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Keith Michael Baker

On Condorcet’s “Sketch”

Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas Caritat

de Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Pic-
ture of the Progress of the Human Mind–
perhaps the most influential formula-
tion of the idea of progress ever written
–was ½rst published in 1795, a year after
its author’s death. Conceived as an intro-
duction 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-prod-
uct of the author’s political defeat. In the
Sketch Condorcet consoled himself with
the conviction that expanding knowl-
edge 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 the-
orist of the Counter-Revolution, Con-

Keith Michael Baker has been a Fellow of the
American Academy since 1991. The J. E. Wallace
Sterling Professor of Humanities at Stanford Uni-
versity, he is the author of “Condorcet: From Nat-
ural Philosophy to Social Mathematics” (1975),
among other books and essays.

dorcet’s work epitomized everything
that was wrong about the faith of god-
less men in secular progress. By Bonald’s
account:

The fanatical picture that this philosopher
gives of his hypothetical society can ex-
plain to us the inconceivable phenomenon
exhibited by revolutionary France. Men
were seen coldly giving their destructive
hordes the order for the desolation and
death of their fellow citizens, their rela-
tives, their friends, out of pure love of
their country; announcing the goal and
even the necessity of reducing its popula-
tion by half . . . and justifying perhaps in
their own eyes horrors unheard of in the
annals of human wickedness, for the
bene½t of . . . future generations.1

For Bonald, the philosophy of progress
was a perversion of the Christian apoca-
lypse–a dangerous rival that substituted
the promise of science for the hope of
salvation while forgetting the brutal
realities of human passions. It inflicted
unprecedented death and destruction
even as it declared the advent of univer-

1 Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de Bonald,
“Observations sur un ouvrage posthume de
Condorcet, intitulé ‘Esquisse d’un tableau
historique des progrès de l’esprit humain,’”
Oeuvres complètes de M. de Bonald, 3 vols. (Petit-
Montrouge: Migne, 1859), vol. 1, 721–722.
Translations from the French are my own.

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On
Condorcet’s
“Sketch”

sal human happiness. It promised uni-
versal freedom at the cost of destroying
colonized peoples. It proclaimed a reign
of reason that could only turn out to be
domination in the name of science.

In his reflections on the idea of prog-
ress in this issue of Dædalus, John Gray
makes a similar sort of argument. In his
view a more or less straight line leads
from Christian notions of eschatology
to the modern idea of progress, and from
there to the misguided revolutionary
movements of the eighteenth, nine-
teenth, and twentieth centuries.

But it does not tell us much about the
idea of progress to assert that it is a secu-
lar version of Christian eschatology. The
idea of an inde½nite human advance to-
ward a better future is quite different
from the eschatological notion of an ul-
timate moment in which history will
come to an end. Nor can we rely on Nor-
man Cohn for proof of the connection
between apocalyptic myths and modern
revolutionary movements; his book es-
tablishes no such connection and scarce-
ly goes beyond asserting a resemblance
between late-medieval chiliasm and
twentieth-century totalitarian move-
ments that might somehow be seen as
illuminating. Moreover, Christianity is
such a massive presence in the intellec-
tual history of the West that it would be
dif½cult to ½nd any European philoso-
phy untouched by it in some way, either
as a source of inspiration or a target of
repudiation.

There are undeniable traces of Christ-

ian providentialism or millenarianism
in the ideas of progress proposed in the
eighteenth century by such writers as
Turgot in France and Price and Priestley
in England, to whom Condorcet paid
tribute in his Sketch. But my own instinct
in thinking about the genealogy of the
idea of progress as it is found in Condor-

cet is to look more closely at the encoun-
ter with late Augustinianism that cru-
cially shaped the French Enlightenment.
And if I could choose a single text to il-
lustrate this encounter, it would be Vol-
taire’s Lettres philosophiques, and particu-
larly the reflections on Pascal’s Pensées
appended to that work in the edition
that appeared in 1734.

The Pensées invoked the Augustinian
nightmare of a humanity trapped in the
torments of a radical separation from
God, the dilemma of a species so pro-
foundly wounded by the Fall that no
effort could bring it grace, no human
means could bring it into contact with a
spiritual reality informing the universe.
Pascal’s was the misery of a sinner cut
off from the Divinity; the fear of an indi-
vidual thus cast alone into the vast, in½-
nite spaces of the universe; the despair
of a being that ½nds its reason inade-
quate and its moral apparatus depraved;
the terror of one thereby deprived, by its
very nature, of true communion with its
fellows. Pascal’s philosophy was pure
metaphysical panic.

