of God even though, officially, we amputated it two or three centuries ago. The counter-argument, when it comes, only has force against an opponent this strong.
The Best of All Possible Worlds
Before there can be a demolition, there has to be a building, and the building in question, the one Voltaire would pull apart brick by brick, was the work of a man far more careful, and far less cheerful, than his later reputation suggests.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was, by any reasonable accounting, one of the largest minds Europe produced in the early modern period: he invented calculus independently of Newton, made foundational contributions to logic, worked as a diplomat and librarian (his employers in Hanover chiefly wanted a history of the House of Brunswick from him, which he pursued for three decades and left unfinished, the structure of the universe having kept interrupting), corresponded with everyone worth corresponding with, and in 1710 published a book called the Theodicy, its full title running something like Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil. The word theodicy, which Leibniz coined for the purpose, literally means the justice, or justification, of God, and the problem it addresses is one of the oldest and hardest in the whole of religious philosophy: if God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good, why does evil exist at all. A being with unlimited power could presumably have made a world with no suffering in it. A being with unlimited knowledge would presumably have known how. A being of perfect goodness would presumably have wanted to. And yet here we all are, in a world that contains earthquakes, disease, cruelty, and the collected works of every tyrant history has produced. Something in that combination of premises appears to be false, and theologians and philosophers had been quarrelling over which one for well over a thousand years by the time Leibniz took his turn.
His answer was not, whatever Pangloss would later make of it, a shrug and a smile. It was a piece of careful, even severe logical argument. Leibniz's God, before creating anything, surveys every logically possible universe: every consistent arrangement of laws, creatures, histories, and outcomes that does not involve an outright contradiction. This is an enormous space of possibilities, effectively infinite, and crucially, not all of these possibilities can be combined with one another. A world with perfectly free creatures who never sin is not available, on Leibniz's account, because genuine freedom logically entails the possibility of choosing wrongly; a world with all the goods that flow from fixed natural laws, the reliability that lets you build a bridge or plant a crop with reasonable confidence it will still be there tomorrow, is not compatible with a world in which those same laws are suspended every time they would otherwise produce an earthquake or a famine. Philosophers call this constraint compossibility: not every good thing is compossible with every other good thing, and God's task, faced with this vast catalogue of mutually exclusive packages, is to select the one combination that contains the greatest possible surplus of goodness over evil that the logical structure of possibility permits. Leibniz sorted the world's evils into three kinds, metaphysical, physical, and moral: the sheer limitation that comes with being a finite creature rather than God, the suffering that follows from the operation of natural law, and the wickedness that follows from freedom. None of the three, on his argument, is a flaw in the design. Each is the unavoidable price of some good that could not exist without it. God, in this picture, is less a doting parent than a supreme engineer optimising under constraints, an engineer, moreover, saddled with a client whose brief demands every good at once and no costs anywhere, a brief no contractor could love; the constraints are logical, absolute, and not of his making, and the best of all possible worlds is simply the name of the solution.
Given God's nature, on Leibniz's argument, this selection is not really optional. Leibniz leaned heavily on what he called the principle of sufficient reason, the idea that nothing happens, and nothing is chosen, without some reason that explains why it is so rather than otherwise. A perfectly good, perfectly wise, perfectly powerful being, surveying every possible world and possessing a sufficient reason for every choice, could not rationally select anything other than the best available option, in the same way that a perfectly rational shopper, aware of every product on every shelf and caring only about value, could not rationally choose the second-best television. And so, Leibniz concludes, this world, whatever evils it plainly contains, must be the best of all possible worlds: not the best conceivable world in some free-floating fantasy sense, since a world with all the good and none of the constraining cost is not among the possibilities on offer, but the best of the worlds that could actually have existed given what full goodness is logically able to combine.
Voltaire can have his fun in a moment. This is a serious position, not sunny complacency, and Leibniz never treated it as licence for indifference to suffering. The whole apparatus of compossibility and sufficient reason is, if anything, a defence of a rationally ordered universe against the alternative and rather bleaker possibility that evil simply has no explanation at all, that suffering is not tragic necessity but sheer, meaningless accident in a universe answerable to nothing. Leibniz's optimism, in its original and technical sense, the word optimum being simply Latin for best, was a metaphysical claim about the logical structure of creation, not a psychological disposition or a prediction that things would keep getting better. He was not promising progress. He was defending God.
Leibniz was writing, remember, against a specific and formidable opponent: the sceptical philosopher Pierre Bayle, whose Historical and Critical Dictionary had argued, with considerable relish, that reason and revelation simply could not be reconciled on the question of evil, and that the honest philosopher was left with an unresolved contradiction rather than a system. The Theodicy is Leibniz's answer to Bayle as much as it is an answer to the ancient problem itself. And Leibniz was, by temperament, an optimist in the older, more general sense of the word too: a man who believed, across the whole of his working life, in harmony, in the idea that apparently disconnected domains of knowledge, mathematics, theology, law, natural philosophy, ultimately cohered into a single rational structure if examined with enough patience, the House of Brunswick excepted. The best of all possible worlds was, for him, not an isolated claim invented to console the grieving. It was the theological expression of a much broader conviction that ran through everything he did: that reality, examined closely enough, turns out to make sense.
The word optimism itself did not exist in any European language before this argument came along to require it. It was coined, in French, by Jesuit critics writing in the years after the Theodicy's publication, who needed a term for the specific doctrine that this is the best of all possible worlds, the Latin optimum, best, supplying the root. The critics were not paying a compliment. The word, in other words, was born as a technical label for a precise metaphysical claim, decades before it drifted, as words do, into the much vaguer and more general sense in which we now use it to describe a person's temperament or a forecaster's mood. The word still hauls that philosophical cargo quietly behind it every time it gets used at a dinner table or in a newspaper headline; nobody who describes a market forecast as optimistic realises they are, etymologically speaking, handling a small piece of Leibniz.
But an argument, once it leaves its author's hands, belongs to whoever picks it up next, and what educated Europe took from the Theodicy over the following decades was considerably cruder than what Leibniz had actually written: a general, ambient sense that whatever happens, happens for the best, that evil is somehow always secretly serving a larger good, that a rightly ordered mind should be able to look at any catastrophe and, with sufficient philosophical effort, locate its silver lining. This is not quite what Leibniz argued, but it is recognisably descended from it, in the way a bumper sticker is recognisably descended from a doctoral thesis, and it was this looser, more popular version of the doctrine, optimism as an attitude rather than a metaphysical claim, that stood directly in the path of the wave that hit Lisbon on the first of November 1755.
