(1743-94)
The Marquis de Condorcet belongs to the second generation of eighteenth-century French philosophes. He was by
training and inclination a mathematician, and his work marks a major stage in the development of what is known
today as the social sciences. He was held in high regard by contemporaries for his contributions to probability
theory, and he published a number of seminal treatises on the theory and application of probabilism. He is best
known today for the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1795), his monumental,
secularized historical analysis of the dynamics of man's progress from the primitive state of nature to modernity.
Condorcet's principal aim was to establish a science of man that would be as concise and certain in its methods
and results as the natural and physical sciences. For Condorcet there could be no true basis to science without the
model of mathematics, and there was no branch of human knowledge to which the mathematical approach was not
relevant. He called the application of mathematics to human behaviour and organization ‘social arithmetic'.
The central epistemological assumption, upon which his philosophy was based, was that the truths of observation,
whether in the context of the physical or the moral and social sciences, were nothing more than probabilities, but
that their varying degrees of certainty could be measured by means of the calculus of probabilities. Condorcet was
thus able, through mathematical logic, to counteract the negative implications of Pyrrhonic scepticism for the
notions of truth and progress, the calculus providing not only the link between the different orders of knowledge
but also the way out of the Pyrrhonic trap by demonstrating man's capacity and freedom to understand and direct
the march of progress in a rationally-ordered way.
In his Esquisse Condorcet set out to record not only the history of man's progress through nine ‘epochs', from the
presocial state of nature to the societies of modern Europe, but in the tenth ‘epoch' of this work he also held out
the promise of continuing progress in the future. He saw the gradual emancipation of human society and the
achievement of human happiness as the consequence of man having been endowed by nature with the capacity to
learn from experience and of the cumulative, beneficial effects of the growth of knowledge and enlightenment.
Condorcet's Esquisse laid the basis for the positivism of the nineteenth century, and had a particularly significant
impact on the work of Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte.
1 Life
Condorcet was one of the outstanding French mathematicians of his time. He was the only eighteenth-century
French philosophe of stature to have participated in the Revolution and, as a legislator, to have had an impact on
events after 1789. Born in Ribemont, his early education took place at Reims, and by 1758 he had entered the
University of Paris where he studied ethics, metaphysics, logic and mathematics at the prestigious Collège de
Navarre. There he was taught by the Abbé Nollet, a proponent of Newtonian physics, and he worked closely with
Georges Girault de Kéroudon on philosophical matters and on the crucial problems of the integral calculus. In later
years he also came under the influence of Euler, Fontaine, the Bernouillis and, above all, of the distinguished
mathematician and academician, Jean Le Rond D'Alembert, who became his patron. He was elected Perpetual
Secretary of the Academy of Sciences in 1773, and in 1782 became a member of the French Academy. An
enthusiastic supporter and theorist of the Revolution, he played an important role in the drafting of the
Déclaration des droits in 1789. Suspected later of being a Girondin, he was denounced, and died, possibly a
suicide, in Bourg-la-Reine while awaiting the guillotine.
His first major work, Du calcul intégral, was published in 1765 as part of the Academy of Science's proceedings,
and was widely acclaimed. This was followed by a series of essays and mathematical papers, published between
1766 and 1769, including important work on the applications of the integral calculus to the still unresolved
mathematical obscurities of Newton's Principia. The extensions of the methodology of differential calculus,
probability (the ‘mathematics of hope') and their application to nonscientific areas, particularly the moral, political
and social sciences, were to remain at the core of his thinking, especially during and after Turgot's ministry
(1774-6). His exploration of the potential of the calculus of probabilities was developed further in the Essai sur
l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix in 1785. The Essai is
complemented by the Eléments du calcul des probabilités et son application aux jeux de hasard, not published in
its own right until 1805.
Condorcet was part of that new-wave reformist movement in late eighteenth-century France that included Turgot,
the idéologues, and the physiocrats, all united in their understanding of how the world of ideas could and must
interact with the world of political and social reality. Other major publications include the Essai sur la constitution
et les fonctions des assemblées provinciales (1788), Sur l'Instruction publique (1791-2), Réflexions sur la
jurisprudence criminelle (1775), De l'Influence de la Révolution de l'Amérique sur l'Europe (1786), Quatres
lettres d'un bourgeois de Newh(e)aven á un citoyen de Virginie (1788), Lettres sur le commerce des grains (1775),
and the Réflexions sur l'esclavage des nègres (1781). In addition, he wrote innumerable pamphlets, drafts of bills
and other legislative material for the National Convention. He was also interested in the development of a
symbolic logic to give precise expression to intellectual operations and which would be appropriate to the
formulation of a universal language of the sciences, although his treatise on this subject, the Essai d'une langue
universelle, was to remain unfinished. In the non-mathematical area his greatest and most influential work is the
Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain, published posthumously in 1795.