Pascal had also written the Pensées as
a scienti½c apostate. Finding unrealiz-
able the ambition to know everything,
he had concluded that human beings
could know nothing. Acknowledging
that there were limits to human knowl-
edge, he had declared it unattainable.
He saw radical skepticism as a neces-
sary consequence of the misery of the
human condition. This is where Vol-
taire found Pascal particularly danger-
ous to humanity. “It is not necessary
to divert humanity from searching
for what is useful to it because of the
consideration that it cannot know
everything,” Voltaire insisted. “We
know many truths; we have made
many useful inventions. Let us con-
sole ourselves for not knowing the
possible relationship between a spi-

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Keith
Michael
Baker
on
progress

der’s web and the rings of Saturn, and
continue to examine what is within our
reach.”2

Confronting the weaknesses and limi-

their sensations and experiences–could
be made relevant to them in the practice
of their everyday lives, useful to them in
their pursuit of their needs, conducive to
their happiness. Limited in the present,
knowledge could be enlarged in the
future; indeed, it could be enlarged only
to the extent that its limits were accept-
ed in the present. Progress became a pos-
sibility, and a promise, provided claims
to philosophical and religious certainty
were abandoned.

It is fortunate for the progress of the
“

sciences, as for our happiness, to forget
in work, as in the conduct of life, the ter-
rifying uncertainty to which we are con-
demned,” Condorcet acknowledged be-
fore the Academy of Sciences in 1780.4 It
is not too much to say that Pascal’s blend
of metaphysical despair, anguished skep-
ticism, exaggerated Christian self-hate,
and radical delegitimation of human ac-
tion in the world haunted Condorcet,
as it did other Enlightenment thinkers.
It did so to such a degree that he was
compelled to take his own stance against
Pascal’s philosophy in 1776, publishing
an edition of the Pensées in which he took
a hatchet to the text and hammered
what was left with responses drawn

Melching and W. R. E. Velema, eds., Main
Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam and
Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 95–120. For a far
broader view of this transition, see Marcel
Gauchet, Le désanchantement du monde: une his-
toire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard,
1985), translated into English by Oscar Burge,
with a foreword by Charles Taylor, as The Dis-
enchantment of the World: A Political History of
Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1991).

4 M. J. A. N. Caritat de Condorcet, “Éloge de
M. Lieutaud,” in Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A.
Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, 12 vols.
(Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847–1849), vol. 2,
404.

tations of the human condition as he
saw them, Pascal gambled on the Abso-
lute. Voltaire refused the wager, accept-
ing the lot of one earthworm among oth-
ers, lost in an in½nite space it can never
truly comprehend, born to action in a
world it must henceforth make its own.
Recognizing the miseries of the human
condition, Voltaire nonetheless hoped
to temper them by a philosophy of epis-
temological modesty, a refusal of reli-
gious extravagance and intolerance, and
an active engagement in the social world.
It is easy in hindsight to underestimate
the immensity of the epistemological re-
orientation thus advocated by Voltaire
under the banner of Bacon, Newton,
and Locke. It consisted in the de½nitive
abandonment of metaphysical aspira-
tions that were centuries old (and as re-
cent as the seventeenth century) in as-
suming the humiliating and uncertain
position of an in½nitely small being fun-
damentally ignorant in the face of an in-
½nitely large universe.

Compensation of some kind was nec-
essary to make this intellectual reorien-
tation acceptable. Voltaire found this
compensation, as did other Enlighten-
ment thinkers, in notions of society, util-
ity, and happiness–and in the possibility
of progress. Human interdependence
(the Enlightenment thinkers called it
society) replaced dependence on the
Divine as the ontological frame of hu-
man existence.3 Knowledge relative to
human beings–because derived from

2 Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Raymond
Naves (Paris: Garnier frères, 1939), 173.

3 I have sketched this argument more fully in
my “Enlightenment and the Institution of Soci-
ety: Notes for a Conceptual History,” in W.F. B.

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from the Lettres philosophiques, new re-
marks from Voltaire, and rejoinders of
his own.

