CONDORCET, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de.

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Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. First edition of the finest and most durable expression of the ultimate perfectibility of man, perhaps the clearest and boldest statement of the enlightenment belief in progress, demonstrating "man's progressive emancipation, first from the arbitrary domination of his physical environment and then from the historical bondage of his own making" (Encyclopedia of Philosophy II, 184).Condorcet wrote the work in 1794 while in hiding from Robespierre's agents, having voted against the execution of the king. Captured by the state, he was found dead the next day, presumed to have taken his own life to escape the guillotine. His manuscript was published the next year. "In the Esquisse... Condorcet traces the history of man through epochs, the first three covering his progress from savagery to pastoral community and thence to the agricultural state. The next five span the growth of civilizations, and knowledge down to Descartes, and the ninth describes the revolution of Condorcet's own lifetime, from Newton to Rousseau. The prophetic view of the tenth epoch shows Condorcet at his most original. He forecasts the destruction of inequality between nations and classes, and the improvement, intellectual, moral and physical, of human nature" (PMM).

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