The problem of social roles in Pascal’s Three Discourses on the Condition of the Great

Abstract

The logic of Blaise Pascal’s Three Discourses on the State of the Nobility has been thoroughly explored by Tamás Pavlovits in his 2014 book What is one man in infinity? Based on this interpretation, I will attempt to show that even if we accept the perspectival logic of orders as the organising force of the Pascalian reasoning, we are still dealing with a text full of unsettling tensions regarding social roles. But these tensions are not a sign of the shortcomings of the thought-construction presented in the discourses, but are telling documents of the profound transformation of the relationship between the individual and society in the early modern period.