Condorcet

This work addresses bell hooks’s call for the development of an alternative to patriarchal masculinity which she calls feminist masculinity. Patriarchal masculinity has convinced most men and women that the development of different forms of masculinity goes against our biological nature. Yet there exists a history of men’s experiences that contradicts this perspective and amounts to, I argue, men’s feminist history.
In particular I argue that the life and work of French philosophe Condorcet constitutes a historical cornerstone for feminist masculinity. An important implication of this work
is the understanding that gender dissolution is not the only strategy capable of rectifying gender inequality. Siding with a range of feminist perspectives, from ecofeminism and Black feminism, I contend that we can accomplish much through a critical reconstruction of men and masculinity, including the reevaluation of historic figures such as Condorcet.

The term 'mixed mathematics' originally derived from the Aristotelian framework of sciences in which mathematics treated abstract entities and could be 'mixed' with sensible properties in varying proportions. Its history is deeply concerned with major events in history of science: the mathematicians' manifesto on mathesis universalis at the end of the sixteenth century, the impact of Newtonian sciences at the end of the seventeenth century and the development of algebraic analysis in continental Europe in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The first two contributed to extending the scope of mathematics to the cognitive territory of the natural philosophers, and the third encouraged the further enlargement of its scope to the fields of engineering and even those of social human activities such as economics and demographics. It was at the beginning of the nineteenth century that the notion of 'mixed mathematics' gradually disappeared and was replaced by a set of modern terminologies.

This paper presents the relation of Kenneth Arrow's 1950 'Impossibility Theorem' to the idea of the 'Condorcet's Paradox'. It shows that Arrow's theorem indeed theoretically proves that democracy is either arbitrary or impossible, and creates a typology of four exhaustive cases to show that this conclusion holds. Nevertheless, this is no cause for despair: seeing Arrow's theorem as representing a trade-off between stability, universal admissibility or non-dictatorship, it renders important insights for constitution-designers that are currently under-utilised.

Democracy was in the margins both as an idea and as a political force in the eighteenth century. Even in the 1790s, ‘democracy’ was hardly the defining notion of the revolutionaries’ political visions. The small states as much as the large states perceived democracy as an outmoded legacy of antiquity leading to anarchy and despotism, inapplicable not least because it was undesirable in the modern world in which commerce was a rising force. This article tells the story of how this changed, how the understanding of ‘democracy’ was transformed during the French Revolution to represent a viable transition mechanism to a state of widespread and durable liberty. To avoid a teleological approach in the process of this analysis, this article examines the works of Condorcet on modern democracy in the context of the predicaments of the eighteenth century and the French revolutionary decade: how to avert at the same time despotism, military government and popular anarchy; and how to establish a free and stable state on the basis of modern commercial society? The history of the French Revolution is hereby placed in dialogue with that of eighteenth-century political and intellectual history. The effect is that a fresh picture of the entirety of Condorcet’s political vision emerges as his idea of democracy is studied from the viewpoint of his historical sensitivity, political economy, constitutional theory and international thoughts. In the end, Condorcet was the thinker who most significantly and prominently contributed to the post-1789 emergence of the concept of ‘democracy’ – which had thitherto been considered as the political form inevitably leading to destructive anarchy and despotic Caesarism – as a viable pathway to stability and prosperity.