The Tutor Who Would Not Learn
Voltaire had, for a good part of his career, found Leibniz's argument more or less tolerable, or at least not worth a sustained assault; he had bigger targets, chiefly the Catholic Church and the French state, and a philosophical position about the logical structure of possible worlds was not, on the face of it, urgent business. Lisbon changed that calculation completely. News of the earthquake reached Voltaire, as it reached the rest of Europe, within weeks, and the scale of it, tens of thousands of people killed at the exact moment they were engaged in the most devout act available to them, on the one day of the year set aside to honour the dead who had gone before, struck him as a direct and unanswerable challenge to the idea that this world represents the best available balance of good and evil. His first response was serious and immediate: the long Poem on the Lisbon Disaster, published within months, which does not mock Leibniz so much as interrogate him, asking with real anguish how the deaths of infants crushed under smoking rubble can possibly be reconciled with any scheme in which their suffering serves some greater cosmic accounting. It is not a funny poem. It is a poem written by a man whose confidence in a certain kind of philosophical consolation has just been badly shaken.
The lasting response, though, the one that has outlived the poem in every sense, is Candide, published in 1759, four years after the earthquake. Voltaire was prolific at the best of times and never more so than when annoyed, and four years was, by his standards, an unusually long time to let a grievance mature. He issued the book under a pseudonym and denied having written it, a denial nobody believed and which he did not, on the evidence, intend anyone to believe. And Candide is funny, ferociously and precisely funny, which is itself part of the argument: Voltaire's method is not to refute Leibniz point by point but to take the popular, degraded version of Leibnizian optimism and simply refuse to let it stop talking, no matter what happens to it.
The vehicle for this is Pangloss, tutor to the young and credulous Candide, who teaches his pupil that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds and then spends the rest of the novel being run through an escalating and almost gleefully absurd catalogue of catastrophes without ever revising the claim. He contracts syphilis, which he explains, with unbroken serenity, as a necessary evil, since the disease came to Europe along with chocolate and cochineal, and one cannot have the excellent things without their attendant costs. He is dissected by anatomists who mistake his freshly hanged body for a cadaver suitable for study, and survives this too, more or less. He ends up enslaved on a Turkish galley. Through all of it, Pangloss returns, battered but philosophically undented, to explain why this particular catastrophe was, on reflection, for the best, or at least a necessary link in a chain that produces the best. No experience has ever cost him a premise.
Voltaire does not even wait to invent a fictional disaster for the purpose of testing his tutor. Early in the book, Candide and Pangloss wash up in Lisbon itself, arriving by sea just in time for the earthquake to strike beneath their feet, and the city that greets them promptly organises an auto-da-fé, a ceremonial burning of supposed heretics, on the theory that a public display of religious severity might appease whatever force had just levelled half the harbour. Pangloss is condemned to be hanged for the crime of reasoning aloud about causation, and survives that too, in the general confusion, only to turn up again later exactly as unshaken as before. Voltaire is not inventing his satire's opening catastrophe. He is putting his characters directly inside the actual event that had, four years earlier, ended his own patience with the doctrine Pangloss represents, and daring the philosophy to keep talking inside the very disaster that had killed it in its author's own mind.
Voltaire's target here is not Leibniz's actual argument, which as we have seen is considerably more careful than anything Pangloss articulates; it is a caricature, pushed to a point of absurdity Leibniz himself never intended and would very likely have found objectionable. But the caricature works because it isolates the exact feature of popular optimism that Voltaire thought dangerous. The joke is easy to misdescribe. Pangloss's crime is not that he holds an optimistic theory. It is that he holds it in a way that no possible evidence could ever be allowed to revise. Every disaster that happens to him becomes, instantly and without friction, further confirmation of the very system that predicted things would turn out well. This is not really optimism in any useful sense at all. It is a kind of doctrinal reflex, a mind so thoroughly captured by its own explanatory system that suffering stops being able to register as suffering; it can only register as data, and the data always, somehow, comes back positive. A man being flogged on a slave galley who can still locate the silver lining has not achieved wisdom. He has lost the capacity to notice what is happening to him, which is a much more ordinary and much less admirable condition, closer to a kind of philosophical anaesthesia than to genuine hope.
This is why the joke keeps landing, book after book, catastrophe after catastrophe, in a way that a single instance of it would not: Voltaire needs the repetition, because the repetition is the argument. A man who explains away one disaster might simply be making a reasonable point about a specific case. A man who explains away every disaster, with the same unruffled formula, on principle, has revealed that he was never actually reasoning about the world at all. He was reciting a creed and calling it philosophy.
And yet Candide does not end in despair. A lazier satire would simply have concluded that all optimism is Panglossian folly and left it there. Voltaire is subtler than that. By the close of the novel, Candide, Cunégonde, Pangloss, and the remaining survivors of the plot's considerable violence have settled on a small farm outside Constantinople. Pangloss, being constitutionally incapable of change, still occasionally maintains, out of what has by now become pure habit rather than conviction, that everything has happened for the best, since if it had not, Candide would never have ended up on this particular farm eating these particular candied citrons. Nobody troubles to argue with him any longer. The household has quietly adopted a different, much smaller creed instead, delivered in the novel's famous closing exchange and its even more famous closing line: mais il faut cultiver notre jardin, we must cultivate our garden.
What a strange and modest note this is to end a philosophical satire on. It is not despair. Voltaire does not have his characters conclude that nothing can be improved, that effort is pointless, that the earthquake proves the universe indifferent and therefore hopeless. It is, instead, a deliberate downsizing of the entire ambition of theodicy. Stop trying to explain the whole of existence, the novel suggests, stop trying to reconcile every earthquake and every act of cruelty into a single coherent balance sheet that comes out net positive. That project, whatever its logical merits in Leibniz's careful original hands, becomes obscene the moment it is used, as it so often was in the aftermath of Lisbon, to console people who have just watched their families die, or worse, to excuse the people who might have prevented it. Instead: tend the small plot of ground actually within your reach. Grow the vegetables you can grow. Fix the part of the world your arms can reach around.
