Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
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Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet was a French philosopher of the Enlightenment and advocate of educational reform and women’s rights. He was one of the major Revolutionary formulators of the ideas of progress, or the indefinite perfectibility of humankind.
Background
Condorcet was born on September 17, 1743 in Ribemont (in present-day Aisne), and descended from the ancient family of Caritat, who took their title from the town of Condorcet in Dauphiné, of which they were long-time residents. Fatherless at a young age, he was raised by his devoutly religious mother.
Education
He was educated at the Jesuit college in Reims and at the College of Navarre in Paris, where he showed his first promise as a mathematician.
Career
At the age of 16, of a thesis on calculus, he was admitted to the Académie des Sciences (1769) and was elected its secretary (1773) after further brilliant mathematical studies. As secretary he wrote his famous Éloges, a series of appreciations of 17th-century scientists and of his contemporaries. The Académie Française admitted him to membership in 1782. Influenced by his intimate friends, Voltaire and Turgot, Condorcet turned to the social sciences, wherein he attained notable success. His abilities as an economist were recognized when, with the triumph of the Physiocrats, Turgot was appointed minister of finance and Condorcet was named inspector of the mint; and his abilities as an advocate were manifested when, as a philosophical critic of the absolute monarchy, he urged a unicameral parliament elected by universal suffrage (including women's suffrage), the separation of church and state, the secularization of education, and the abolition of slavery. As a legislator he drafted three remarkable projects, none actually adopted, but each having a profound influence on subsequent legislation: his Declaration of Rights (1789); a complete program for the reform of education on a national and laic basis (1792); and the draft of a constitution called La Girondine for the new French Republic. Only after the flight of Louis XVI had Condorcet come out wholeheartedly for the Republic. Proscribed by the Jacobins, his opponents in the Convention, Condorcet took refuge in a hiding place in Paris in 1793. During the nine months of his concealment there he wrote his great work on social philosophy, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (Sketch of the Intellectual Progress of Mankind), a sweeping epitome of 18th-century philosophical ideas on the goodness and grandeur of man and the infinite perfectibility and progress of mankind. Captured by his enemies, he was taken to a tavern at Bourg-la-Reine, where he died, perhaps by taking poison, on April 8, 1794. The Convention, which had proscribed him, subsequently ordered the publication of his great work.
None of Condorcet's writings refer to a belief in a religion or a god who intervenes in human affairs. Condorcet instead frequently had written of his faith in humanity itself and its ability to progress with the help of philosophers such as Aristotle.
Politics
Condorcet took a leading role when the French Revolution swept France in 1789, hoping for a rationalist reconstruction of society, and championed many liberal causes.
Membership
He became an honorary member of many foreign academies and philosophic societies including the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1785), Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1792), and also in Prussia and Russia .
Connections
In 1786 Condorcet married Sophie de Grouchy, who was more than twenty years his junior.