In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France - in the very chair occupied today by Pierre Bourdieu - Raymond Aron coined the word 'sociodicy': an apt term for the apologetic tendency of much contemporary social science, a tendency which has a long ancestry, going back to the theodicies of the 17th century. Within the theological tradition two ways of justifying evil emerged: pain and sin, which could be seen either as indispensable conditions for the good of the universe as a whole, or as inevitable by-products of an optimal package solution. The first was that of Leibniz, who suggested that monsters, for instance, had the function of helping us to see the beauty of the normal. The second was that of Malebranche, who poured scorn on the idea that God created monstrous birth defects 'pour le bénéfice des sages-femmes', and argued that accidents and mishaps should be understood as the cost God had to pay for the choice of simple and general laws of nature. In both cases, the argument was, of course, intended to explain that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds.

LRB 5 November 1981 | PDF Download