This is, on reflection, its own kind of optimism, just one that has given up on the metaphysical guarantee. It assumes that cultivation is worthwhile, that effort applied to a bounded and concrete task will actually produce something better than doing nothing, that a garden tended is better than a garden neglected. It has simply stopped pretending that this local, practical confidence tells us anything about the ultimate structure of the universe. Voltaire has not refuted optimism. He has evicted it from theology and moved it into the vegetable patch, where, as it turns out, it gets along rather better.
Blame, Geology, and the Courage to Know
Voltaire was not the only person arguing about Lisbon. The earthquake worked simultaneously on several different levels of the eighteenth-century mind: theological, moral, and, for the first time in a serious and sustained way, scientific.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, reading Voltaire's poem on the disaster, wrote him a long and pointed letter in 1756 that has become one of the more famous exchanges in the whole controversy. Rousseau wrote, oddly enough, in defence of providence; his complaint was that Voltaire's poem stripped the afflicted of every consolation while offering nothing in its place, a cruelty he thought unworthy of a man so fortunate. But the letter's most durable argument is not theological at all. It is practical, almost architectural, and it has a distinctly modern ring to it. Nature, Rousseau argued, did not build Lisbon. People did. It was people who decided to crowd tens of thousands of residents into a dense city of tall stone buildings, six storeys in places, and it was people who decided that everyone should be gathered inside those buildings, under their heaviest masonry, at the precise moment a devout population would be assembled for a holy day. A shepherd caught in the open countryside when the ground shook would likely have suffered nothing worse than a fright. It was the arrangement of human life, not divine malice and not cosmic necessity, that turned a geological event into a mass grave. This was, in its own eighteenth-century way, an early and pointed instance of a habit of mind we now take for granted whenever a hurricane or a flood makes headlines: the recognition that a natural hazard and a human disaster are not the same thing, and that the gap between them is very often a matter of decisions about where and how people are allowed to build. Rousseau was not absolving nature. He was refusing to let human choices hide behind it, an argument his own century found startling and ours finds obvious.
At almost exactly the same moment, a young lecturer in the distant Prussian university town of Königsberg was taking an entirely different approach to the same event. Immanuel Kant, not yet thirty and not yet the towering figure he would become, wrote three separate essays in 1756 attempting to explain the earthquake's probable causes in purely natural, geological terms: subterranean caverns, trapped gases, the mechanical propagation of shock through rock and soil. Read now, the essays are of modest scientific value; Kant did not have access to plate tectonics, and much of his specific reasoning has not survived the intervening two and a half centuries especially well. Trapped gases explain very little. But the gesture itself matters more than the content. Here was one of the sharpest minds in Europe, faced with an event that most of his contemporaries were still discussing chiefly in terms of divine judgement and providential meaning, choosing instead to ask a quieter and in some ways more radical question: what actually happened, mechanically, underground, and can it be explained the way we explain any other physical event, without reference to punishment or purpose at all. It is a small essay in an unglamorous genre, and an early, telling sign of the Enlightenment's growing confidence that the natural world could be explained rather than merely endured or interpreted for its moral lessons, and that confidence is itself one of the deep tributaries feeding the modern belief in progress.
It is the same Kant, not quite three decades later, who gave the Enlightenment what might be its closest thing to a founding motto. In 1784, responding to a magazine's open question, posed, as the period's most consequential questions tended to be, in a footnote, Kant published a short essay titled "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" His answer begins with a definition that has lost none of its force: enlightenment is humanity's emergence from its self-incurred immaturity, immaturity meaning the inability to use one's own understanding without direction from another. Self-incurred, Kant is careful to insist, because the immaturity is not usually the result of any actual lack of capacity; it persists chiefly through laziness and cowardice, through the comfort of letting a book, a pastor, or a physician do one's thinking for it. And then the famous line, in Latin borrowed from Horace: sapere aude, dare to know, have the courage to use your own understanding.
Be precise about what this motto is and is not claiming, because it is very easy to mistake it for simple cheerfulness about the future, and it is nothing of the kind. Kant is not predicting that enlightenment will happen, still less that it will happen automatically, or that history has some mechanism guaranteeing humanity's eventual maturity. He is issuing a summons to individual courage, which is a great deal cheaper to issue than to answer. It is a considerably harder-edged doctrine than it is usually given credit for, and it sits, not entirely comfortably, alongside the geological essays on the earthquake written by the same hand a generation earlier: both are instances of the same underlying instinct, that the world yields to inquiry rather than merely to endurance, and that the yielding is a matter of will as much as of luck.
A later reader names what the geologists and the theologians of 1755 could sense about the earthquake's shock without quite being able to state it. Hans Blumenberg, the same philosopher who will shortly supply the counter-argument to Löwith, wrote a short book called Shipwreck with Spectator, which traces a much older European habit of mind: the philosophical tradition, running back through Lucretius, of imagining the wise man standing safely on shore, watching a ship founder in a storm at sea, and drawing calm philosophical lessons from a catastrophe he is not himself inside. It is a comfortable position, the position of the spectator, and European thought had rather liked it for a very long time. Apply Blumenberg's figure to Lisbon and something becomes visible that the contemporaries could feel without being able to name: the shore itself had given way. There was no safe promontory from which to philosophise about the disaster at a proper, composed distance, because the disaster arrived inside the churches, inside the city, inside the very audience that might otherwise have supplied the calm spectators. Everyone in Lisbon that morning was aboard the ship. It is one reason the earthquake did more philosophical damage than earlier catastrophes of comparable scale: it collapsed the distance between the thinker and the thing being thought about, and a great deal of what came after, from Voltaire's fury to Condorcet's cell, can be read as different attempts to work out how to think seriously about a catastrophe once standing safely apart from it is no longer an option.
The Sketch from the Hiding Place
If Voltaire supplies the demolition of naive optimism, and Kant supplies something like its more demanding, courage-requiring alternative, then the figure who supplies the emotional and argumentative centre of this whole story is a French aristocrat and mathematician named Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, better known by his title, the Marquis de Condorcet.
Condorcet was, by the outbreak of the French Revolution, one of the most accomplished intellectuals in Europe: a mathematician of real distinction, permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences, an early and consistent advocate of equal rights for women, an opponent of slavery, and, when the Revolution came, an enthusiastic participant in its early, hopeful phase, serving in the Legislative Assembly and later the National Convention. He was, in short, exactly the kind of figure the Revolution might have been expected to reward. It devoured him instead.
