The Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Melioristic Turn in the Optimism Debate

This chapter explores an overlooked aspect of the optimism debate: meliorism, the belief that the world increases in perfection over time. Contrary to the simplistic view of meliorism as a middle ground between optimism and pessimism, this chapter outlines a nuanced typology of meliorism that emerged over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Three forms are identified: inclusive meliorism (M1), where the world is the best and increases in perfection over time; mediating meliorism (M2), where the world eventually becomes the best through increases in its perfection; and exclusive meliorism (M3), where the world perpetually increases in perfection without ever becoming the best. The chapter traces the development of these forms, starting with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's inclusive meliorism, then examining André-Pierre Le Guay de Prémontval's mediating meliorism, before finally investigating the exclusive meliorism of late-nineteenth-century French philosophers, who viewed continual improvement as the true form of optimism. The chapter thus illuminates how these thinkers developed different forms of meliorism within the context of the debate about optimism, and thereby provides a comprehensive understanding of meliorism's evolution and its relation to optimism.