Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics

by Keith Michael Baker

From the preface:

This is neither a new biography of Condorcet nor an attempt to analyze exhaustively all aspects of his thinking. In the following pages I have concentrated on a single theme in his thought-albeit, I think, the central one-his conception of social science. I have tried to analyze historically the nature and development of this conception as it took shape in the general context of Enlightenment thought and the particular social and political milieu that was eighteenth-century France. My subtitle, From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics, is therefore meant to suggest both the particular course of Condorcet's intellectual development and a more general evolution of ideas within the Enlightenment to which he contributed.

538 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1974

About the author

Keith Baker is professor of early modern European history and, by courtesy, of French and Italian, J.E. Wallace Sterling Professor in the Humanities, and Jean-Paul Gimon Director of the France-Stanford Center. His research focuses on intellectual history and the history of political culture, and on the cultural and political origins of the Englightenment and the French Revolution. He is the author of Condorcet. From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics and Inventing the French Revolution. Prof. Baker has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, has been named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. In 2014, he won the American Historical Association's lifetime achievement award.