By 1793, the Revolution had entered the phase now known, with grim understatement, as the Terror, and Condorcet, who had made the fatal error of criticising the new Jacobin constitution as poorly drafted, a review its authors took personally, and had voted, on principle, against the execution of the king, found himself denounced as an enemy of the Revolution he had spent years helping to build. A warrant went out for his arrest. He went into hiding in Paris, sheltered by a widow named Madame Vernet, in a small room where he could not risk being seen and where he knew, with a clarity that must have been very difficult to sit with, that discovery would mean the guillotine.
It was in this room, under this sentence, that Condorcet wrote his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. It is, on the face of it, one of the most optimistic documents the eighteenth century produced. Condorcet surveys the whole of human history as a sequence of stages, each marked by advances in knowledge and the slow, uneven retreat of ignorance, prejudice, and tyranny, and argues that the human mind is capable of indefinite improvement, with no fixed ceiling anywhere in view, not just in the accumulation of scientific knowledge but in virtue, in the design of institutions, and in the ordinary happiness of ordinary people. He anticipates, with a specificity that reads almost eerily today, the extension of human lifespan through medical advance, the spread of education, the equalisation of rights between men and women, the eventual elimination of the grosser forms of inequality between nations. The book ends by looking forward to a future stage of human development so far beyond the writer's own moment that he can describe its general shape but not its particulars, and Condorcet writes about this future with something close to tenderness, as a man might write about a child he will not live to see grow up. Which, of course, is exactly what he was doing.
Notice how much of the Sketch's confidence rests on things Condorcet had spent his working life building, rather than merely hoping for from an armchair. He was not a mystic prophesying a golden future he had no hand in. He had spent years developing what would later be called social mathematics, applying probability theory to questions of jury verdicts, voting systems, and the reliability of collective judgement, on the wager that human institutions, like natural phenomena, could be studied, measured, and improved by the same rational methods that had already transformed astronomy and mechanics. His advocacy for the education of girls alongside boys, for the civil rights of Protestants, Jews, and enslaved people, for a national system of public instruction free of church control, was not incidental to the Sketch's argument. It was the argument, already half enacted, in the years before the Terror made enactment impossible. The book he wrote in hiding is, in this sense, less a leap of faith than a summary of a life's practical programme, restated at the one moment when practice itself had become unavailable to him and only the argument for it remained.
In March 1794, Condorcet finally left his hiding place, apparently judging that his continued presence endangered Madame Vernet, and was arrested within days, disguised and travelling on foot, on suspicion of being an aristocrat owing to the fineness of the linen shirt he wore under his workman's clothes, a detail that would be too neat for fiction if it were not so grimly plausible. He died in his prison cell at Bourg-la-Reine within a day or two of his arrest, the circumstances disputed ever since: exhaustion, apoplexy, and, by many accounts, poison he may have carried against exactly this eventuality. He never stood trial. He never met the guillotine that had been waiting for him for the better part of a year. He simply, quietly, ran out of road, alone, at the end of a hunt his own revolution had organised.
It is difficult to think of a starker juxtaposition in the whole history of ideas than the one between the Sketch and the circumstances of its composition. Two easy readings present themselves, and both should be resisted in favour of the harder, truer one in between. The easy cynical reading says that Condorcet's optimism was simply refuted by events, that a man writing confidently of humanity's limitless future while hiding from the machine that would kill him was engaged in a kind of tragic self-deception, proof that philosophical optimism is a luxury available only to those who have not yet been made to pay for it. The easy sentimental reading goes the other way, treating Condorcet as a secular martyr whose faith in progress was somehow vindicated by his composure in the face of death, as though the nobility of the gesture settled the philosophical question.
Neither reading survives much time with what Condorcet actually wrote and did. He was not confused about his circumstances. He knew precisely what was hunting him and precisely how likely it was to succeed. And he chose, in that knowledge, to spend his remaining time not on despair, not on a settling of scores with the revolutionaries who had betrayed him, but on a careful, disciplined argument for the proposition that human effort, applied across generations, tends to improve the human condition. This is the point at which the question sharpens into something close to unbearable: is Condorcet's optimism refuted by the guillotine waiting outside his door, or is the act of writing the Sketch anyway, in that room, under that sentence, the single clearest demonstration available anywhere in this whole history of what philosophical optimism actually requires of a person.
The answer worth arguing for, and it is an argument rather than a fact, is the second one. Condorcet's optimism was never a forecast of his own personal fortunes. It was never the claim that things would go well for him, specifically, in March 1794. It was a claim about the trajectory of a species across a much longer stretch of time than any single life, including his own, could encompass or guarantee. A weather forecast that fails to predict a single afternoon's storm is a bad forecast. A commitment to tending a forest is not refuted by a single tree falling on the person tending it. Condorcet's optimism, understood properly, was never in the forecasting business at all. It was a commitment, made and kept in the full knowledge of immediate and overwhelming contrary evidence, which is precisely what makes it a commitment rather than an observation. Anyone can be optimistic when the evidence is running their way; that requires no courage and very little philosophy. Writing the Sketch from a hiding place, with a warrant out and a widow's kindness the only thing standing between the author and arrest, is optimism with no evidence in its favour whatsoever, sustained by nothing but the writer's considered judgement that the wager was still worth making. That, more than anything in Leibniz or Voltaire or Kant, is the best available candidate for what philosophical optimism actually is, once every comforting illusion has been stripped away from it.
Whose Theology Is It Anyway
Return, now, to Löwith's thesis, the one left standing at the end of the second section: that all of this, the whole apparatus of progress, Condorcet's stages of human development, Kant's sapere aude, the entire modern confidence that history moves and moves upward, is secularised eschatology, theology that has forgotten its own name. It is a powerful argument, and it got a powerful answer roughly two decades later, from the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg, in a large and demanding book called The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, first published in 1966 and substantially revised over the following decade, Blumenberg not being a man to leave a large book alone.
Blumenberg's counter-argument does not try to deny the obvious formal resemblance between Christian eschatology and modern progress narratives; the resemblance is too plain to deny, and Blumenberg does not waste time pretending otherwise. His argument is instead that resemblance is not the same thing as inheritance, and that Löwith's picture, of modern thinkers unwittingly smuggling theological furniture into a secular house, gets the historical mechanism wrong in a way that matters enormously for how we should think about the legitimacy of the modern project as a whole.
Blumenberg's case runs, in outline, something like this. By the late Middle Ages, Christian theology had itself undergone an internal crisis, driven largely by a movement in philosophy known as nominalism, associated above all with thinkers like William of Ockham, now chiefly remembered for a razor he never stated in quite the form attributed to him. The nominalists, in their determination to protect the absolute sovereignty and freedom of God, pushed the idea of divine omnipotence to a point where God's will became, in effect, entirely unconstrained by anything, including the rational order that earlier medieval thought, following Aquinas and the broader scholastic tradition, had assumed bound God's actions to comprehensible, reason-friendly patterns. A God whose will is truly absolute is not obliged to be predictable. He could, on strict nominalist logic, have made a world with entirely different laws, could suspend those laws tomorrow without contradiction, could save or damn according to a decree that human reason has no purchase on whatsoever. This is theologically coherent, arguably even more rigorously monotheistic than what came before it, in its refusal to place any limit at all on divine freedom. But it came at an enormous cost to human confidence in the intelligibility of the world. If God's will is truly inscrutable, then the medieval project of reading the cosmos as a rationally ordered book, written by a reliable author for a comprehending reader, collapses. The world becomes, in a phrase Blumenberg uses, radically contingent: not necessarily hostile, but no longer trustworthy in the specific sense of being answerable to human reason at all.
This, on Blumenberg's account, left a genuine vacuum, a real and pressing human problem rather than a merely intellectual puzzle: how is a person meant to live, meant to build knowledge, meant to plan a future, in a universe whose ultimate governing will has just been declared unreadable. And his claim is that modernity's confidence in progress, in human reason's capacity to investigate nature and improve the human condition through its own effort, was not a theft from the theology that had just collapsed. It was a new answer to the specific problem that theology's own internal crisis had created. Early modern thinkers, in this telling, were not quietly repurposing borrowed eschatological furniture. They were furnishing an empty room for the first time, filling the space left by an unreliable, inscrutable God with an original human self-assertion: the wager that even if the cosmos no longer comes with a guaranteed rational author, human beings can, through their own patient inquiry and effort, build a reliable and improving relationship with it anyway. Blumenberg calls this Selbstbehauptung, self-assertion, and insists that it is modernity's own achievement, legitimately its own, not a disguised continuation of the theology it replaced.
Blumenberg has a further, more technical move, and it is the one that does the real work against Löwith. Where Löwith sees secularisation, the transfer of a theological content into a worldly disguise, Blumenberg sees what he calls reoccupation. The Christian centuries had built up a set of great questions, above all the question of what history as a whole means and where it is going, and had supplied answers to them for so long that the questions themselves came to seem natural, permanent, simply part of the furniture of any thinking life. When the theological answers lost their authority, the questions did not politely leave with them. They remained behind, vacant positions in the culture's structure of expectations, and the new age found itself pressed to fill them with whatever materials it had to hand. The idea of progress, on Blumenberg's account, had a perfectly legitimate and rather modest origin of its own, owing nothing to eschatology. It grew out of the actual working experience of early modern science, where Kepler could correct Copernicus and Newton could build on both, and out of the seventeenth-century quarrel between the ancients and the moderns, in which living writers discovered they need not concede permanent superiority to the dead. That kind of progress, local, cumulative, demonstrable, was something new under the sun. The trouble began when this modest idea was drafted in to occupy the enormous vacant position the Kingdom of God had left behind, and made to answer a question, the question of history's total meaning, that it was never built to bear. What Löwith diagnoses as secularised theology, Blumenberg rediagnoses as overextension: not stolen content, but a sound local idea stretched to cover a hole in the roof that it did not make.
The distinction is finer than it first appears. On Löwith's account the fault lies in the modern idea itself; it is illegitimate at the root, living off an inheritance it cannot acknowledge, and no amount of refinement will make it solvent. On Blumenberg's account the idea is sound and only its inflation is at fault, and the cure is not to abandon confidence in progress but to return it to its proper and defensible scale: from a promise about the destiny of the species to a working expectation about the growth of knowledge and the correction of error. One diagnosis says amputate. The other says reduce the swelling. A reader deciding between them is not choosing between optimism and pessimism; both philosophers were, in their different ways, sceptics about grand historical promises. The choice is between two accounts of what modern hope is made of, and therefore of what, if anything, can be salvaged from it once the grand promises are given up.
The dispute cannot be settled with a clean winner, and both men hold ground the other cannot quite take. Löwith is right that the shape of modern progress narratives, three-act structures moving toward a culminating resolution, borrows unmistakably from the theological pattern that preceded it; the Joachite echo in Hegel and Marx and Comte and Kurzweil is too consistent to be coincidence. Blumenberg is right that resemblance of shape does not settle the question of legitimacy, and that a modern thinker's confidence in the value of patient, cumulative human effort does not stand or fall with whichever theological scaffolding happened to be lying around at the moment the confidence was first articulated. A house built with timber salvaged from a demolished church is not thereby haunted, nor obliged to collapse when the church's former congregation finally notices where the beams came from. Yet Löwith has a reply. The salvaged beams would be harmless, he might say, if modern people actually treated progress as the working hypothesis Blumenberg describes, and they conspicuously do not. They mourn its setbacks with the grief appropriate to a broken covenant, not a failed experiment; they speak of being on the right side of history as their great-grandparents spoke of being among the saved; the emotional temperature of the belief keeps betraying the theology the official account has renounced. Blumenberg can vindicate the modest idea of progress. Whether anyone has ever managed to hold the modest idea and only the modest idea, without the old hope flooding quietly back in, is a question his argument does not answer and perhaps cannot. So the dispute stands, and it should be allowed to stand. What the house needs either way is a foundation argued on its own terms rather than a borrowed one it must hope nobody inspects too closely.