“Why affect so great a disdain for the
physical sciences, when they have given
humankind such resources to oppose the
rigors of nature?” Condorcet demanded
of Pascal.5 All those who had denied the
certainty of human knowledge were cor-
rect in maintaining that the moral and
physical sciences could never yield the
certainty of mathematics, he acknowl-
edged. But they were wrong to assert
that there could be no reliable basis for
opinion in these matters, “for there are
sure means of arriving at a very great
probability in some cases and of evaluat-
ing the degree of that probability in a
great number.”6

To a mathematician skilled in the cal-

culus of probabilities, Condorcet now
began to argue, skepticism need no long-
er be a paralyzing affliction: it could
open the way to a philosophy of proba-
ble belief subject (at least in theory) to
precise expression in mathematical
terms. This was the claim underlying
Condorcet’s principal mathematical
work, a lengthy study of the application
of the calculus of probabilities to the
theory of decision making published in
1782. It began with the proposition that
all our knowledge is probable because it
is based solely on experience–even the
truths of mathematics, which depend
for their apparent certainty only on the
expectation that the human mind will
½nd demonstrable in the future what it
has found demonstrable in the past.

It may seem odd to emphasize the un-

certainty to which Condorcet’s ideas
about the progress of the human mind

5 Pensées de Pascal. Nouvelle édition corrigée et
augmentée (London: 1776); notes as reprinted in
Condorcet O’Connor and Arago, eds., Oeuvres
de Condorcet, vol. 3, 622.

6 Ibid., 641.

offered a response. Uncertainty is not a
characteristic frequently ascribed to the
Enlightenment. As a polemicist in the
reforming cause, Condorcet could be as
dogmatic about what he knew (or knew
to be false) as he could be insistent,
when speaking philosophically, that all
that he knew was provisional, that pres-
ent truths were destined to become past
errors. Nor can we forget that he also
presided over the most powerful scien-
ti½c academy in eighteenth-century Eu-
rope at the time of its greatest prestige
and productivity, or that it was from this
position that he set out to bring to the
understanding of human interaction
(the task of “the moral and political sci-
ences”) the kind of precision being at-
tained in the natural sciences. But relin-
quishment of claims to epistemological
certainty was a crucial aspect of the sci-
enti½c achievements of the Academy of
Sciences during this period. Arguably
the greatest of these, Laplace’s applica-
tions of the calculus of probabilities to
outstanding problems of understanding
the Newtonian world system, rested
explicitly on the postulate of human
ignorance regarding the principles of
order underlying that system.

In what they called the moral and

political sciences, Enlightenment think-
ers also started from a position of uncer-
tainty. In a recent book on the economic
ideas of Turgot, Adam Smith, and Con-
dorcet, Emma Rothschild has done
much to remind us that the world in
which the Enlightenment took form was
an insecure and unpredictable one.7 It
was a world (like our own) still haunted
by collective memories of fanatical vio-
lence and wholesale slaughter, a world
(like our own) undergoing rapid change
fed by processes of globalization, a

7 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam
Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).

On
Condorcet’s
“Sketch”

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Dædalus Summer 2004

Keith
Michael
Baker
on
progress

world in which proposals for reform reg-
ularly met dire predictions of social con-
vulsion. In such a world, wagering that a
peaceable social order might derive from
the exercise of individual freedom guid-
ed by reasoned choice, both individual
and collective, was (and is) still a daring
bet.

Condorcet wrote in the Sketch of the
“terrifying complexity of interests link-
ing the subsistence and well-being of an
isolated individual to the general system
of societies, rendering him dependent
on all the accidents of nature, on every
political event, virtually extending to the
entire world his capacity to experience
enjoyment or suffer privation.” How, he
asked, “in this apparent chaos, does one
nevertheless see, by a general law of the
moral world, the efforts of each individ-
ual for himself serving the well-being of
all, and, despite the external shock of
opposed interests, the common interest
demanding that each understand his
own interest, and be able to obey it
without obstacle?”8 The Enlightenment
hope for a peaceful and autonomous or-
der of society was here, as was the gam-
ble that this order might derive solely
from the interaction of informed indi-
vidual choices; but neither was far from
the recognition of a “terrifying complex-
ity” still to be understood.

