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Often called "the last of the great philosophes," Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, is still mostly remembered today for his last work, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. The original was published in 1795, one year after his death during the Terror, and an English translation, Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind, appeared in Philadelphia in 1796. A late but classic expression of the philosophes' faith in reason, science, and progress, the Esquisse has been characterized as the testament of the Enlightenment, a work perhaps less remarkable for its intrinsic qualities than as the canonical formulation of a fading ideology. According to an all-too-common idée reçue, the author of the Esquisse epitomized the illusions and excessive optimism of the Enlightenment.
However, this reductive view ignores the fact that Condorcet was also an original thinker often very much ahead of his time. He pioneered the application of mathematics to the study of social phenomena, and was one of the first authors to openly support full political rights for women. His self-termed "Social Mathematics" anticipated the rise of a modern social science based on probability theory and statistics,1 while the 1790 publication of "Sur l'admission des femmes au droit de cité" ["On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship"] preceded both Olympe de Gouges's Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne [Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen] (1791) and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). These two original aspects of Condorcet's thought-his theory of social mathematics and his feminism-have received renewed attention for the past four or five decades, yet little of this work examines the connection between them.2 I propose here to explore this relationship between feminism and social mathematics in Condorcet's political and scientific writings.
The theory of voting holds a central place in Condorcet's vision of a social science. His feminism follows a parallel orientation and focuses primarily on the question of voting rights for women. Complicating the issue is the fact that Condorcet considered voting from two distinct perspectives: either as the expression of a natural right or as a mode of rational collective decision making....