The End of History, Twice
There is a further, more ambitious version of the claim that history has a direction, one that goes beyond the general confidence that things tend to improve and asserts something much stronger: that history is not merely heading somewhere, but is heading toward a specific, identifiable, and in some sense final destination. This is the territory of Hegel, and of the two twentieth-century readers who did more than anyone else to make his difficult philosophy politically legible: Alexandre Kojève and, at one remove, Francis Fukuyama.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century, is not an easy philosopher to summarise fairly in a paragraph, the paragraph being a unit of prose Hegel himself showed little interest in ending, and most brief summaries do him a disservice by reaching for a piece of shorthand that is not, strictly, his own. Generations of students have been taught that Hegel's method proceeds by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: a starting position, its contradiction, and a resolution that combines elements of both at a higher level. The triadic formula is useful as a rough sketch, but it comes chiefly from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, an earlier German idealist, and from later summarisers of the tradition, rather than from Hegel's own preferred vocabulary. The formula has done considerably better in classrooms than anything Hegel actually wrote. Hegel himself tends to speak instead of a movement from an immediate, undeveloped unity, through division and opposition, to a more developed unity that has passed through and incorporated its own contradiction rather than simply cancelling it out. His key term for this incorporating movement is Aufhebung, a German word that Hegel liked precisely because it carries three senses at once: to cancel, to preserve, and to lift up. When an earlier stage of thought or of history is aufgehoben, superseded, it is not simply thrown away. Its limitations are cancelled, but whatever was true and valuable in it is preserved and carried forward, lifted into a richer and more adequate stage that could not have existed without it.
Hegel's grand claim, worked out across an enormous body of writing but expressed most directly in his lectures on the philosophy of history, is that this movement, division, conflict, and richer reconciliation, is not just a pattern found in individual arguments but the actual structure of history itself. History, for Hegel, is the progressive self-realisation of freedom. Successive civilisations and successive political and philosophical arrangements represent successive, imperfect attempts to work out what human freedom actually consists of and how it can be organised into a stable, rational social order, and each attempt, through its own internal contradictions, generates the conflict that produces the next, more adequate attempt. The whole process, on Hegel's account, is moving toward a state he called Absolute Spirit, or Absolute Knowing: not the end of events in any crude sense, but a condition of full self-understanding, in which human reason has finally worked out an adequate and stable account of freedom, and the great historical drama of contradiction and reconciliation has essentially completed its central work. In fairness to Hegel, and against a lazy caricature, his philosophy of history is not a simple story of inevitable, uninterrupted improvement; it is a story soaked in what he called the cunning of reason, in which individual human passions, ambitions, and even catastrophes are the actual material through which a larger rational pattern works itself out, often at appalling cost to the individuals caught up in it. He described history, in a phrase no naive optimist would reach for, as a slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples and the wisdom of states had been sacrificed, and then asked, without flinching, for whom and for what those enormous sacrifices had been made. Hegel is not a naive optimist. He is closer to someone arguing that history has a direction and a logic, whatever the price of any particular chapter. It was Hegel, too, who observed that the owl of Minerva takes flight only at dusk, meaning that philosophy comprehends an age only once that age is nearly over: an admission, made with complete composure, that his system could explain everything except what to do next, and that wisdom, on his own account, kept unhelpful hours.
It is the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève who took this dense and demanding material and turned it into one of the most influential intellectual events of the twentieth century, in a setting almost absurdly unlike the university seminar room its content might suggest. Between 1933 and 1939, Kojève led a series of lectures on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, attended over the years by a remarkable roster of listeners, including Raymond Aron, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, several of whom would go on to reshape entire fields of French intellectual life partly on the strength of what they absorbed in that room. Kojève's reading of Hegel was distinctive and, in certain respects, quite bold: he argued that Hegel's philosophy of history should be read as claiming that history, in its deepest and most consequential sense, had effectively already ended, with the ideals of liberty and equality unleashed by the French Revolution and given their decisive military and political confirmation at the Battle of Jena in 1806, the moment at which Napoleon's armies, carrying the Revolution's principles across Europe, defeated the old Prussian order. What remained after that point, on Kojève's account, was not the emergence of any fundamentally new principle of political organisation, but simply the long, uneven, often violent working-out of those principles across the rest of the globe: their extension to peoples and places that had not yet caught up with them, their gradual, unglamorous implementation in institutions and laws. Kojève gave the destination a name of his own, the universal and homogeneous state: a condition in which the recognition men had once fought wars and mounted revolutions to obtain would at last be distributed equally to everyone, leaving nothing fundamental left to fight about. The great ideological drama, the argument about what freedom actually requires, had, in Kojève's reading, already been settled. Everything since has been administration.
This is a startling claim, and it must have sounded stranger still delivered in Paris in the late 1930s, to an audience about to watch the twentieth century stage two of the most catastrophic ideological experiments in human history. Kojève was not naive about this; his own later career, spent largely as a senior official in French and European trade policy, suggests a man who took his own thesis about the shift from grand ideological struggle to detailed administrative implementation rather literally and rather seriously. He also left behind, in a footnote added to a later edition of the lectures after a visit to Japan, one of the strangest asides in twentieth-century philosophy: a rumination on whether post-historical life would amount to a return to animal contentment or to something like Japanese snobbery, the endless disciplined refinement of pure form, tea ceremonies and Noh theatre, once nothing fundamental remained to fight over. It is hard to tell how serious he was being. With Kojève it usually is.
It was this specific, Kojèvian reading of Hegel, transmitted through decades of subsequent scholarship and argument, that Francis Fukuyama picked up at a moment when it suddenly seemed to fit the available evidence uncannily well: the closing years of the Cold War. In the summer of 1989, with the Soviet system visibly cracking and months before the fall of the Berlin Wall gave the argument its most vivid possible illustration, a piece of timing no publicist would have dared to arrange, Fukuyama published an essay in the journal The National Interest titled, with a question mark that much of the subsequent commentary preferred to ignore, "The End of History?" He expanded the argument into a full book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992, after the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. His central claim, echoing Kojève's reading of Hegel almost exactly but transposed onto the specific ideological contest of the twentieth century, was that liberal democracy, paired with market economics, might represent the final form of human government: not because nothing further would happen in the world, and not because liberal democracies would stop having problems, arguments, or crises, but because no more fundamental ideological alternative appeared to remain on offer. Fascism had been defeated militarily in 1945. Communism, the last serious rival system claiming to offer a comprehensive and superior account of how human society should be organised, had just visibly and comprehensively failed on its own terms. What remained, on Fukuyama's reading, was not a world without conflict, but a world without a genuine ideological contest at the level that had structured the preceding two centuries: a world in which the argument about the best form of human government had, in its deepest sense, been settled, leaving only its uneven and often difficult implementation still to come.
