Political Writings

Overview

About two hundred and fifty pages, a selection from the political essays of Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician of genuine distinction who became one of the French Revolution’s most intellectually serious and most consistently principled participants, and who died in a revolutionary prison cell in 1794, likely from exhaustion or suicide, shortly after being arrested by the very government whose founding ideals he had spent years trying to work out with real philosophical rigor. This edition draws together writings spanning roughly 1786 to 1794, from Condorcet’s pre-revolutionary essays through his final work, composed while he was in hiding from arrest during the Terror.

Condorcet’s political writing is distinguished from that of many revolutionary contemporaries by its unusual consistency: having accepted certain premises about natural rights and human equality, he pursued their implications with a mathematician’s insistence on following an argument wherever it led, arriving at positions, full citizenship for women, immediate and unconditional abolition of slavery, universal public education, that were genuinely radical even by the standards of a revolutionary moment already committed, in principle, to sweeping political transformation.

The argument

Women’s citizenship. Condorcet’s 1790 essay on the admission of women to the rights of citizenship argues directly and without hedging that women possess exactly the natural rights the Revolution had proclaimed for men, and that excluding them from citizenship on the grounds of sex is simply arbitrary and unjust, inconsistent with the Revolution’s own stated first principles. He works through and dismisses the standard objections of his time, that women lack the reason or judgment for political participation, pointing out that these same objections, applied consistently, would equally justify excluding various categories of men whose reason nobody proposed to question.

Slavery. Condorcet’s writings on slavery, composed under the pseudonym Schwartz to protect his position, argue for the institution’s complete and immediate abolition, explicitly rejecting the more common gradualist position, prevalent even among many self-identified opponents of slavery at the time, that argued for a slow, managed transition out of the institution for practical or economic reasons. For Condorcet, slavery’s injustice was absolute and admitted no legitimate argument for delay.

Public instruction. Condorcet argues at length that formal political rights, however generously proclaimed in a constitution, are of limited practical value to citizens who lack the education needed to understand and effectively exercise them. His proposals for public instruction, later influential on French educational policy well beyond his own lifetime, treat universal, well-designed education not as an optional social benefit but as a genuine precondition for the political equality a republic claims to guarantee its citizens.

On the meaning of revolutionary change. Several shorter pieces address directly what Condorcet considered the true meaning and proper direction of revolutionary transformation, distinguishing genuine, principled reform grounded in consistently applied rights from mere disorder or the substitution of one arbitrary power for another, a distinction that became increasingly urgent, and increasingly personally dangerous for Condorcet himself, as the Revolution moved toward the Terror.

The Sketch of the progress of the human mind. Composed while Condorcet was in hiding, having gone underground to avoid an arrest warrant that would eventually catch up with him regardless, this final and most philosophically ambitious work argues that human history, despite genuine and repeated setbacks, shows an overall pattern of advancing knowledge, equality and freedom, and that this progress, though never guaranteed or automatic, would likely continue. The Sketch’s calm, sustained optimism about humanity’s future, written by a man correctly anticipating his own near-certain death at the hands of the very revolutionary government he had helped establish, remains one of the more striking instances in intellectual history of a thinker’s public philosophy holding steady against devastating personal circumstance.

How to read it

Read Condorcet’s essay on women’s citizenship against the actual practice of the French Revolution he was writing within, which proclaimed universal rights while continuing, throughout its various constitutional phases, to exclude women from political participation, a gap between principle and practice Condorcet’s essay names directly and refuses to accept as acceptable or inevitable.

Notice how consistently Condorcet applies the same basic method across these different essays, testing existing political and social arrangements against a standard of universally and consistently applied natural rights, and treating any exception to that standard, for women, for enslaved people, for the uneducated, as requiring genuine justification rather than simply accepting it as customary.

Read the Sketch of the progress of the human mind with its composition circumstances firmly in mind; Condorcet wrote this account of humanity’s long-term progress while hiding from arrest and almost certainly aware that his own personal prospects were increasingly desperate, a biographical fact that gives the work’s sustained optimism a weight and a poignancy purely textual analysis would miss.

Pay attention to how directly Condorcet’s argument for public instruction connects abstract political rights to practical educational access, an argument with obvious continuing relevance to debates about the actual conditions required for meaningful, rather than merely formal, political equality.

Read Condorcet’s writings alongside Mary Wollstonecraft’s roughly contemporary Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published just two years after Condorcet’s essay on women’s citizenship, to compare how a mathematician working from principles of consistency and a writer working more directly from lived female experience arrived independently at closely related conclusions.

Questions it raises

• Condorcet’s argument for women’s citizenship proceeds primarily by testing consistency, if these rights apply to men on these grounds, the same grounds apply to women. Is this a stronger or weaker foundation for the argument than one grounded more directly in women’s own lived experience of exclusion?
• How should a reader weigh the Sketch of the progress of the human mind’s confident optimism about humanity’s future against the fact that Condorcet wrote it while correctly anticipating his own imminent death at the hands of the revolutionary government whose progress he was defending?
• Condorcet rejected gradualist arguments for ending slavery in favor of immediate abolition. What does comparing his position to more common contemporary gradualist arguments reveal about the different ways injustice can be rationalized even by people who claim to oppose it?
• Does Condorcet’s argument that public instruction is a precondition for meaningful political equality hold up as well today as it did in his own historical moment, given how much access to formal education has expanded since the eighteenth century?
• What does it mean that many of Condorcet’s fellow revolutionaries, committed in principle to universal rights, nonetheless excluded women, enslaved people and others from those rights in practice? Does Condorcet’s writing suggest this was a failure of consistency, or a deeper problem with how the principles themselves were originally formulated?
• Condorcet was ultimately destroyed by the same revolutionary movement whose principles he had worked to develop and apply consistently. What does his fate suggest about the relationship between principled political philosophy and the practical, often brutal politics of revolutionary change?