(English translation of) “Contexte génétique et première réception de la Monadologie. Leibniz, Wolff et la Doctrine de L’harmonie préétablie,”

Abstract

The many equivocations that, in several respects, characterised the reception of Leibniz's Principes de la Nature et de la Grâce and Monadologie, up until the last century, find their origins in the genetic circumstances of their manuscripts, which gave rise to misinformation published in an anonymous review that appeared in the Leipzig Acta eruditorum in 1721. Archival research demonstrates that the author of this review, as well as of the Latin review of the Monadologie, which appeared, the same year, in the Supplementa of the Acta eruditorum, was Christian Wolff, who possessed a copy of the Leibnizian manuscrip since at least 1717. This translation figured as a precise cultural strategy that aimed to defuse any idealist interpretation of Leibniz’s monadology. An essential part of this strategy consists in reading the theory of pre-established harmony as a doctrine founded on a strictly dualistic substance metaphysics.