Condorcet and the Viability of Democracy in Modern Republics, 1789–1794

Abstract

Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.