Corruption and the chemistry of the Enlightenment (French text)

This thesis examines the relation between the notion of corruption and the 18th-century intellectual phenomenon known as Enlightenment. It shows how "corruption", broadly understood as moral, physical, political, and philosophical degradation, played a crucial but hidden role in the Enlightenment's efforts to perfect man and his society. The idea of corruption, formerly confined to religious language and the discourse of individual experience, evolved into a key feature of the 18th century's civilizing process---a process of which it is simultaneously the destructive and generative principle. Seen by Enlightenment thinkers as inherent to human history, corruption becomes the index of a temporality that is no longer divine, but secular.; At a time when a broad range of writers and thinkers sought ways to reconfigure society, rethinking corruption became a major force in the century's intellectual debates. In the public sphere, corruption provided a model for understanding the decadence of absolute monarchy. In the private sphere, it became the emblem of an aristocracy seen as degenerate. In both spheres, the dynamics of moral and physical corruption opened up new ways of thinking about reform and regeneration. Authors as diverse as Montesquieu, in relation to political theory, Rousseau with his conception of social utopia, Diderot's Encyclopedia, Sade's conception of "perversion" as social cure, and Robespierre's revolutionary "purity" as alternative cure, among others, took part in that debate, writing on corruption's causes and consequences as they sought to answer the question of what precisely corruption was and how it might best be overcome.; Produced by the civilization whose imminent end it constantly announces, corruption is at once the proof of that civilization's decline and the reason of its preservation. Intellectual and social pharmakon , corruption is both poison and remedy, problem and solution. The concept of corruption, which marks the beginning of modernity, reveals our civilization for what it is: a subtle chemistry that produces in the same gesture both the disease and its cure.