Condorcet: Selected Writings (The Library of Liberal Arts, Lla 159) (English and French Edition)

The aim of this book is quite simply to make available to students a selection of some of the more important writings of Condorcet on philosophy, politics, social science, and history. His Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, often regarded as the very epitome of Enlightenment thought, is well known in the English-speaking world. But the great body of his writings remains untranslated; and, apart from a modern translation of the Sketch, those few works that have been rendered into English exist only in old, rare, or fragmentary translations. The new selection presented here attempts to convey the fundamental ideas and the range of interests of a man who was in one short career mathematician and political theorist, man of letters and social reformer, scientific statesman and revolutionary deputy: a man who, if he is still recognized by historians as the last of the great philosophes of the Enlightenment, is now also being discovered by contemporary social scientists as one of the founding fathers of modern social science.

Text: English, French (translation)