person1743–1794

Marquis de Condorcet

Disciplines:

Summary

French mathematician and Enlightenment philosopher — who invented the Condorcet method of voting and the Condorcet paradox — predicted the French Revolution's going wrong in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind — died in prison during the Terror.

Core Contribution

Creates the mathematical theory of voting — Condorcet's discovery that majority voting can produce cycles (A beats B, B beats C, C beats A) regardless of individual rationality is the foundational result in social choice theory and the mathematical study of collective decision-making.

Key Spikes & Highlights

Hid from the Terror while writing the Sketch — a prisoner in hiding, knowing he would be arrested, wrote the most optimistic document about human progress in Western intellectual history; the combination of personal circumstances and intellectual content is one of the most ironic juxtapositions in intellectual history
Predicted his own era's failure — the Sketch argues that progress is inevitable but also describes how religious superstition and inequality impede it; the Terror that killed him illustrated his own theory

Notable Works & Achievements

Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions

Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind

Historical Influences

D'Alembert Voltaire

Intellectual Lineage

Ribemont, Picardie Collège de Navarre Académie des Sciences French Revolutionary politics

Contemporaries & Peers

Voltaire D'Alembert Turgot

Minds Influenced

Social choice theory Arrow's Impossibility Theorem

Intellectual Posterity

Condorcet paradox Condorcet method Social choice theory Sketch for a Historical Picture

Discussing