Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat de Condorcet

Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (Ribemont, 1743 – Bourg-la-Reine, 1794), was a French philosopher, mathematician, political economist and politician who lived through the late Enlightenment and the first years of the Revolution. Voltaire called him a "universal philosopher" because of the breadth of his learning. Today he is associated with the ideal of rational human progress, with public education and with equal rights, including those of women and of Black people. For this reason he is usually counted among the most characteristic thinkers of Enlightenment rationalism.

His father died when he was still young, and his devoutly religious mother arranged his schooling with the Jesuits, first in Reims and then in Paris. He later opposed the Jesuits and, more broadly, established churches and religions. He showed his talent early in mathematics: at sixteen, D'Alembert and Clairaut recognised his analytical gifts, and D'Alembert remained his patron until D'Alembert's death. In 1765 he published his first mathematical work, an essay on integral calculus, which launched a career that brought him into the Academy of Sciences in 1769. Through the philosophes, including Diderot, Voltaire, Helvétius and Turgot, he also contributed mathematical articles to the Encyclopédie.

His friendship with the economist Turgot changed the direction of his career. In 1774 Turgot appointed him inspector general of the mint, and from then on Condorcet moved his interests from mathematics toward politics and philosophy. He defended human rights, the equality of women and the abolition of slavery, and in 1781 he anonymously published a pamphlet denouncing slavery. Among specialists, his best-known work is the Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions (1785), which contains the jury theorem and the paradox that bears his name, showing that majority preference can be intransitive. He was also among the first to apply mathematics systematically to the social sciences.

During the Revolution of 1789 he played a prominent role. He was elected a Paris deputy to the Legislative Assembly and backed a secular, rational public education system, and in 1790 he argued for women's suffrage. He sided with the Girondins without ever joining a party, and he opposed the death penalty for Louis XVI. After criticising the constitutional draft proposed by Hérault de Séchelles, he fell foul of the Jacobins, was declared a traitor and had to go into hiding. It was then that he wrote the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, published posthumously. He was arrested in March 1794 and was found dead in his cell soon afterwards, probably from pulmonary oedema, although poisoning was also suggested.

The Sketch is his most influential philosophical work. In it he argues that history follows discoverable laws, that the progress of the human mind advances through knowledge, and that inequality, between individuals and between nations, is the main obstacle to happiness. He divides history into ten stages, from the first settlements to a vision of continuous progress after the French Revolution. His optimism was contested in his own time: Malthus wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population partly in response to the idea of the perfectibility of society. His legacy lies in the debate on public instruction, civil rights and faith in reason as a driver of social change.