On Condorcet’s “Sketch”

Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind– perhaps the most influential formulation of the idea of progress ever written– was first published in 1795, a year after its author’s death. Conceived as an introduction to a much more comprehensive work, Condorcet’s essay, hastily written while he was in hiding from his Jacobin enemies, was in part an ironic by-product of the author’s political defeat. In the Sketch Condorcet consoled himself with the conviction that expanding knowledge in the natural and social sciences would lead to an ever more just world of individual freedom, material affluence, and moral compassion.

A year later Louis de Bonald published one of the earliest responses, a vehement critique that denounced the “apocalypse of this new gospel.” For this mighty theorist of the Counter-Revolution, Condorcet’s work epitomized everything that was wrong about the faith of godless men in secular progress. By Bonald’s account:

The fanatical picture that this philosopher gives of his hypothetical society can explain to us the inconceivable phenomenon exhibited by revolutionary France. Men were seen coldly giving their destructive hordes the order for the desolation and death of their fellow citizens, their relatives, their friends, out of pure love of their country; announcing the goal and even the necessity of reducing its population by half . . . and justifying perhaps in their own eyes horrors unheard of in the annals of human wickedness, for the benefit of . . . future generations.1

For Bonald, the philosophy of progress was a perversion of the Christian apocalypse– a dangerous rival that substituted the promise of science for the hope of salvation while forgetting the brutal realities of human passions. It inflicted unprecedented death and destruction even as it declared the advent of universal human happiness. It promised universal freedom at the cost of destroying colonized peoples. It proclaimed a reign of reason that could only turn out to be domination in the name of science.

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Endnotes

• 1Louis-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. (PetitMontrouge: Migne, 1859), vol. 1, 721–722. Translations from the French are my own.