Marquis de Condorcet
French Enlightenment philosopher, mathematician and politician (Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, 1743–1794), born in Ribemont into a noble family, a mathematical prodigy already recognised before the age of twenty-five for his contributions to probability calculus and elected permanent secretary of the French Academy of Sciences, a position from which he combined for decades a brilliant scientific career with a growing political commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of rational progress, religious tolerance and social reform. Author of the Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions (1785), he founded with this work the modern field of social choice theory, formulating the famous 'Condorcet paradox' — the possibility that collective preferences may be cyclical and intransitive even when individual preferences are not — a mathematical discovery of lasting importance for democratic theory and contemporary political science. A deputy in the National Convention during the French Revolution, Condorcet firmly advocated positions particularly advanced for his time: the abolition of slavery, women's suffrage — in the essay On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790) he argued with logical rigour that denying women political rights on grounds of sex was as arbitrary as denying them on grounds of skin colour or height — and a public, free and secular education system intended to guarantee equal opportunity and the formation of rational, free citizens. His most famous work, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, was written clandestinely while he was in hiding, condemned by the Jacobins as a suspected Girondin, and traces, with moving Enlightenment optimism — even in the face of his own imminent execution — a history of human progress from primitive barbarism to a future 'tenth epoch' of indefinite improvement of reason, science and morality. Arrested shortly after completing the manuscript, he died in prison under circumstances never fully clarified, two days after his arrest, becoming one of the most poignant symbols of the Revolutionary Terror devouring the very ideals that had begotten it.