We know from the evidence of his

manuscripts that Condorcet had been
projecting a work on “the progress of
the human mind” since the early 1770s.9

8 Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des
progrès de l’esprit humain, ed. O. H. Prior (Paris:
Boivin et cie, 1933; republished with an intro-
duction by Yvon Belavel, Paris: J. Vrin, 1970),
152; see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, 237.

9 For a fuller account, see my book, Condorcet:
From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975),
344–352.

Favored by Fontenelle in the éloges of
eminent scientists he delivered as per-
manent secretary of the Paris Academy
of Sciences, the phrase was becoming a
common one in scienti½c circles.10 It
was therefore appropriate that the young
academician should imagine writing a
history of this progress to demonstrate
his suitability to enter into the line of
Fontenelle’s succession. Condorcet did
not write the history, ½nding other ways
to secure the position of permanent sec-
retary. But he continued to argue the
bene½ts of scienti½c progress and, more
signi½cantly, to make the case that the
moral and political sciences could follow
the methods of the natural sciences in
securing more precise and reliable
knowledge, advancing the cause of rea-
son, and promoting human freedom and
happiness.

At some point during the 1780s, fol-
lowing this line of thought, he drafted
an introduction for a work that “would
make known to humankind its resources
and true destiny.” That text outlined
three general propositions to be demon-
strated: that the past revealed an order
that could be understood in terms of the
progressive development of human ca-
pabilities, showing that humanity’s
“present state, and those through which
it has passed, are a necessary constitu-
tion of the moral composition of hu-
mankind”; that the progress of the natu-
ral sciences must be followed by prog-
ress in the moral and political sciences
“no less certain, no less secure from
political revolutions”; that social evils
are the result of ignorance and error
rather than an inevitable consequence
of human nature. Each of these proposi-
tions was to become an underlying
theme of the Sketch. It is clear, moreover,

10 Jean Dagen, L’histoire de l’esprit humain dans
la pensée française de Fontenelle à Condorcet
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), 18–23.

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On
Condorcet’s
“Sketch”

that Condorcet had in mind a kind of
historical demonstration of the increas-
ing power and freedom of humanity, a
demonstration that would support the
expectation that the power of human-
kind would transcend the limits appar-
ently imposed upon it by nature, as by its
own history. In these plans, Condorcet
divided the historical record into nine
epochs spanning the progress of the hu-
man mind from the dawn of civilization
to his own time. But it is striking that
they contain no reference at all to a
Tenth Epoch that would portray his vi-
sion of the future.

The Tenth Epoch did not ½nally ap-
pear in Condorcet’s drafts for a work on
progress until the period after July of
1793, when he was driven into hiding by
political defeat. He was to devote the re-
maining nine months of his life to the
actual composition of the Sketch and to
other substantial fragments of the larger
work on the progress of the human mind
to which it was intended as an introduc-
tion. And even though the basic concep-
tion of the Sketch had been formulated
some years earlier, it is nevertheless true
that the work bears the imprint of the
French Revolution, most notably in the
appearance of the Tenth Epoch itself.
In a sense, the earlier nine parts of the
story Condorcet had envisioned now
became a preparation for the Tenth
Epoch, which seems simultaneously to
condense the exaltation of the Revolu-
tion and to project it far into the future.
The urgency of the moment is reflected
in the style of the work itself, as Con-
dorcet piles phrase after phrase, hope
after hope, into sentences that extend
into paragraphs almost as inde½nite as
the progress they attempt to picture.
The Sketch also reflects a profound
sense of defeat. Driven into hiding by
the Jacobins, Condorcet saw the Revolu-
tion as betrayed by men he regarded as

charlatans; politicians who had misrep-
resented its principles and misdirected
its energies; terrorists who had sacri-
½ced reasoned debate to fanatical mani-
pulation, freedom to tyranny, the prom-
ise of the moderns to a false nostalgia for
the ancients. The heightened vision of
progress represented by the Tenth Epoch
now became the consolation of the de-
feated philosopher, the warrant that de-
spite the frustrations of the political
moment the transformation of human
existence promised by the Revolution
could nevertheless occur in the long run.

