that it had only recently become possible to be.
His contemporaries described him in paradoxes: the ârabid sheep,â the âvolcano covered with snow.â In person, he was shy and inarticulate, as well as sickly and unhealthy. Yet he could explode with passion when inspired by ideas.
As he ascended in Enlightenment circles, Condorcet got to know luminaries like Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Tom Paine. But he embarked on an intellectual quest perhaps more ambitious than any of theirs, seeking nothing less than to derive a âscience of society.â Condorcetâs motto was âsocial mathematics,â and his creed probability. We canât know much with certainty, he reasoned, but for many things we can at least know their likelihoodâa fact with vast political implications.
Applying such principles would make government more enlightened, scientific.
As the revolutionary period nearedâand the political distinctions of âleftâ and ârightâ were first defined, based upon whether or not one wanted to overthrow Franceâs ancien regime âCondorcet got to test his ideas. He was elected to the newly formed Legislative Assembly in 1791 and became its president. He was also elected to the 1792 Convention, the new republicâs first governing body, and served as its vice president.
Yet in this maelstrom, reason did not prevailâand neither did Condorcet. He wasnât a very good politician; certainly, he was no straight-arrow decider like George W. Bush.
Instead he was a man of too much nuance at a time of too strong passions, and before long he fell on the wrong side. Condorcetâs allies, the moderate Girondists, were thrust out of the convention on June 2, 1793. Condorcet had played a central role in drawing up a constitution for the new republic, based on his probabilistic principles. But it was tainted with the perception of Girondism, and the Convention ultimately rammed through an alternative, Jacobin constitution instead.
And here was Condorcetâs fatal mistakeâhe couldnât keep silent. He had to stand up for reason and argue back. So he circulated an anonymous pamphlet blasting this constitution, but his identity was exposed and the Jacobins called for his arrest. He escaped, went into hiding, and started writing his greatest work, the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind .
Condorcet would have been laboring over it as his Girondin friends were guillotined, and when he himself was condemned to death for conspiring against the Republic. The Sketchâs greatness thus derives not solely from its contents, but also from its unique character as an unfolding nonfiction tragedy. Itâs the literary equivalent, wrote the famed anthropologist James George Frazer, of a âgreat fresco on a prison wall.â
After reading Condorcet, you can never think about âreasonâ in the same way again.
Condorcetâs Sketch is the most powerful work of nonfiction Iâve read. In 2009 while a visiting associate at Princeton University, I was first introduced to photocopied excerpts of the workâbut that just wasnât enough.
So I paid nearly $100 on Amazon for my own copy. I canât think of a book that moves me more; but then, Iâm a liberal who cares about science and ensuring a more enlightened society. I would love it, wouldnât I?
But Condorcetâs vision doesnât just stir meâit saddens me deeply. Reading Condorcet is like dousing liberal-scientific assumptions about human rationality in what Ted Koppel once called an âacid bath of truth.â
Condorcet began at the dawn of humanity with âmanâ in a âstate of nature.â He then showed how humanity had proceeded to elevate itself to an apotheosis of reason that has no boundary, save the âabsolute perfection of the human race.â The âperfectibility of man is
General Stanley McChrystal