De Condorcet Research Articles

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Influence on French Revolutionary Educational Reform

ABSTRACT When Mary Wollstonecraft travelled to Paris in December 1792, she was already well-known there as a republican writer, and a defender of women’s rights, particularly to education. Her philosophy of education was very closely tied to her republican beliefs – to educate a child in the right way was to preserve her from domination. In Paris, Wollstonecraft became friends with several famous Girondins, including Madame Roland and Jacques-Pierre Brissot. She was asked to participate in the drafting of Nicolas de Condorcet's report on the reform of education. Condorcet was himself an early proponent of women's rights in France and unlike his predecessor, Talleyrand, he did not want to leave women out from French educational reforms. Although her notes on this report did not survive, I argue that Wollstonecraft did in fact influence French educational reforms. Looking at the reception of Wollstonecraft's work among the Girondins, and Condorcet's early drafts of the reform proposal, I argue that Wollstonecraft's legacy in the final years of the Revolution can be traced in particular to the 1795 Loi Daunou and its corresponding report, by Joseph Lakanal, on girls’ primary education.

THE AESTHETIC REGIME IN THE MODERN ERA: ART AND DISCOURSE ON ART

The article traces the changes in the aesthetic conventions of Modern art in accordance with the dynamics of literary development in Great Britain. The study focuses on three key areas: the impact of “the ancients and moderns” quarrel on European philosophical and literary thought; the nuances of critical and literary discourse in Enlightenment-era Great Britain; and the reception of the Enlightenment aesthetic values and novelties in Victorian criticism, linking them to the emergence of twentieth-century modernism. The subject involves the evolution of Enlightenment aesthetics and poetics in Great Britain, particularly the departure from classical art and literature models, and the emergence of concepts like imagination, novelty, and the reader’s subjective experience of art. Seminal literary-critical essays of the eighteenth century, including works by Joseph Addison, Henry Home, Richard Hurd, and Leslie Stephen’s monograph ‘History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century”, are analyzed. The paper also examines philosophical texts by Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Marquis de Condorcet to understand the oscillatory nature of philosophical thought before and during the Age of Enlightenment. The study contextualizes “the ancients and moderns” debate on models for literary excellence and accentuates its role in shaping the discourse of aesthetics and artistic creativity. Contributions by Enlightenment figures such as Addison, Home, and Hurd are explored, emphasizing how they reshaped the discourse of aesthetics by redefining the nature of beauty, the sublime, and the principles of artistic criticism, thereby influencing the literary and artistic productions of their time and beyond. Particular attention is paid to the critical views of Stephen who wrote about the “fluctuating mode” of the literature of the second half of the eighteenth century, illustrating his peculiar subjectivism as an exponent of the Victorian worldview (Stephen saw Sterne’s novels as a serious moral threat), and simultaneously reflecting the normative aesthetic views of the second half of the nineteenth century. The paper also demonstrates how the antinomianism in aesthetic thinking, which challenged traditional norms and values as seen in “the ancients and moderns” quarrel, was further evolved in the works of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel, the latter articulating the antinomy of “classic versus romantic”. This tradition of antinomian thinking, coupled with the rejection of the idea of linear progression in cultural evolution, a call for a reassessment of values amidst a paradigm shift in culture and the breakdown of traditional ethic and aesthetic systems, finds a notable and unique expression in Friedrich Nietzsche’s works, that significantly influenced the transition from Modernity to Postmodernity. In summary, it is argued that the Modern Age was the time of the emergence of a new aesthetic sensibility, and its aesthetic pluralism and anti-classical literary ideas were pivotal in redefining concepts of progress, novelty, and human consciousness in art and literature. This laid the groundwork for modernist art and literature, characterized by a departure from tradition and a quest for new artistic expressions of human experience.

Three Versions of Social Science in Late Eighteenth-Century France

The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.

Systemic racism in data practices

Systemic racism in data practices

Amartya Sen. The Idea of Justice. London: Penguin Books Ltd. 2009. 468 pages. Hardback. £ 25.00.

