September 17, 1743 – Birth of Marquis de Condorcet, French Philosopher Whose Ideas Embodied the Age of Enlightenment

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), also known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, political theorist, and mathematician.

He is important to the history of America because of his interactions with, and influence upon, American founders, including Thomas Jefferson. . . . Perhaps not as influential as one might have hoped, since Condorcet was an early advocate for the abolition of colonial slavery. He also was in favor of education reform, women’s rights, and opposed to capital punishment.

Portrait of Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet

Condorcet also championed a system of voting, now known as the Condorcet Method, that elects the candidate who wins a majority of the vote in every head-to-head election against each of the other candidates, that is, a candidate preferred by more voters than any others, whenever there is such a candidate. According to Equal.vote, as well as a Princeton analysis of voting theory, Condorcet is almost universally regarded as the most fair, representative, and accurate way to tally ranked choice ballots for single winner elections. 

Condorcet also developed what we now call Condorcet’s jury theorem, about the relative probability of a given group of individuals arriving at a correct decision. The assumptions of the theorem are that a group wishes to reach a decision by majority vote. One of the two outcomes of the vote is correct, and each voter has an independent probability of voting for the correct decision. The theorem asks how many voters should be included in the group. Interestingly, many political theorists and philosophers see the Condorcet’s Jury Theorem as a double-edged sword: it can either prove that majority rule is an (almost) perfect mechanism to aggregate information, or an (almost) perfect disaster, when voters’ knowledge is systematically biased toward (probably) wrong options.

This problem would appear to be particularly exacerbated in a world, as well now live in, of rampant misinformation.

His best-know work, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit, published posthumously in 1795, it is considered one of the most significant Enlightenment texts. In this book he asserts that humanity’s expanding knowledge of the natural and social sciences would lead to a just world of individual freedom, and moral compassion. This could only be achieved, however, through the destruction of inequality between nations, the destruction of inequality between classes, and the perfectibility of human nature itself, intellectually, morally, and physically. Condorcet’s Sketch is also notable for its aversion to religion and monarchy and for positing that social evils are the result of ignorance.

Marquis de Condorcet was arrested for his outspoken opposition to the Jacobin government at the outset of the Reign of Terror, during the French Revolution. He was imprisoned after months of hiding and died in his cell two days later, on March 29, 1794. He was 50 years old.