Condorcet

Condorcet was a nobleman of Picardy whose paper on the integral calculus at twenty-two caught d'Alembert's eye; he entered the Academy of Sciences at twenty-six and became its permanent secretary at thirty-three. A friend of Voltaire and Turgot, he directed the reform of the coinage while Turgot was controller-general. In 1785 he applied probability to voting and found that majority rule can produce cyclical collective preferences, the 'Condorcet paradox' that begins social choice theory; his 'jury theorem' showed that a majority is more likely than an individual to judge correctly.

When the Revolution came he was the most active of the philosophes. In 1790 he published On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship, the first systematic case for women's suffrage, helped found the abolitionist society, and argued for equal rights for Jews and Protestants. Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1791, he drafted a plan for free, secular public education equal for both sexes. In 1793 his Girondin constitution was rejected by the Jacobins; he criticised their replacement openly and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

For eight months he hid in the attic of a widow's house in Paris and wrote the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. It divides history into ten epochs from tribal society to the French Revolution; the tenth is the future: inequality among nations will vanish, inequality within nations will vanish, and human faculties will improve without limit. In March 1794 he left his refuge to spare his hostess, was arrested two days later, and was found dead in his cell the next morning, possibly by his own hand. The Convention paid for the book's publication.