2 The science of the probable
Condorcet used mathematics as a model upon which to build a philosophy of social science, and to establish a
methodology as applicable to the science of man as it was to the physical sciences. In Condorcet's hands
mathematics became an instrument of social and philosophical analysis and, following the lead given by
D'Alembert, he set out to integrate the Newtonian view of a rationally determined order of nature into an
analagous framework of moral, social and political order. He postulated the view that all human sciences were
underpinned by positive fact in the same way as the physical sciences, and open to a rigorous system of analysis
made meaningful through the use of a precise, well-determined ‘universal' language, capable of unambiguous use
across the whole spectrum of scientific enquiry.
Greatly influenced by Locke and Hume, as well as by the French sensationalist philosopher Condillac, Condorcet
devoted much of his intellectual life to the development of a concept of ‘social arithmetic' based on the calculus of
probabilities. He saw probabilism as constituting the essential epistemological link between the social and the
physcial sciences. By utilising the calculus of probabilities, the uncertainties and ambivalences inherent in
previous attempts to study and evaluate man's behaviour, which had resulted in the case of many philosophers in a
profound scepticism, could be dissipated. He was convinced that this ‘true philosophy' would provide the
foundation for a systematic ‘science of man'. The clearest elaboration of this philosophy of probable belief and the
methodological principles for its application are to be found in general, tentative outline in the notes to
Condorcet's reception speech to the French Academy in 1782, and in more sophisticated mathematical detail in the
Mémoire sur le calcul des probabilités (1784), in the Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des
décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix and in the Eléments du calcul des probabilités et son application aux jeux
de hasard.
In the preliminary discourse to the Essai sur l'application de l'analyse, he postulated two key principles governing
the processes of human reasoning: (1) that ‘nature follows invariable laws' and (2) that these laws ‘are made
known to us by observable phenomena'. What leads us to believe in the truth of such a postulation is our
phenomenological experience of the facts and of the ways in which that experience accords with these two
principles. A perfect and definitive calculation of the probability of their truth can never be fully realized, as it is
impossible to take cognizance of the totality of the factors that shape our experience. Condorcet insisted, on the
other hand, that such a calculation, were it possible, would indicate a very high degree of probability of the truth of
these principles. In the light of this probable truth, Condorcet then added a third working proposition, namely that
all human reasoning that informs judgment, decision making, choice and conduct is based ultimately on
probability.
‘The truths proved by experience are simply probabilities.' For Condorcet this insistence on uncertainty did not,
however, lead to the impasse of Pyrrhonism. On the contrary, although all knowledge was founded only on
probabilities, the value, or degree of probability could be determined with relative precision.
Condorcet fully accepted the Lockean view on epistemological modesty. Uncertainty characterized all human
understanding (exception being made for the mathematical model itself), but for Condorcet, as for Locke,
uncertainty was not an invincible, action-denying absolute. In the Essai sur l'application de l'analyse he sought to
demonstrate, by means of the calculus of probabilities, how the defeatist scepticism of the past could be made to
give way before the new positivism.
The calculus of probabilities was applicable in theory to all aspects of human life and behaviour, and in
demonstrating the logical foundation for this principle Condorcet developed a view of rational belief that owed as
much to Hume as to Locke. Belief in both the moral and physical sciences was in his system simply the
representation of things as having to exist in a certain way, based on our experience that what has occurred will
tend to recur within a frame of constant laws. Belief was not, however, the result of a raw process of reaction to
sense impressions. Man obeys an automatic sentiment that leads him to belief, but in order to avoid
judgment and opinion degenerating into prejudice and irrationality, Condorcet took care to distinguish between the
sentiment of belief and the actual grounds for belief. Reason and experience must play their part if man was to be
rescued from the illusions of the senses and the fleeting impressions made upon the senses. To this end, he
advanced the view that reason had found a powerful weapon in the form of the calculus of probabilities, which
offered a dependable methodology for the estimation of the grounds for belief. The calculus would provide the
necessary mechanism for the correction of any error arising from the passive, automatic and uncritical sentiment of
belief, particularly important in the case of the moral and social sciences.
The principles of probabilistic philosophy enabled Condorcet to elaborate a model of calculation that permitted the
objective evaluation of man in society, and with it he sought to transform the calculus of probabilities into a
mathematically-based language of rational decision-making and action. The Essai sur l'application de l'analyse
was an attempt to illuminate the ways in which the calculus could work in a practical context, in this case the
constitutional process itself, so that the unpredictable and the contingent could be measured and minimized. This
particular treatise represents Condorcet's most detailed and sustained attempt to ‘discover the probability that
assures the validity of a law passed by the smallest possible majority, such that one can believe that it is not unjust
to subject others to this law and that it is useful for oneself to submit to it'. The mathematics that he then deployed
exemplify the pioneering methodology that he would adopt in other contexts, such as crime, jurisprudence and
taxation theory, to locate the human sciences within the realm of the probable, and to attempt to address the
otherwise intractable problem of accounting for chance in human behaviour.