Justice is comparative in nature and may have plural impartial dimensions. Provision of justice, in an ‘ideal sense’, is non-pragmatic and is therefore impossible to deliver, argues the Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen. He divides the existing theories of justice into two categories: the transcendental institutionalism and the Comparative School. The transcendental institutionalism, led by eminent enlightenment philosophers like Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau and Kant holds that a just society can be maintained by ensuring justice in the ‘ideal sense’. The provision of ‘ideal justice’ is based on the notion of either right or wrong. To provide justice in the ‘ideal sense’ the society must enjoy access to ‘just institutions’. John Rawl, the more recent contributor to transcendental tradition, came up with his theory of ‘justice as fairness’ in the mid twentieth century. The comparative school of justice propagated by Adam Smith, Marquis de Condorcet, Carl Marx and Stuart Mill lays emphasis upon looking at ‘justice’ in a comparative sense and on the basis of what the society is actually able to realise.Sen, disagreeing with both the schools of thought, however, is seen leaning towards the comparative school. The author gives the example of three children and a single flute to demonstrate how the ‘ideal justice’ and the ‘comparative’ school fail to hold water in certain situations. Three children—Carla, Anne and Bob, claim their right to a specific flute on different but competing principles. Carla manufactured the flute, Anne is the only one among the three who can play the flute, while Bob is the poorest of the three and does not have any toy to play with. Sen questions how ‘ideal justice’ may be provided with the transcendental approach, or how the ‘comparative assessment’ would lead to an impartial and non-arbitrary solution, in the case of the ‘three children and a flute’. Despite his disagreement with both the schools of thought, Sen aligns himself with the comparative school. However he believes that for provision of ‘impartial justice’ competing principles need not essentially be unique; these could be plural as well. The plurality of competing principles is the essence of Sen’s ‘idea of Justice’.

A strontium isoscape of inland southeastern Australia

Abstract. The values and distribution patterns of the strontium (Sr) isotope ratio 87Sr/86Sr in Earth surface materials are of use in the geological, environmental, and social sciences. Ultimately, the 87Sr/86Sr ratios of soils and everything that lives in and on them are inherited from the rocks that are the parent materials of the soil's components. In Australia, there are few large-scale surveys of 87Sr/86Sr available, and here we report on a new, low-density dataset using 112 catchment outlet (floodplain) sediment samples covering 529 000 km2 of inland southeastern Australia (South Australia, New South Wales, Victoria). The coarse (<2 mm) fraction of bottom sediment samples (depth ∼ 0.6–0.8 m) from the National Geochemical Survey of Australia were milled and fully digested before Sr separation by chromatography and 87Sr/86Sr determination by multicollector-inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. The results show a wide range of 87Sr/86Sr values from a minimum of 0.7089 to a maximum of 0.7511 (range 0.0422). The median 87Sr/86Sr (± median absolute deviation) is 0.7199 (± 0.0071), and the mean (± standard deviation) is 0.7220 (± 0.0106). The spatial patterns of the Sr isoscape observed are described and attributed to various geological sources and processes. Of note are the elevated (radiogenic) values (≥∼ 0.7270; top quartile) contributed by (1) the Palaeozoic sedimentary country rock and (mostly felsic) igneous intrusions of the Lachlan geological region to the east of the study area; (2) the Palaeoproterozoic metamorphic rocks of the central Broken Hill region; both these sources contribute radiogenic material mainly by fluvial processes; and (3) the Proterozoic to Palaeozoic rocks of the Kanmantoo, Adelaide, Gawler, and Painter geological regions to the west of the area; these sources contribute radiogenic material mainly by aeolian processes. Regions of low 87Sr/86Sr (≤∼ 0.7130; bottom quartile) belong mainly to (1) a few central Murray Basin catchments; (2) some Darling Basin catchments in the northeast; and (3) a few Eromanga geological region-influenced catchments in the northwest of the study area; these sources contribute unradiogenic material mainly by fluvial processes. The new spatial Sr isotope dataset for the DCD (Darling–Curnamona–Delamerian) region is publicly available (de Caritat et al., 2022; https://dx.doi.org/10.26186/146397)​​​​​​​.

