The Algorithmic Enlightenment

After tracing the seventeenth-century emergence of the algorithm as a general term for the new instrumental approach to quantitative mathematical reasoning and practice—aka analysis—in the eighteenth century, this chapter then looks at the modernity-making event of Enlightenment science as a result of the establishment within the natural sciences, especially physics, of algorithmic mathematics via analysis as a dominant methodological paradigm. This is one meaning of the “Algorithmic Enlightenment,” namely the establishment and authorization of this particular approach to natural science during the eighteenth century. But in the second part of the chapter, a second meaning of Algorithmic Enlightenment is developed, rooted not in the new quantitative analytical natural sciences of the eighteenth century per se, but in the general acceptance and deployment of universally conceived instrumental and mathematical rule-bound approaches to theorization and problem solving in many domains during the same period. Enlightenment political economy is used as a case study of this aspect of the Algorithmic Enlightenment, along with other projects in universal human and social science characteristic of the period. Both aspects, the article argues, and especially their entanglement, are crucial to understanding how the Enlightenment shaped the place of the algorithm and algorithmic thinking in our contemporaneity.