Condorcet and the Faith in Progress

The Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and the last major philosophe, carried the Enlightenment's faith in reason into the French Revolution. He applied probability to voting, discovering that majority preferences can be inconsistent, a puzzle now called the Condorcet paradox. He campaigned against slavery and, in a 1790 essay, argued that women should have the same rights of citizenship as men. Condorcet sat in the revolutionary assembly and drafted a plan for free public education.

When the radical Jacobins took power, he was condemned and went into hiding. There he wrote the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, describing history as ten stages leading toward greater equality between nations, classes and sexes, and toward human perfectibility. He died in prison in 1794; the fact that his most optimistic work was written while hiding from execution has struck many readers as both moving and deeply ironic.