Can we do without scientific progress? – Liberation

Progress has been a mobilizing watchword that has made it possible to reinforce the centrality of science and technology in industrial societies. But it would be naïve to think that scholars of the past had not already pointed out its risks and excesses.

“Once upon a time there was progress.” Death certificate or fairy tale to start over? Like every year, the Toulouse festival History to Come, whose Release is a partner, rubs shoulders with a topical issue. The notion of progress is today called into question, including on the left. Scientific advances, colonization in the name of “civilization”, economic growth have brought in their wake ecological disasters and violence. Should we therefore forget the ideal of perfectibility that came from the Enlightenment and the improvements that science has given rise to in the fields of health or knowledge? More than the abolition of progress, it is its redefinition which is at stake here and on which Sylvie Chaperon, Camille Lefebvre, Johann Chapoutot, Patrick Boucheron, Romain Huret will debate in Toulouse… In Liberation, the historian Stéphane Van Damme recalls that as early as the Renaissance, scholars reflected on the risks of self-sufficient progress. As for Timur Atnashev, he tries to understand how the left can reinvent itself around another, more experimental idea of ​​progress.

History to come, from May 24 to 28 in Toulouse. https://lhistoireavenir.eu/evts

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