It would be a massive understatement

to say that Condorcet’s forecast of ad-
vances in science, technology, and medi-
cine has held up better than his anticipa-
tions of progress in ethics and politics. It
is easy, two centuries later, to be appalled
at the naïveté (or should we rather be
ashamed at the unrealized generosity?)
of his hopes for the end of colonization;
to be embarrassed at the failure of his
prediction that European peoples would
be led, by principles of benevolence or
through rational calculation of their in-
terests, to end exploitation and foster
universal emancipation; to sense the
arrogance of his expectation that non-
European peoples would readily em-
brace new truths and accept their blend-
ing into the fraternity of a cosmopolitan
civilization. Bonald, only the ½rst to
recognize a polemical opportunity here,
was not above doctoring Condorcet’s
text to foist upon it the worst possible
interpretation of his remark that the
progress of civilization might result in
the dispersion or disappearance of some
primitive peoples. This was his chance
for payback against Enlightenment cri-
tiques of colonization undertaken in
the name of Christ. Did philosophy
have any more right than Christianity,
Bonald demanded, to “cause the dis-

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Keith
Michael
Baker
on
progress

appearance of [ faire disparaître] the
peaceful inhabitants of these distant
regions?”11

It is also easy, in retrospect, to smile
at the assurance that freedom of trade,
elimination of monopolies, destruction
of obstacles to individual participation
in economic affairs, and equality of pub-
lic instruction would necessarily come
together to prevent the vastly dispropor-
tionate distribution of wealth within
nations and among them. But laissez-
faire was still new in the eighteenth cen-
tury, as Emma Rothschild has reminded
us, and Condorcet did not claim that
economic principles had been estab-
lished once and for all. Nor did he deny
that their application might be re½ned
in the light of practice and tuned by gov-
ernment action. His view of the progress
of the human mind was that it was al-
ways subject to correction: never more
than provisional, truths of one moment
could be expected to become the errors
of another. Holding that human rights
could be logically derived from the na-
ture of individuals as sensual beings, he
was nevertheless quick to emphasize
how abstract these principles remained,
how far they were from being fully un-
derstood, how complex a matter it
would be to institute them in particular
situations.

Nor was Condorcet offering a blue-

print for scienti½c rule, as Bonald

11 Bonald, “Observations,” 757. Bonald omitted
Condorcet’s quali½cation that the process of
civilization would be accomplished “even with-
out conquest,” and combined and supplement-
ed parts of two passages from the Sketch (see
below, pages 67–68) to produce a more damn-
ing version: “It is possible, says Condorcet, that
some savage nation in the vast regions of north
America that knows no law but brigandage will
reject the delights of this perfected civilization;
but reduced to a small number, pushed back
themselves by the civilized nations, these peo-
ples will ½nish by disappearing entirely, or
being lost in the midst of these nations.”

charged. His goal was not social engi-
neering carried out under the aegis of a
technocratic state. To the extent that his
social art was the art of legislation, he
thought it would ultimately do best in
doing little. Its purpose was to open up
as wide a ½eld as possible for the exercise
of individual freedom, the play of free
and informed individual choice, and
the expression of sentiments of benevo-
lence. Doubtless, there were tensions
in his thinking, particularly in its early
stages, between the claims of scientism
and the principles of democracy. His
work on decision theory had sought to
resolve these tensions by exploring vot-
ing conditions under which majority
rule might be regarded as rational. At
times under the Old Regime, when it
seemed that the monarchy could be a
vehicle for enlightened political reform,
he was willing to argue that the right to
participate in political decision making
was secondary to the need for rational
decisions.

But his views changed. By the time he

wrote the Sketch he was ready to insist
that individual rights could only be se-
cured by majority rule. “Doubtless there
are matters on which the majority might
perhaps decide more often in favor of
error and against the common interest
of all. But it is still up to the majority to
de½ne which matters must not be sub-
ject immediately to its own decision, to
identify those whose reason it believes
should be substituted for its own, and to
determine the procedure they must fol-
low to arrive more assuredly at the truth;
and it cannot abdicate the authority to
decide whether or not their decisions
have violated the common rights of
all.”12

