Condorcet and Modernity

In this book I have set out to examine aspects of Condorcet's political thought from 1774, the year of Louis XVI's accession, and also of the appointment of Turgot to ministerial office, to the marquis's death in 1794, two decades that would bear witness to more political and social change than had been seen before in France in any single lifetime. During these interesting times Condorcet's approach to politics gradually changed from being that of a second-generation philosophe, prominent mathematician and outspoken defender of human rights into that of a public servant and advocate of a ground-breaking scientific model of civil government and the social order. These were the years when Condorcet would also evolve ideologically from constitutional monarchist into theorist and practitioner of revolution and republicanism. The emergence of Condorcet as a public figure coincided with the passing of the ancien régime and the dawn of a modernity in Europe whose implications for ‘the science of society’ he understood more clearly than most.

His political life really had its beginnings in 1770 following his encounter with Voltaire at Ferney, an encounter that would draw him into Voltaire's public campaign against the injustices of the French criminal procedure fought out in the long aftermath of the notorious trial in Abbeville in 1766 of the young blasphemer, the chevalier de La Barre.