Rimpiangere la "res publica", tornare a Roma. In questo, alla fine del secondo millennio, gli studi antichistici (storici e giuridici) e quelli teorico-politici sembrano trovare una convergenza. Se lo storico di Roma Fergus Millar evidenzia gli elementi "democratici" della tarda repubblica, Philip Pettit e Quentin Skinner individuano una libertà "neoromana", ideale civico elaborato a partire da Machiavelli e applicabile anche al presente. Ciò si scontra, per molti versi, con la "cesura" tra antichità e modernità politica, fatta spesso coincidere con il celebre discorso di Benjamin Constant sulla "Libertà degli antichi paragonata a quella dei moderni" (1819). A ben guardare, però, il padre svizzero del costituzionalismo liberale si concentra soprattutto sulla Grecia, scissa tra la "quasi moderna" Atene e l'arretrata Sparta. E Roma? È su questo che il presente volume indaga, prendendo anche in considerazione i più recenti dibattiti nell'antichistica e nella teoria politica; punti di riferimento sono il pensiero di Constant, a sua volta oggetto di reinterpretazione, e le sue innumerevoli "ricadute". Risulta quindi che le critiche al 'modello' antico, già ben chiare in Hobbes, esaltate dalla Querelle degli antichi e dei moderni, e infine accuratamente delineate da Hegel e Marx, in Constant sono frutto della volontà di attaccare più Sparta (esaltata da Mably) che Roma (esaltata da Rousseau e profondamente rispettata anche da Mme De Stael). Le stesse nuove letture di Constant, che tendono a limitare le conseguenze estreme tratte da Berlin sulle due diverse libertà (democratica e liberale), ci fanno apparire il pensatore svizzero più legato al modello romano di quanto si creda in genere.

This paper makes a claim about Constant's intellectual sources in order to throw additional light on the nature of his liberalism. It assesses Constant's views against the background of a tradition of political rationalism. Constant both criticized and inherited that tradition. This paper shows how this process of critical re-appropriation occurred principally with two figures that had a particular significance for Constant: the very Francophile William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. Constant resisted these authors' desire to replace a consent-based decision-making model by a truth-based decision-making model, and condemned their tendency to enrol individual judgment at the service of a politics of truth. At the same time, Constant did not renounce completely to their dream of bringing certainty into politics. As this double-move shows, it is not clear to what extent Constant succeeded in distancing himself from this tradition of political rationalism in order to establish what I call a rationalist liberalism. This problematic intellectual lineage not only challenges received interpretations of Constant's liberalism either in terms of 'scepticism' or 'pluralism.' It should also invite us to reconsider the widespread idea according to which the French liberal tradition had a common and exclusive source in Montesquieu.

Key Enlightenment minds are often juxtaposed with their iconic foes, religious conservatives. When discussing the subject of women's rights, however, this comparison creates a false impression that Enlightenment male thinkers held ideas very much opposed to a dogmatic institution such as the Catholic Church. Ironically, and damaging to their legacy of prejudice-free rationalism, nearly all of the philosophes, many of whom were "freethinking" atheists, viewed woman's intellectual nature and societal purpose through a prejudice-tainted glass, not unlike the most conservative establishments of their time. Indeed, when it came to the perception of women, the philosophes had less in common with a virulently secular feminist such as Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, than they did with modern conservative Christians who believe women should be treated more fairly, but still cling to gender stereotypes.

Alors que le «peuple» réclame qu’on  l’entende,  il  n’est  pas inutile de faire  un  détour  par  la  constitution  de 1793. A minima la souveraineté est le pouvoir de faire les lois, de les défendre et de se faire justice. Reste à définir ce que peut être «le peuple».

Publié dans les Tribunes de l'Hétairie, n° 23, 6 février 2019

During Spain’s colonization of the Americas and its striving to “civilize” peoples considered barbarians, the idea of a world in which a single way of life was compulsory emerged for the first time. By making European cultural norms a requirement for Christianization, José de Acosta, a 16th century Spanish Jesuit historian and philosopher, diluted religion into civilization and framed the colonial enterprise as a clash between civilization and barbarism, a relationship necessarily mediated by technology. Acosta is a precursor of Enlightenment thinkers (Smith, Gibbon) for whom European technology guaranteed self-preservation and hegemony in a world comprised of nations they still considered barbarian. Even when there were critics of this will to transform the world into a place suited for a European way of life (Herder), or those who saw this transformation not as self-preservation but as an extension of benefits that ought to be universal (Condorcet), uneven development and climate change are the salient consequences of this history dating back to the 16th century.

