Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat de

(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.