Marquis de Condorcet

 Marquis de Condorcet

Another Frenchman, Condorcet, born a half-century after Voltaire and around thirty years after Rousseau, was one of the first to systematically apply mathematics in the social sciences. Behavior, he believed, could be quantitatively analyzed. But he also believed in diversity and individual freedom, independence of choice and people thinking for themselves – something a bit apart from Rousseau's General Will, foreshadowing the liberalism that was coming in the 1800s.

Condorcet was an optimist, believing that the lives of people, in general, could be improved. He believed in social justice and advocated free and equal public education, constitutionalism, equal rights for women, and people of all races. He founded an anti-slavery organization, the Society of the Friends of the Blacks.

Opposed to authoritarianism, he was anti-clerical, and, unlike Voltaire, he was also opposed to monarchy. In other words, he was a republican. His belief in liberty extended to free exchanges in the world of buying and selling, as did a Scottish contemporary, Adam Smith.

In his early twenties, in 1765, his first work on mathematics – on integral calculus – launched his career as a respected mathematician. In 1769 he was elected to the French Royal Academy of Sciences. In 1772 he published another paper on integral calculus which was widely hailed as groundbreaking. Condorcet was recognized worldwide and worked with famous scientists, including Leonhard Euler and Benjamin Franklin. He became an honorary member of many foreign academies and philosophical societies in Sweden, Germany, Russia, and the United States.

Condorcet was one of those who believed that knowledge, reason, and science would liberate humanity, and he took this belief with him into the French Revolution. He would take a leading role in the French Revolution from its beginning in 1789, hoping for a rational reconstruction of society. He was to be elected as Paris delegate to the Assembly, and he became secretary of the Assembly. He advocated women's suffrage for the new government. He opposed the death penalty for King Louis XVI. Hardline revolutionaries associated him with the revolution's liberal and traitorous faction. He was imprisoned, and in prison, he died a mysterious death.