Republican Constitutionalism

The article presents a plebeian strand of republican constitutional thought that recognises the influence of inequality on political power, embraces conflict as the effective cause of free government, and channels its anti-oligarchic energy through the constitutional structure. First it engages with two modern plebeian thinkers – Niccolò Machiavelli and Nicolas de Condorcet - focusing on the institutional role of the common people to resist oppression through ordinary and extraordinary political action. Then it discusses the work of two contemporary republican thinkers – Philip Pettit and John McCormick – and contrasts their models of ‘contestatory’ and ‘tribunician’ democracy. Finally, I incorporate a political economy lens and propose as part of republican constitutionalism not only contestatory and tribunician institutions but also anti-oligarchic basic rules to keep inequality and corruption under control.

Judging a declaration: Condorcet, rights and the general will in 1789

Abstract This article argues that a study of unpublished notes for a treatise on the Déclaration des droits, written by the marquis de Condorcet in 1789, offers an insight into a problem that has defined scholarship on the philosophe for decades: the tension between the competing ‘democratic’ and ‘elitist’ discourses in Condorcet’s political thought. In this manuscript we see a novel integration of the discourse of ‘general’ or ‘common’ will into Condorcet’s rights-thinking. Due to his fear that the debates in the National Assembly over the proposed Declaration of Rights during the summer of 1789 were undermining the ‘self-evident’ nature of Natural Rights and more specific rights that derived from them, the article suggests that Condorcet was here experimenting with the legitimating languages of ‘volonté générale’ and ‘sens commun’. Although these notes remained unpublished, hints of Condorcet’s shift in thinking can nevertheless be seen in his published work of the same period.

The “Women’s Question” in the Biographies of Scientists and Philosophers by E. F. Litvinova (1890s)

In the 1890s, Elizaveta Fedorovna Litvinova (1845–1919), a mathematician, philosopher, educator and writer, published ten biographical essays on prominent scientists and philosophers, including the first Russian biography of a renowned mathematician S. V. Kovalevskaya (also spelled Kovalevsky). This article gives particular attention to the “zhenskii vopros” (women’s question), as reflected in these biographies of the scientists and philosophers. Apart from the biography of Kovalevskaya, the women’s issue is considered in the biographies of F. Bacon, J. Locke, J. le Rond d’Alembert, J.-A.-N. de Condorcet, P.-S. Laplace, and L. Euler, as well as in the book “Rulers and Thinkers”. The biography of Kovalevskaya describes the difficulties encountered by the woman mathematician in her professional self-realization. In the biography of Bacon, Litvinova writes about his mother and her four sisters being learned as well as the women of the English royal family. In John Locke’s biography, a chapter is devoted to the philosopher’s friend Lady Damaris Masham, her upbringing and education, and the women’s position in society in the late 17th-century England is criticized. In d’Alembert’s biography, special attention is given to his discussion with Jean-Jacques Rousseau about women’s education. In her book about Laplace, Litvinova writes about the scientist’s spouse and her role in the preservation of his scientific heritage. In Euler’s biography, Litvinova reviews his “Letters to a German Princess”, written in a form of lessons in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, intended for an educated woman. Finally, in her biography of de Condorcet the author refers to him as the most committed and strenuous advocate of women’s rights, who promoted the women’s right to education and active involvement in the life of society.

Comparing the Effect of Intangible Assets and Macroeconomic Parameters on the Stock Prices in Firms Listed on the Stock Exchange of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq

Comparing the Effect of Intangible Assets and Macroeconomic Parameters on the Stock Prices in Firms Listed on the Stock Exchange of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq

Probabilistic view of voting, paradoxes, and manipulation

The Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher, mathematician, and political scientist, studied mathematical aspects of voting in the eighteenth century. Condorcet was interested in studying voting rules as procedures for aggregating noisy signals and in the paradoxical nature of ranking three or more alternatives. We survey some of the main mathematical models, tools, and results in a theory that studies probabilistic aspects of social choice. Our journey will take us through major results in mathematical economics from the second half of the twentieth century, through the theory of Boolean functions and their influences and through recent results in Gaussian geometry and functional inequalities.

