Abstract Summary
While a fugitive from the Reign of Terror, the mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet composed his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794), a brief yet sweeping account of humanity, divided into ten epochs, melding political history with the history of knowledge, concluding with the tenth epoch, “the future progress of the human mind.” While these predictions have attracted the lion’s share of scholarly attention, this paper re-centers the first nine epochs, as essential to Condorcet’s conceit of the Sketch as a scientific undertaking. For his prognostications are licensed by the invocation of the natural sciences, which allow for prediction based on past observation. Building on the work of Hanna Roman, this paper takes Condorcet at his word, querying the meaning of science, both as historical object and as methodology, in the Sketch. Read as a history of science, the text is revealed as a patchwork of determinisms—political, environmental, technological—that bind politics, nature, and ideas into a teleological narrative of Progress. This picture of science, as at once material and ideal, and as proceeding inexorably and by logical necessity from past to future, perfectly describes the method of the Sketch itself. Condorcet’s text functions as a unit—as a scientific epic, in Nasser Zakariya’s terms—with the (heavily curated) data set of the first nine epochs creating the necessity of the tenth. The Sketch thus instantiates a history that is both prophecy and an attempt to make the prophecy self-fulfilling.
