On condorcet's "sketch"

Daedalus

Volumn 133, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 56-64

  Baker, Keith Michael ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 77950386710     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/0011526041504506     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise, vicomte de Bonald, "Observations sur un ouvrage posthume de Condorcet, intitulé 'Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain,'" Oeuvres complètes de M. de Bonald, 3 vols. (Petit-Montrouge: Migne, 1859), vol.1, 721-722. Translations from the French are my own.
2. Voltaire, Lettres philosophiques, ed. Raymond Naves (Paris: Gamier fréres, 1939), 173.
3. I have sketched this argument more fully in my "Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual History," in W.F.B. Melching and W. R. E. Velema, eds., Main Trends in Cultural History (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1994), 95-120.
4. For a far broader view of this transition, see Marcel Gauchet, Le désanchanlement du monde: une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985).
5. translated into English by Oscar Burge, with a foreword by Charles Taylor, as The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991).
6. M. J. A. N. Caritat de Condorcet, "Éloge de M. Lieutaud," in Oeuvres de Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O'Connor and M. F. Arago, 12 vols. (Paris: Firmin Didot frères, 1847-1849), vol.2, 404.
7. Pensées de Pascal. Nouvelle édition corrigée et augmentée (London: 1776).
8. notes as reprinted in Condorcet O'Connor and Arago, eds., Oeuvres de Condorcet, vol.3, 622.
9. Ibid., 641., Oeuvres de Condorcet, 3
10. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001).
11. Condorcet, Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès del'esprit humain, ed. O. H. Prior (Paris: Boivin et cie, 1933;
12. republished with an introduction by Yvon Belavel, Paris: J. Vrin, 1970), 152. see Rothschild, Economic Sentiments, 237.
13. For a fuller account, see my book, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 344-352.
14. Jean Dagen, L'histoire de l'esprit humain dans la pensée française de Fontenelle à Condorcet (Paris: Klincksieck, 1977), 18-23.
15. Bonald, "Observations," 757. Bonald omitted Condorcet's qualification that the process of civilization would be accomplished "even without conquest," and combined and supplemented parts of two passages from the Sketch (see below, pages 67-68) to produce a more damning version: "It is possible, says Condorcet, that some savage nation in the vast regions of north America that knows no law but brigandage will reject the delights of this perfected civilization; but reduced to a small number, pushed back themselves by the civilized nations, these peoples will finish by disappearing entirely, or being lost in the midst of these nations."
16. Condorcet, Esquisse, 150.
17. Bonald, "Observations," 742.
18. Richard Rorty, "The Continuity Between the Enlightenment and 'Postmodernism,'" in Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hanss Reill, eds., What's Left of Enlightenment?: A Postmodern Question (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001), 19-36.
19. On this theme, see Pierre-André Taguieff, Du progrès: biographie d'une utopie moderne (Paris: Éditions J'ai Lu, 2001), esp. 183-184.