The Role of Caritas Nakuru in Poverty Alleviation in East Pokot Sub-County in Kenya.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of Caritas Nakuru in poverty alleviation in East Pokot Sub-County, Kenya. The study was guided by two theories of development: structural functionalism as discussed by Herbert Spencer and Robert Merton and Modernization theory Human needs theory advocated by Marquis de Condorcet and Emile Durkheim. This study employed both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection. It was informed by the Ex-post Facto research design, which was considered appropriate because the study has a historical perspective. The study was conducted in Baringo County of Kenya but focused on East Pokot Sub County which comprises of Pokot, Tugen and Ilchamus communities. Data collection techniques and procedures included the use of interviews, focus group discussions and the administration of structured questionnaires. The quantitative techniques consisted of household surveys using questionnaires with both closed and open-ended questions. Focus group discussions (FGDs) was used to obtain qualitative data. The quantitative data was analysed using descriptive statistics by employing Statistical Package for Social Scientists and presented using percentages and information discussed thematically. This study found out that poverty alleviation activities lead to enormous economic costs incurred in the course of its programs which are higher than normal monthly expenditure of affected families. The study recommended that there is need to improve access to food, education, health care services, water and sanitation in East Pokot Sub-County.

CONFLICT, DICTATORSHIP, AND ARROW’S IMPOSSIBILITY THEOREM

Abstract: Since the 18th century, doubt has been raised concerning “rational” majoritarian public choice: the “voting paradox” holds, in a simple calculation made famous by the Marquis de Condorcet, that rational resolution of divergent preferences by voting is impossible. The economist Kenneth Arrow extended this in 1951 to prove that no rational order of diverse preferences [R] is possible other than dictatorship for a group of any size. But Arrow’s meaning of “rational” assumes fixed preferences instantaneously analyzed, and ignores any preference adjustment, necessary in social conflict resolution. If preferences do adjust to resolve conflicts, Arrow’s theorem reduces to the formula that any group of unyielding preference holders can only be governed by dictatorship.

Czy społeczeństwa śnią o sprawiedliwym pastwisku? Interpretacja „Umowy społecznej” Jana Jakuba Rousseau

In this paper I present an interpretation of Jean Jacques Rousseau's “Social Contract” as a normative theory of rational thinking of a political community. Using the understanding of Rousseau, suggested many times in the literature, as a theorist of group intentionality, I present the interpretation of the concept of “general will” as the intention of a group subject, which is a political community. Then I explain Rousseau’s normative remarks on democratic procedures through the prism of decision theory, in particular the relationship between the concept of general will and some concepts in game theory as well as Marquis de Condorcet’s “Jury Theorem”. I will show that the vision of fair democratic procedures proposed by Rousseau adequately reflects the conclusions drawn from the adduced theorems.

Nicolas de Condorcet as a forerunner of John Rawls

ABSTRACT John Rawls proposed two criteria for the delimitation of acceptable inequalities. The universal gain principle requires inequalities to be beneficial for all, and the difference principle requires them to be beneficial for the least advantaged. These principles are commonly believed to have originated in Rawls’s work, but they were both clearly expressed in the writings of Nicolas de Condorcet. Contrary to Rawls, Condorcet did not imbed them in the framework of a social contract, but instead sought their foundations in natural rights. Whereas Rawls recommends us to find out what social arrangements rational reasoners would choose in a hypothetical pre-social situation, Condorcet proposes that we ask the underprivileged in our society whether or not they consider themselves to benefit from the prevailing social and economic inequalities. Thus, Condorcet’s original version of the difference principle puts social inequalities to a different test than its latter-day, hypothetical version.

Auguste Comte’s Reception of Nicolas de Condorcet’s Idea of the Progress of the Human Mind

