Comegna Condorcet Progress

Condorcet was simultaneously one of the most significant Enlightenment thinkers, proto-libertarians, and philosophical historians of progress.

Our author covers barbarian hordes and pastoral-nomadism and we recall that the past is a place historians interpret into existence.

The invention of agriculture was certainly epochal and revolutionary, but writing dramatically sped up the course of progress.

Condorcet surveys the widely-distributed, decentralized, yet deeply interconnected ancient Greek 'Republic of Letters.'

Condorcet believed secular sectarianism was the primary cause of ancient philosophy's decline, but Christian dogmatism sure didn't help.

Condorcet surveys the dismal feudal era, but highlights its greatest triumph--the libertarian moment when slavery disappeared across Europe.

While Renaissance artists and intellectuals rediscovered, revived, and revered, tinkering inventors drove progress into its next epochal period.

No mere whig historian, Condorcet recognized that alongside wonderful, liberty-maximizing inventions like printing came modern states and global slavery.

For our author, the print revolution ushered in both an unstoppable flood of progress and the massive, abosolute, bureaucratic central state.

Whether rationalists or empiricists, the first modern philosophers gave us all good reasons to doubt the dictates of either kings or priests.

Rounding out his history of the Early Modern period, Condorcet explains the linkages between philosophy and politics on both ends of the Atlantic.

Like many of us, Condorcet got a bit carried away with praise for the Enlightenment. Unlike many of us, he tempered it with a dose of realism.

Though our author wrote in hiding from a terroristic regime, his saw unlimited potential for human accomplishment.

Condorcet ends his greatest work with the confident assertion that progress cannot be stopped.