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introduction 1. Besides Condorcet, the leading américanistes on the eve of the French Revolution were Lafayette, of course, Brissot de Warville, Dupont de Nemours, the duc de La Rochefoucauld d’Enville, Crèvecœur, and the marquis de Chastellux. 2. The History of the East and West Indies was not the work of Raynal alone but of several contributors, chief among them Diderot. In the “definitive” 1780 edition, chapters 1–5 and 18–30 of book 17, and 1–37 of book 18 deal with colonial America; chapters 38–52 of book 18 cover the Revolution. See the 1783 English translation, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies, trans. John O. Justamond, 8 vols. (London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell, 1783). The chapters on the Revolution are also available as Raynal, The Revolution of America (1783; Boston : Gregg Press, 1972). Selections from the chapters on colonial America can be found in Raynal, A History of the Two Indies, trans. and ed. Peter Jimack (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2006), 242–61. 3. Filippo Mazzei, Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États-Unis de l’Amérique Septentrionale , 4 vols. (Colle, Va., and Paris: Chez Froullé, 1788). This early history of the United States devotes two of its four volumes to refuting the reservations expressed by Raynal and Mably concerning the future of the new republic. Inserted in the other two volumes are two essays by Condorcet: a second edition of Influence de la Révolution de l’Amérique sur l’Europe (1786) (4:237–83) [Influence of the American Revolution on Europe], and Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven à un citoyen de Virginie, sur l’inutilité de partager le pouvoir législatif entre plusieurs corps (1:267–371) [Letters from a Freeman of New Haven to a Citizen of Virginia on the Futility of Dividing the Legislative Power Among Several Bodies], an important theoretical text on social choice, which we do not include in the present volume, however, since it is not specifically about the United States. A translation of Mazzei’s work is available, but it omits the two essays by Condorcet . See Philip Mazzei, Researches on the United States, trans. and ed. Constance D. Sherman (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976). 4. See Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (New York: Octagon Books, 1966 [1957]), 71, 162. 5. Condorcet also knew John Adams, but the two men disagreed sharply on political matters. 6. For more on the Girondin constitution, which was never voted on, see On the Principles of the Constitutional Plan Presented to the National Convention [Plan de constitution, présenté à la Convention nationale les 15 et 16 février 1793: Exposition des principes et des motifs du plan de constitution ], in Condorcet, Selected Writings, ed. Keith M. Baker (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976), 143–82 (also translated as A Survey of the Principles Underlying the Draft Constitution, in Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory, trans. and ed. Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt [Aldershot, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1994], 190–227); and David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 266–76; Victor G. Rosenblum, “Condorcet as Constitutional Draftsman,” in Condorcet Studies I, ed. Leonora C. Rosenfield (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984), 187–205; Keith M. Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 320–30. On the posthumous influence of Condorcet and the Girondin constitution, notes 126 S notes to pages 3–5 see Keith M. Baker, “Condorcet,” in A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution, ed. François Furet and Mona Ozouf, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 209–12. 7. The reception of Condorcet’s works in the nineteenth century (and beyond) is a complex topic. The radical, republican ideas of the philosopher and revolutionary often made him a controversial figure. His project for a rational social science remained a central reference for the idéologues during the Directory and the Empire. Later, Saint-Simon and Comte claimed to prolong and develop his philosophy of progress, but they inflected it in a direction foreign to Condorcet’s thought. Laplace and Poisson, the great late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century mathematicians , built on his research on elections, but his theory of voting was soon after forgotten , not to be...