This article discusses the influence of the ideas of Nicolas de Condorcet on the formation of the thought of Auguste Comte, as well as compares the theories of progress of these French philosophers according to their key criteria: education, science, and law. At the end of the 19th century, a new direction in intellectual thought appeared in France was the theory of the progress of the human mind. The author of this theory was the philosopher, mathematician, and statesman Nicolas de Condorcet. Later, Condorcet’s ideas were reflected in the works of the positivism’s founder, Auguste Comte, who on their basis created his own system of civilization progress, which was called the Law of Three Stages of the intellectual evolution of mankind. Condorcet’s doctrine can be defined as a kind of integral “system of progress,” which is founded on the concept of perfectibility (the endless ambition of man and society to improvement). According to the philosopher, the real progress of the human mind has three keystones: a developed system of public free education, progressive law and constantly improving science, technology and art. Auguste Comte, inspired by the works of Condorcet, emphasizes that the predecessor, on the first hand, created an important scientific notion of the social progress of humanity as an ongoing historical process; and on the other hand, he designated the main object of research in social philosophy, which consists in the study of the fundamental sequence of various social conditions. However, an important difference between Comte’s and Condorcet’s ideas of progress is an industrial aspect. Comte’s progress of society is inconceivable without the progress of technology and economics. And even civilization the philosopher defines as the joint development of the human mind and human impact on nature. Thus, Comte’s progress includes the progress of the sciences, the beaux-arts, and industry. The author concludes that the French philosophers’ arguments on the significance of moral and intellectual perfectibility for progress are still relevant for the contemporary technocratic world.

American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation by Kirsten Fischer

Reviewed by: American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation by Kirsten Fischer Margot Minardi (bio) Keywords Eliju Palmer, Religion, Religious freedom, Free thought, Deism American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation. By Kirsten Fischer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 307. Cloth, $39.95.) Those with a passing awareness of Elihu Palmer (1764–1806) might associate him with the pugnacious deism of Thomas Paine and his ilk, predecessors to the aggressive atheism of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens in recent times. But in this elegant and engaging intellectual biography, Kirsten Fischer challenges this tagline for Palmer in two significant ways. First, she takes seriously the early phases of Palmer’s career, before he completely rejected Christianity. For years after Palmer first [End Page 694] doubted the divinity of Christ, he continued to enjoy theological reflection and debate, perceive himself as a Christian, and admire Jesus as a moral (if thoroughly human) teacher. Not until later, after encountering Paine’s Age of Reason, would Palmer develop more strident objections to Christianity itself. Fischer’s careful account of each phase of Palmer’s life and career—including the early, less documented ones—makes evident the considerable evolution in his thinking across his brief life. Fischer further complicates the view of Palmer as a deist above all else by showing that deism was, for him, “a platform from which to pursue an idea he cared about even more: the notion of a divine life force residing within shared, sensate matter” (8). Palmer was inspired by vitalism (the theory that the entire universe is composed of the same substance), a philosophy he picked up from a Long Island physician and unorthodox believer whom he befriended during his short-lived ministerial career. Later, drawing on intellectual exchanges with another eccentric friend, Palmer added the idea that every atom of the universe was capable of experiencing sensation, including pleasure and pain. He contended that if more people understood the makeup of the physical universe as he did, they would develop radical empathy toward every being in the world. War, slavery, and other forms of oppression would cease—without the need for bloody revolutions. In short, Palmer believed that people could be taught to think themselves to a better world. For all Palmer’s idiosyncrasies, this book nevertheless highlights his myriad connections to the cultural and intellectual ferment of the age of Atlantic revolutions. Throughout his short but vibrant career, Palmer was at least as much “a compiler of ideas” as he was a generator of them (226). One of the many delights of this book is encountering brief portraits of his diverse intellectual interlocutors. An intriguing example is John “Walking” Stewart, an erstwhile clerk for the East India Company whose travels on foot through South Asia (and well beyond) exposed him to mind-broadening philosophies, including, perhaps, the concept of “sensate matter.” Through another freethinking friend, the New York bookseller John Fellows, Palmer accessed the ideas of radical philosophers from across the Atlantic. Palmer had lost his eyesight in the Philadelphia yellow-fever epidemic of 1793, but his imagination was fired by the community that gathered at Fellows’s bookshop to read aloud new philosophical works by such luminaries as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet. Fischer also deftly tracks Palmer’s many critics and those whose orthodoxies he resisted. In place of direct documentation of Palmer’s early life, [End Page 695] Fischer uses the diary of his Connecticut hometown’s minister to sketch a picture of the spiritual and social world that brought him up—and made him hungry for new ideas. Later in life, Palmer fell into more direct opposition to those who didn’t share his freethinking inclinations. His detractors included, unsurprisingly, leading clerics in the various cities and towns where he lived or traveled, as well as Federalist civic leaders concerned that freethought would upend the moral and social order that was rooted, in their view, in religious commitment. But Palmer also crossed swords with other deists and freethinkers, who, while sharing his aversion to traditional Christianity, didn’t adhere to the same philosophical or...

