Slaven WAELTI

Whether it is a question of individual performance or collective efforts, social services or economic returns, governance today is often reduced to a question of optimisation. However, the concept did not originate with the financial capitalism of the last 20th century. To shed light on its meaning, we need to go back to the time of the Enlightenment, which, in this area as in many others, helped to shape our frameworks of thought. Borrowed from Latin, the term optimum appears in Leibniz’s Essays on Theodicy (1713) to describe the most favourable state of a thing according to given conditions and objectives.

Under the names of ’philosophical optimism’, ’market balance’ or ’social equilibrium of passions’, it still permeates many fields of knowledge. However, the optimum was not in itself the subject of debate, nor did it give rise to a positive science; rather, it constitutes a diffuse set of thoughts actualised in various forms and discursive regimes, whose expressions are scattered across multiple disciplinary fields. The study of what the project generically calls "thoughts of the optimum" is therefore transversal in principle and interdisciplinary in nature.