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Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (review)
- Journal of the History of Philosophy
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 16, Number 1, January 1978
- pp. 113-115
- 10.1353/hph.2008.0085
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
BOOK REVIEWS 113 Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics. By Keith Michael Baker. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 538. $22.00) Using Condorcet's conception of social science as its thematic center, this book broadens out to become a wide-ranging, yet at the same time thoroughly rigorous and analytical exploration of a large segment of the Enlightenment. For Baker's vision goes far beyond his ostensible subject. Avoiding the myopia that so often afflicts those intellectual historians who choose to pursue their interest through the study of a single individual, Baker carries his investigation deep into Condorcet's intellectual, social, and political background. Thus, in the course of telling us where Condorcet's views on agriculture, or economics, or education, or epistemology, or probability theory, or Newtonian science are located within the general structure of his thought, Baker also provides us with a set of mini-dissertationsthat trace the evolution of these concerns through the mature and late Enlightenment periods. With a thinker less historically significant than Condorcet, such an approach might have led to the submergence of the subject into his times, or--even worse--to a distortion of the context to fit the subject. But as Baker manages to show, Condorcet was an active intellectual producer rather than a passive receptor, a man who took up and developed a surprising number of the disparate intellectual strands making up the Enlightenment. With a historian less sure-footed than Baker, such an approach might have produced a confusing book having no coherent focus. Fortunately, Baker has managed to tie everything together (though he occasionally has to strain to do so), and if some of his mini-dissertations stop just short of becoming independent treatises, they still constitute one of the great merits of the work. In short, this book is much more than a study of Condorcet; rather, it is a study of the Enlightenment that takes Condorcet as its terminus ad quem. In his initial chapter Baker adumbrates the social and cultural milieu in which the interests and ambitions of the young mathematician (b. 1743) were formed, suggesting that it was the failure, in the mid-1770s, of Turgot's program of enlightened reform that turned Condorcet in the direction of social science. Thwarted in his hopes for immediate participation in the reform process, Condorcet sought instead to fulfill his "passion for the public good" by attempting to establish a theoretical foundation for social praxis that would be as sure in its methods and as certain in its results as the science of nature. Thus it is that Baker turns in his second and third chapters to deal with the "scientific model" underlying Condorcet's conception of social science. The attempt to apply the methods of science to human society is perhaps the most significant contribution of the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and Baker's two chapters constitute an important attempt to clarify the problem of the genesis of this intellectual development. As is now widely recognized , social science arose in the eighteenth century out of two quite different intellectual strands: the moral-philosophical and the natural scientific. The former strand, embracing such thinkers as Pufendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Smith, led from a consideration of the natural foundations of morality and law to a consideration of the social framework within which these phenomena operate. The latter strand, deriving its impetus from Newton, led from a consideration of the laws of the physical universe to a consideration of the laws of the moral and human universe. Concerned as he is with Condorcet, whose affinities are mathematical and scientific, Baker naturally deals only with the second, natural scientific strand. The usual argument is that the success of Newtonian science in demonstrating order and harmony in the natural world stimulated the philosophes to use the same methods to reveal the order and harmony underlyingthe human world. While not rejecting this argument, Baker also argues, convincinglyif at times rather digressively, that in the development of social science the limitations of the Newtonian epistemological model were as important as its achievements. 114 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY For the philosophes learned from Newton and his successors that human knowledge is...