A functional equation of tail-balance for continuous signals in the Condorcet Jury Theorem

Consider an odd-sized jury, which determines a majority verdict between two equiprobable states of Nature. If each juror independently receives a binary signal identifying the correct state with identical probability p, then the probability of a correct verdict tends to one as the jury size tends to infinity (Marquis de Condorcet in Essai sur l’application de l’analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix, Imprim. Royale, Paris, 1785). Recently, Alpern and Chen (Eur J Oper Res 258:1072–1081, 2017, Theory Decis 83:259–282, 2017) developed a model where jurors sequentially receive independent signals from an interval according to a distribution which depends on the state of Nature and on the juror’s “ability”, and vote sequentially. This paper shows that, to mimic Condorcet’s binary signal, such a distribution must satisfy a functional equation related to tail-balance, that is, to the ratio alpha (t) of the probability that a mean-zero random variable satisfies X>t given that |X|>t. In particular, we show that under natural symmetry assumptions the tail-balances alpha (t) uniquely determine the signal distribution and so the distributions assumed in Alpern and Chen (Eur J Oper Res 258:1072–1081, 2017, Theory Decis 83:259–282, 2017) are uniquely determined for alpha (t) linear.

FERDINANDO GALIANI’S NEWTONIAN SOCIAL MATHEMATICS

The evolution of Ferdinando Galiani’s thought toward social mathematic has been neglected by scholars, and his attempt to establish political arguments on the analytical basis remains unexplored. The non-systematic nature of Galiani’s intuitions, due to his laziness, largely justifies this underestimation of his scientific program. This paper intends to show that the mature abbé Galiani follows an intellectual itinerary autonomous and parallel to that followed by Marquis de Condorcet in the same years. The anti-Physiocratique querelle represents Galiani’s methodological maturation. In contrast with Physiocratic economic doctrine, based on the primacy of deductive methodology, Galiani claims for economic science the realism of circumstance against aprioristic axiomatic hypotheses and rationalist generalizations. Galiani’s project, substantially similar to Marquis de Condorcet’s approach to social science, can be defined as Newtonian social mathematics opposed to Physiocratic Cartesian social mathematics.

Romantic Disciplinarity and the Rise of the Algorithm

Scholars in both digital humanities and media studies have noted an apparent disconnect between computation and the interpretive methods of the humanities. Alan Liu has argued that literary scholars employing digital methods encounter a “meaning problem” due to the difficulty of reconciling algorithmic methods with interpretive ones. Conversely, the media scholar Friedrich Kittler has questioned the adequacy of hermeneutics as a means of studying computers. This paper argues that that this disconnect results from a set of contingent decisions made in both humanistic and mathematical disciplines in the first half of the nineteenth century that delineated, with implications that continue to resonate in the present day, which aspects of human activity would come to be formalized in algorithms and which would not. I begin with a discussion of Nicolas de Condorcet, who attempted, at the height of the 1789 revolution, to turn algebra into a universal language; his work, I argue, exemplifies the form of algorithmic thinking that existed before the Romantic turn. Next, I discuss William Wordsworth’s arguments about the relationship of poetry and science. While Wordsworth is sometimes viewed as a critic of science, I argue that his polemic is specifically targeted at highly politicized projects like Condorcet’s that sought to supplant existing modes of thought with scientific rationality. Finally, I demonstrate the importance of Romantic thought for George Boole, creator of the logic system that would eventually form the basis of digital electronics. The reason Boole was able to succeed where Condorcet had failed, I argue, was that Romantic notions of culture enabled him to reconcile a mechanical view of mathematical reasoning with an organic view of the development of meaning—a dichotomy that remains a key assumption of computer interfaces in the twenty-first century.