The aim of the research is to give a contribution and an insight on the complex field of stakeholder involvement in transport planning, by analysing the role of decision-support methods and agent-based modelling in guiding a participation process.
The approach is twofold: from one side it is about to deeply understand the process of making a collective decision, by studying how the interaction among different actors can lead to a convergence of opinions towards a shared collective decision. From the other side, it is based on finding appropriate decision-support methods to help the group decision-making process.
Agent-based modelling and simulations have been used, in order to guide real participation processes and predict the results of an interaction process, and group multi criteria decision-making methods, to help taking consistent decisions based on several judgment criteria. The results of the research should help decision-makers and practitioners in dealing with multiple stakeholders and complex decisions and guiding the participation process.

Sadece çifte devrimler çağı olarak adlandırılacak dönem itibari ile değil kadının rolü dünya siyaset tarihinde itici bir güç olarak yer tutmaktadır. Çifte Devrimlerin bir yüzü olan Fransız Devrimi ile birlikte kadın ve modernizm ilişkisi gündeme gelecektir. Ne var ki Fransız Devrimi'nin genel izahı için erkekler daha kapsayıcı bir güç olarak oynasa da, XIV. Louis döneminden beri gözlemlenen kadın hareketleri Devrim'in hem öncesi hem sonrasında büyük önem taşımaktadır.

Como último recurso, dado que Mirabeau, miembro de ese Comité de los Cinco *…+ había propuesto que la Declaración se redactara después de la Constitución, se decidió redactarla y votarla en Asamblea general artículo por artículo, a partir de un proyecto que serviría como guía" Fauré, C. (1995) Las declaraciones de los derechos del hombre de 1789, México DF, Fondo de Cultura Económica, pág. 15.

Can collectives be wise? The thesis that they can has recently received a lot of attention. It has been argued that, in many judgmental or decision-making tasks, suitably organized groups can outperform their individual members. In this paper, I discuss the lessons we can learn about collective wisdom from the emerging theory of judgment aggregation, as distinct from the literature on Condorcet’s jury theorem.
Preprint: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/list/pdf-files/CollectiveWisdom19Oct.pdf

L’historiographie récente montre que l’idée d’utilité des sciences est devenue un topos des discours scientifiques depuis la Renaissance, tant lors d’interventions orales que dans les publications . La notion de l’utilité, utilitas, était associée à l’idée de l’intérêt public, très éloignée d’un simple besoin matériel ou d’une pure recherche de l’intérêt individuel . Tout en héritant de cette tradition, le XVIIIe siècle voit cependant apparaître des discours nouveaux dans les publications de l’Académie royale des sciences de Paris, fondée en 1666 et réorganisée en 1699. Sa publication produit une forme nouvelle de discours s’adressant au public avec tout le poids de la légitimité scientifique. L’idée d’« utilité » tient une grande place dans les discussions académiques comme justification des activités savantes.
La présente contribution se penche sur l’étude de deux cas, Fontenelle et Condorcet, tous deux secrétaires perpétuels, l’un au début, l’autre à la fin du XVIIIe siècle. De l’un à l’autre, on peut suivre un certain déplacement de l’idéal des travaux savants et de la forme d’organisation qu’ils souhaitaient pour l’activité scientifique, depuis l’image d’un cercle sous la protection du monarque, qui est consacrée aux sciences expérimentales chez Fontenelle, vers un centre de theories, de calcul, et de renseignements qui a pour objectif de rationaliser l’action gouvernementale chez Condorcet.

Notre intérêt pour une  l'amitié intellectuelle entre Condorcet et Sieyès repose sur le souci de mesurer l'ampleur de leur débat philosophique investi dans la politique, et des divergences qui s'y expriment, sans a priori sur leurs qualités intellectuelles respectives  Plus largement,  il a pour origine notre  publication  des principaux manuscrits philosophiques de Sieyès au sein d’une édition de ses manuscrits en deux volumes sous la responsabilité de Christine Fauré chez Champion.

