• DOI:10.1162/0011526041504506
• Corpus ID: 57571594

On Condorcet's “Sketch”

@article{Baker2004OnC,
  title={On Condorcet's “Sketch”},
  author={Keith Michael Baker},
  journal={Daedalus},
  year={2004},
  volume={133},
  pages={56-64}
}

• K. Baker
• Published 1 July 2004
• Art
• Daedalus

Dædalus Summer 2004 Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind– perhaps the most influential formulation of the idea of progress ever written –was 1⁄2rst published in 1795, a year after its author’s death. Conceived as an introduction to a much more comprehensive work, Condorcet’s essay, hastily written while he was in hiding from his Jacobin enemies, was in part an ironic by-product of the author’s political defeat. In the Sketch Condorcet consoled himself with the conviction that expanding knowledge in the natural and social sciences would lead to an ever more just world of individual freedom, material affluence, and moral compassion. A year later Louis de Bonald published one of the earliest responses, a vehement critique that denounced the “apocalypse of this new gospel.” For this mighty theorist of the Counter-Revolution, Condorcet’s work epitomized everything that was wrong about the faith of godless men in secular progress. By Bonald’s account: