:Condorcet and Modernity

Abstract

The Marquis de Condorcet's most famous work, his posthumously published Tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain, was described by its first editors, in 1795, as a “monument” to “the most useful truths.” He has been seen, ever since, as an exemplary figure; an emblem of enlightenment and its illusions. His political ideas, in particular, have been rediscovered and reburied at fairly regular, resonant intervals throughout the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (at the time of the 1848 Revolutions, for example, or of the educational reforms of the 1890s, or of the anticommunist liberalism of the 1950s). The most recent edition of Condorcet's collected works dates from 1847–1849. But with Keith Baker's important book, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (1975), Condorcet at last became the subject of serious and sustained interest to historians, in France and elsewhere. There is now a “groupe Condorcet,” involving historians of publishing, archivists, paleographers, and “codicologists” of the paper on which Condorcet wrote or dictated his fragments of political theory; their vast (1317 pages) edition of the Tableau historique is itself a monument of collective scholarship and historical investigation (Condorcet, Tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit human: Projets, Esquisse, Fragments et Notes (1772–1794), ed. Jean-Pierre Schandeler, Pierre Crépel, et al. [2004]).