3 Progress and the science of man
Condorcet's name has been associated most commonly with the ‘idea of progress', and the work in which he
developed this idea in depth is the Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. Based on the
empirical observation of data and the statistical analysis of that data, the Esquisse traces the trajectory of human
achievement using a de-christianized chronology of historical periods or ‘epochs'. The tableau starts with
primitive man in the state of presocial nature and culminates in the ninth ‘epoch', covering the years from
Descartes and the late seventeenth century to the birth of the first French republic. A tenth ‘epoch' offers a vision
of the postmillenium future and holds out the promise of unlimited human perfectibility. Condorcet paid particular
attention to two factors in man's advancement: (1) the growth of language as the principal vehicle of social
progress and intellectual advancement, and (2) the development of technology and the physical sciences as
instruments facilitating the progressive liberation of man from the darkness of past error and servitude.
Lockean sensationalist psychology deeply influenced Condorcet, particularly with regard to his doctrine of moral
sentiment. At the start of the Esquisse primitive man emerges as the one creature with the faculty of receiving
sensations, of reflecting upon them, of analysing them and recombining them. In Condorcet's view, the
pleasure-pain principle engendered in early man moral feelings, and eventually relationships, based on controlled
self-interest. The sensations facilitated man's difficult, but irreversible, climb out the of the darkness of primitive
presocial life into the light of civilisation. Condorcet understood the implications for the moral sciences of
Lockean reversion to the origins of knowledge in sense experience, together with its consequential destruction of
the myth of innate ideas, and he saw Lockean sensationalism as an intellectual event whose importance was
matched only by that of the Newtonian revolution in physics.
Condorcet wanted to show in the Esquisse that history was not the creation of random forces, with man cast in the
role of passive spectator/victim. The gradual emancipation of man from the limitations imposed upon him by
nature, and the consequential liberation of the individual, was itself a natural process, and the reflection of an order
inherent in man's condition that could be made intelligible. Man's progress was enacted within the framework of
an exclusively human condition, free from the intervention of transcendental forces. Progress was for Condorcet an
entirely secular concept, the fruit of human dynamics interacting with the natural currents of history alone. Evil
was not a consequence of man's nature but of the absence of enlightenment, and would recede inevitably as
knowledge in the moral sciences caught up with the advances being made in the physical sciences, and extended
its beneficial effects.
In linking the pursuit of knowledge, and the inexorable logic of scientific advances, to the mission of progress,
Condorcet had to demonstrate necessarily that there was a relationship between advances made in the physical and
natural sciences and those made in the moral and social sciences, and that as man learned to order his natural
environment by means of the physical sciences he would also learn to order his social environment through the
advancement of the moral sciences and their political and sociological extensions. The historical portrait of man in
the Esquisse is drawn with that demonstration in mind in the context of each successive ‘epoch'.
Progress for Condorcet was always a cumulative, collective phenomenon, dependent upon the free pursuit of
knowledge and upon the rational application of that knowledge. His view of progress assumed that the laws of
nature were constant, and that there was an analogous constancy at work in historical processes to which the
calculus of probabilities in relation to the future was relevant. A scientific, mathematically-informed study of
history would reveal constant principles, many of which would confirm the truth of human progress, as far as this
truth could be defined in probabilistic terms.
The power of mathematics allowed man to rise above the facts of random phenomena and to take advantage of the
‘law of calculated observations'. This was the law that permitted a scientific understanding of causes, effects and
relationships, that allowed for the determination of those recurring patterns of phenomena in human history that
made a given truth probable, and that facilitated the measurement of degrees of certainty, and therefore control, in
human affairs. It was the key that would open the way to a rationally-planned application of the ‘science of man'.
The ‘science of man', anchored firmly to what were essentially Baconian traditions of thought - observation,
experiment, calculation - and Lockean-Humean epistemology, would establish the basis for a radical reordering of
the processes of human understanding to create ‘a new understanding admitting only precise ideas, exact notions
and truths whose degree of certainty or probability has been rigorously weighed'.
Condorcet argued throughout the Esquisse the case for the indefinite perfectibility of human society. His vision
entailed the construction of a future in which man's potential for social and political choice of action was
theoretically infinite. Condorcet's positivism was not facile, however, nor was his optimism Panglossian. The tenth
‘epoch' of the Esquisse, in some ways naïvely utopian, is a projection of probabilities set out within a cautiously
defined context of preconditions, reservations and contingencies. Condorcet never lost sight of the essential
fragility of human civilization; progress remained dependent ultimately on the rational exercise of the human will
alone, and without that vital driving-force progress would not take place.