Marx and Fukuyama arrive at what looks, from a great enough distance, like the same shape of argument by very different roads. Marx also inherited Hegel's dialectical structure, filtered through his own materialist reworking of it: where Hegel's motor of history is the self-realisation of Spirit through ideas and their contradictions, Marx's is the self-realisation of a classless society through the contradictions of successive economic systems, feudalism giving way to capitalism, capitalism generating, through its own internal logic, the conditions of its own overthrow. Marx, too, believed history was heading toward a determinate resolution, a final stage beyond which the old drama of struggle would cease to have its old material basis. Fukuyama's argument, decades later, is in one sense Marx's mirror image and in another sense his direct rebuttal: liberal democracy and market capitalism, not communism, as the terminus, the ideological contest ending in the opposite camp from the one Marx had predicted. Both men, whatever their disagreement about which side would win, agreed on something deeper and rarely examined, which is that history is the kind of thing that can be won: that it has a logical structure with a determinate outcome, rather than being simply one damned thing after another. Notice how much ground that shared assumption occupies, quietly, underneath two political traditions that spent the twentieth century trying to destroy each other.
The thesis is far more often caricatured than read, a fate books with memorable titles rarely escape. Fukuyama's argument is more careful and more hedged than the triumphalist slogan it is remembered as. The book itself is preoccupied, at real length, with the psychological and spiritual costs of a world without grand ideological struggle, drawing on Nietzsche's concept of the "last man," a figure who has achieved comfort and security at the cost of the thumos, the spiritedness and desire for recognition, that drove earlier, more dangerous but also more vital ages of human history. Fukuyama was worried, from the very beginning, that a world with the ideological argument settled might produce a kind of spiritual flatness, a boredom dangerous enough to generate its own destabilising reactions. He was, in other words, never quite the unqualified cheerleader for a permanently peaceful, permanently satisfied liberal future that his critics, and for that matter many of his supporters, took him to be.
His later work bears this out, and it amounts to more than three decades spent explaining his own question mark, which may be a record for a single piece of punctuation. After the September 2001 attacks, and more decisively after the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent rise of populist and nationalist movements across the democratic world, Fukuyama returned repeatedly to his own thesis, complicating and qualifying it considerably. His later books, including Political Order and Political Decay, published in 2014, and Identity, published in 2018, are preoccupied with exactly the kinds of instability, decay, and reversal that a naive reading of "the end of history" would have declared impossible: institutions can rot, democracies can slide toward illiberalism, and the mere absence of a coherent rival ideology does not guarantee that liberal democracy will actually be chosen, or well maintained, by any particular country at any particular moment. What Fukuyama has never fully retracted, even through all of this qualification, is the narrower core claim: that no fully worked-out, comprehensive rival account of political organisation, comparable in ambition and coherence to fascism or communism, has actually emerged to replace the ones that failed in the twentieth century. Authoritarian capitalism, religious fundamentalism, and various populist nationalisms have all proven capable of real damage and real staying power. None of them, on Fukuyama's continuing argument, offers a new universal answer of its own to the old Hegelian question of how human freedom should be organised; they are objections and disruptions rather than alternatives.
A Family, Not a Doctrine
The word optimism has been doing several quite different jobs across this history. None of them well. A great deal of unnecessary confusion, both in casual conversation and in serious argument, comes from treating optimism as a single settled idea with one two-thousand-year pedigree rather than what it actually is: a loose family of related but sometimes flatly incompatible claims that happen to share a hopeful surface.
There is, first, Leibniz's own position, which is best called theological optimism in its strict and original sense: the claim that this specific world, with all its actual evils, is the best of all possible worlds, in the precise sense that no logically available alternative would have contained a better balance of good over evil. This is a technical metaphysical thesis about the logical structure of divine creation. It does not promise that things will get better over time. It does not even promise that things are, on any ordinary human scale, good; it only claims that the alternatives were worse. Which is not the sort of thing a person says to cheer anybody up. It is a far more careful and defensible position than its Panglossian caricature, though also one that very few people today, inside or outside professional philosophy, are prepared to defend in its original form, chiefly because most people no longer share the specific and demanding conception of God that made the argument cohere in the first place.
There is, second, and standing a step further back from Leibniz's precise logical machinery, what might be called providential optimism in a looser and much more widespread sense: the general belief that things will work out because some benevolent power, whether conceived as God, fate, karma, or simply the universe, is arranging matters for the best. This is the popular residue of Leibniz's argument, the version Voltaire actually spent his satire attacking, and it remains, in secularised forms, extremely common: it survives, for instance, in the vague but persistent modern conviction that things "happen for a reason," a phrase that does an enormous amount of quiet theological work for people who would be startled to hear it described that way.
There is, third, historical or dialectical optimism: the claim, running from Hegel through Kojève, through Marx in a very different register, and into Fukuyama, that history possesses an internal logic, driven by conflict and its resolution, that moves toward a determinate and identifiable end state. This is a much more specific and much more falsifiable claim than either of the first two, because it commits itself to a particular account of the mechanism, freedom working itself out through contradiction, class struggle resolving itself through revolution, ideological contest settling into liberal consensus, and mechanisms of that kind can, in principle, be checked against events in a way that Leibniz's logical argument about compossible worlds cannot. Being checkable, they have been checked. It is also, not coincidentally, the version of optimism most vulnerable to Löwith's charge of being disguised theology, since its three-act structure of division, conflict, and culminating reconciliation is the one that maps most exactly onto Joachim of Fiore's three ages.
There is, fourth, a position that deserves to be much better known than it currently is, chiefly because it was designed, quite deliberately, to avoid the traps the first three fall into: meliorism. The term is most closely associated with the American philosopher William James, who introduced it into his 1907 lectures on pragmatism specifically because he found both optimism and pessimism, as conventionally understood, philosophically dishonest in the same way, each pretending to a certainty about the ultimate outcome of things that no finite, situated human being actually possesses. Pessimism, on James's account, declares in advance that the world's salvation is impossible; optimism, in its stronger forms, declares in advance that the world's salvation is certain. Meliorism refuses both declarations. It holds only that the world's salvation, whatever that would even mean in a given case, is neither guaranteed nor foreclosed, but contingent, in the fullest sense, on what people actually do: better, in James's word, is a possibility, dependent on effort, not a promise independent of it. This is optimism with its metaphysical guarantee surgically removed, and it is considerably closer to what serious modern thinkers who call themselves optimists actually mean by the term than either Leibniz's theodicy or Kojève's end of history, precisely because it makes a wager rather than a forecast, and a wager is the kind of claim a person can stand behind in good conscience, without lying to themselves about how much they actually know. The word itself has never caught on, a doctrine that promises nothing being difficult to market, and nobody in the history of invective has been denounced as a hopeless meliorist.