It was therefore a crucial feature of
Condorcet’s thinking that scienti½c

12 Condorcet, Esquisse, 150.

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On
Condorcet’s
“Sketch”

truths, always subject to correction,
must never be propagated as dogmas.
His educational proposals during the
Revolution insisted on the distinction
between education and instruction he saw
as crucial in differentiating modern lib-
erty from that of the ancients. Education
meant the inculcation of truths as dog-
mas, the institutionalization of habits of
obedience, the subjection of the individ-
ual to the community. Instruction meant
the teaching of the critical reasoning
that was the necessary basis for individ-
ual judgment and the exercise of inde-
pendence; it meant the exposition of
current truths–whether in the natural,
political, or moral sciences–as no more
than provisional. In Condorcet’s view
modern society and individual liberty
could be served only by public instruc-
tion understood in this sense. But even
then, such instruction could be neither
mandatory nor exclusive of the teaching
of other views, nor could a political au-
thority be allowed to decide the curricu-
lum. Even the constitution, he argued,
could be taught only as a provisional for-
mulation, subject to advances in the un-
derstanding of the principles underlying
it.

We are still a long way here from the

religion of social progress offered by
Saint-Simon and Comte, from the his-
torical determinism proposed by Marx
and Engels, and from the twentieth-
century subjections of humanity in the
name of laws of society or history. No-
tions of society and history had to thick-
en, as they rapidly did in the nineteenth
century, for these conceptions to appear.
Bonald himself announced the sociolog-
ical turn in de½ning “the great question
that divides men and societies in Eu-
rope: whether man makes himself and
makes society, or society makes itself
and makes men.”13 Saint-Simon and

13 Bonald, “Observations,” 742.

Comte were to follow his lead. In com-
parison with theirs, Condorcet’s concep-
tion of society and history was still rela-
tively thin: his story began with a model
of the individual mind, not with a prem-
ise about necessary social relations; its
division into epochs did not correspond
(much to Comte’s frustration) to any
succession of systemic social orders.
Condorcet did not reveal the work of
history on human beings; he pointed to
the work of human beings in history.
Nor did he invoke historical laws or soci-
ological determinism as the basis for a
theory of social organization. His con-
ception of the social art was resolutely
antihistorical, open to the possibilities of
the future rather than subject to the de-
terminisms of the past. It was also res-
olutely individualistic, aimed at widen-
ing the human capacity to choose intelli-
gently for oneself, in individual matters
as in collective. The only historical law
he saw might be called the law of the
open future: the tendency of humankind
to secure increasing freedom from con-
straints of physical nature and those of
its own making. He thought this tenden-
cy would hold, only because freedom
would beget freedom through informed
choice and reasoned action.

Richard Rorty has suggested the im-

portance of holding to the goal of uni-
versal emancipation proclaimed by the
Enlightenment while abandoning the
epistemological blend of rationalism
and positivism upon which its hopes for
emancipation were based.14 The lan-
guage of science has been useful for
many purposes, but it has not served us
well in our thinking about ethics and
14 Richard Rorty, “The Continuity Between
the Enlightenment and ‘Postmodernism,’” in
Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanss Reill, eds.,
What’s Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern
Question (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2001), 19–36.

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Keith
Michael
Baker
on
progress

politics. It is irrefutable that the growth
of scienti½c and technical knowledge
has magni½ed human capacities to in-
flict harm as much as those to achieve
well-being. Knowledge in itself does not
make human beings good; it seems far
from eradicating evil. But neither is it
clear that the balance of malevolence
and benevolence within and among hu-
man beings is ½xed and constant. Some
conditions seem more conducive to be-
nevolence than others.

Condorcet allowed for an uncertainty

at the very heart of his philosophy of
history. He did not know whether to ar-
gue that progress must be inde½nite be-
cause it is unlimited, or inde½nite be-
cause one cannot know what its limits
might be. We sense those limits more
clearly in our age of global warming,
randomized terror, and virtually univer-
sal insecurity. If Condorcet moved from
promise to assurance, and at least some
of his successors moved from there to
historical inevitability, it may be time for
us to move back toward Voltaire’s offer
of hope and possibility–not forgetting
the latter’s sense of responsibility.15

Time will tell if we have left it too late.
Condorcet’s expectations for a more de-
cent world–for universal human rights,
individual autonomy, and a measure of
equality between individuals and na-
tions–may now seem far from assured.
But we can still look for opportunities to
move toward these goals. Does anyone
have a better idea?

15 On this theme, see Pierre-André Taguieff,
Du progrès: biographie d’une utopie moderne
(Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu, 2001), esp. 183–184.

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