Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de
Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de (1743–94) A leading contributor to the Encyclopedia (1751–65), and first supporter then victim of the French Revolution, Condorcet is chiefly remembered for his theory of human progress. This was presented in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of Progress of the Human Mind, written while in hiding. He distinguished a series of ten progressive epochs or phases in human history, and like many of his contemporaries, emphasized the indefinitely progressive potentiality of the growth of science and mathematics. His radical social and political ideas were one of the main targets of criticism in Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, in which the latter argued that all such well-meant projects must founder on the disproportion between population growth and natural limits to the supply of food.
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Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de
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