There is, finally, a fifth and more recent member of the family: epistemic optimism, the physicist and philosopher David Deutsch's argument that human knowledge has no logical ceiling, that any problem which is not forbidden by the laws of physics is, in principle, solvable given a sufficiently good explanation, and that error and ignorance, not any fixed limit on what can be understood, are the only permanent obstacles to progress, which is a considerable pair of obstacles. This is optimism purged entirely of theology, resting not on a claim about God's goodness or history's direction but on a claim about the logical structure of knowledge itself: an epistemological wager rather than a theological or historical one.
There is, lurking at the edge of this family, a colder cousin that shares the same underlying wager while dropping almost all of its warmth: the various strains of accelerationism that run from the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who greeted the machine age with open ecstatic delight and, notoriously, described war as the world's only hygiene, through to more recent philosophers such as Nick Land, who has argued that capitalism and technology possess their own inhuman momentum which human intention can neither fully steer nor should particularly want to. This is not meliorism, and it is not Condorcet's humane confidence in the progress of virtue alongside knowledge; it dispenses with virtue almost entirely and keeps only speed, the conviction that acceleration itself, whatever it accelerates toward, is the only historical force worth reckoning with. It belongs in this family nonetheless, because it rests on the identical underlying premise that has run through every figure from Joachim onward: that history has direction and that direction can be discerned, engaged with, ridden. The humanist optimist and the accelerationist are, in this narrow but real sense, cousins rather than opposites, arguing not about whether speed and knowledge remake the world, which both assume, but about whether the remaking is something to be welcomed with warmth or simply endured, gripped tightly, and steered where one can.
Laying these six out side by side, plainly, rather than dressed up as a list with headings, is not pedantry. When two people in an ordinary conversation each declare themselves an optimist about the future, they may be committing to almost nothing in common: one might mean something close to Leibniz, a settled confidence that the world's arrangement is fundamentally sound; another might mean something close to Kojève, a belief that history's argument has essentially been won; a third, and my own sympathies lie here, might mean nothing more, and nothing less, than James's meliorism, the modest and unguaranteed wager that effort applied in good faith tends to leave things better than it found them. These are not shades of the same colour. They are different colours that happen to share a name, and a great deal of unnecessary argument, about whether optimism is naive, whether it is refuted by this or that catastrophe, whether it is a serious philosophical position or merely a temperament, evaporates once the family is properly sorted and each member is judged on its own, specific terms rather than on the reputation of its more embarrassing relatives.
The Garden and the Cell
Return, at the end, to the two scenes that anchor the whole story: Lisbon, on the morning the churches fell, and the small hidden room in Paris where a condemned mathematician wrote, with a warrant out for his arrest, that the human mind is capable of indefinite improvement.
What philosophical optimism actually demands of a person, once it has been stripped of both Pangloss's complacency and the historical guarantee that Hegel, Kojève, and their successors offered in its place, turns out to be a much narrower and much harder thing than either extreme allows for. It is not the belief that the best of all possible worlds has already arrived; Lisbon settled that question in about ten minutes on a November morning in 1755, and nothing since has seriously reopened it. Nor is it the certainty that history's arc, in the phrase Martin Luther King made famous and had himself borrowed from the abolitionist preacher Theodore Parker, bends toward justice on some schedule that will take care of itself regardless of what anyone does; it is a small, tidy confirmation of Löwith's whole thesis that the modern world's favourite line about secular moral progress turns out, on inspection, to be a piece of nineteenth-century pulpit oratory. Löwith's diagnosis of that particular comfort, inherited theology wearing a new coat, has too much force to be waved away, and Blumenberg's defence of modernity's legitimate self-assertion, serious and persuasive as it is, was never a promise that the assertion would succeed without continued effort. It carries no guarantee at all. That is exactly the point of it.
What is left, once both comforts are removed, looks a great deal like what Voltaire's household settled on outside Constantinople and a great deal like what Condorcet was actually doing in that room in Paris: a deliberate, unguaranteed commitment to improvement, made in the absence of metaphysical assurance rather than on the strength of it. Neither man was making a prediction. Both were making a wager, in James's exact sense of the word, a bet placed without certainty of the outcome because the alternative, refusing to place it, forecloses the very possibility it claims merely to be doubting.
The temptation, at the close, is to reach for a tidy consolation, some formula that resolves the tension between Voltaire's garden and Condorcet's cell into a single, satisfying lesson. That temptation should be resisted, because the tension is not a flaw in the argument to be smoothed away. It is the argument. Anyone can cultivate a garden when the weather is fine and the war is somewhere else. The harder and more useful question is what happens to the commitment when the weather turns, when the warrant is out, when the evidence in front of you is running entirely the other way, and Condorcet's answer, given not in words but in the simple fact of what he spent his final months doing, is that the commitment does not get suspended for bad weather. If anything, that is the only condition under which it can be shown to mean what it claims to mean.
That, in the end, is the deep philosophy of optimism, the thing lying underneath the more familiar arguments about data and knowledge and technology and fiction. It is not a discovery about how history behaves, in the way a law of physics is a discovery about how matter behaves; the ancient world's wheel had at least as much evidence behind it as the modern world's arrow, and in certain moods, Nietzsche's demon still whispers that the wheel was the more honest picture all along. It is an invention, built out of theological material whose origin can be traced with real precision, from Hesiod's decline through the promise of a Kingdom, through Joachim's three ages, through Leibniz's careful logic and Voltaire's furious and necessary demolition of its degraded popular form, through Kant's dare to know and Condorcet's dare to hope, through Hegel's freedom working itself out in history and Kojève's and Fukuyama's argument that the working-out had reached its decisive chapter. But an invention, held with open eyes, with its guarantees stripped away and its evidence examined rather than assumed, is not a lesser thing than a discovery. It is, if anything, the harder and more admirable achievement, because it has to be chosen and rechosen by every person and every generation that takes it up, in full knowledge that nothing outside their own effort obliges the story to come out well. Lisbon fell in ten minutes. Condorcet had perhaps a year in hiding. Neither the earthquake nor the guillotine settled the question the rest of us are still, one way or another, deciding every morning: whether to cultivate the garden anyway.