This paper considers the contribution positive political theory has made to the resolution of “Hobbes’ Problem”—the problem of describing the nature of artificial persons, such as states. This problem plays a central role in both empirical and normative work in political science. Several areas of positive political theory, most notably social choice theory, have shed light on Hobbes’ Problem, and the results have been generally negative. That is to say, they have suggested that the conditions necessary to generate an artificial collective agent out of the individual agents comprising it may be impossible to satisfy,
at least if this is done in a nontrivial way. While efforts to establish the possibility of a collective agent continue—notably in recent work by Christian List and Philip Pettit—the primary accomplishment of positive political theory has been to raise the question of whether Hobbes’ Problem can be solved at all.

The paper presents a synthetic survey of the most relevant Enlightment contributions on the topic of freedom of expression. I focus on the main arguments elaborated by a selection of authors -Condorcet, Filangieri, Fichte -in some of their works, where freedom of expression is presented as a natural right which, as such, ought to be recognized and legally protected by political authorities: a right that, as it is known, has two dimensions, being a negative liberty, from preventions and restrictions, and, at the same time, a faculty potentially threatening another's rights and interests. Its primary form of protection is the abolition of State censorship of the press and the jurisdictional organization of a repressive control over its abuses.

“We may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election.” The words with which Judge Stevens expressed his dissent from the US Supreme Court Sentence, which effectively decided the election of President George W. Bush in 2000, sanctions the role of uncertainty in our political life. It’s not just that in some cases it may be difficult to determine the winner of an election. As the participants in the dialogue of this book come to realize, reflecting on the events of those days, the uncertainty affects all aspects of our electoral practices, beginning with the most basic questions: What is a vote? How do we count votes? And do votes really count?

Artículo para la publicación extremeña Paradoxa sobre la propuesta educativa de Sophie de Grouchy y Nicolás de Condorcet, de inspiración republicana y con una evidente vocación igualitaria en lo que respecta a la situación de las mujeres y su acceso a la escuela.

This article focuses on the alleged direct acquaintanceship between Condorcet and Adam Smith. Mistaken infor-mation about this issue was repeated many times in the literature of the late 1800s and 1900s. It is presumed that they met in France, during Smith’s journey there, chez Sophie de Grouchy. I will attempt to show that the meeting be-tween the two authors was not in fact arranged by Sophie de Grouchy, Condorcet’s wife, even though she was very interested in Smithian theories, especially about the category of “sympathy”, as confirmed by her French translation of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. My purpose is to demonstrate that Madame de Condorcet did never meet Smith and, as a result, she could not have introduced Condorcet to Smith. A greater degree of probability can be attributed to the version that indicates Turgot as the intermediary between Condorcet and Smith. In my opinion, not even this hypothesis is totally convincing, because neither Smith nor Condorcet ever talk about their meeting. Moreover, there is no evidence of correspondence between them.

La distinction entre persuader et convaincre a souvent servi à disqualifier les passions soulevées par l'éloquence antique, qui aurait conduit les assemblées populaires à céder au charme des démagogues. À l'inverse, nous disent Condorcet et Perelman, la publicité de débats parlementaires entre représentants élus garantirait le triomphe d'arguments évalués in fine par le jugement « froids et sévères » de citoyens élevés au rang d'« auditoire universel ». Avec l'avènement de la publicité, le recours aux passions n'a pas pour autant disparu de l'horizon des gouvernements représentatifs. Entre l'espace public des Lumières et la propagande des démocraties de masse, tel que les a décrits Habermas, la Révolution française a donné voix à des formes mixtes de rhétorique qui déjouent les catégories traditionnelles de la persuasion et de la conviction, du délibératif et de l'épidictique, pour laisser libre cours à l'usage stratégique de la publicité, par lequel Condorcet et Barère parvinrent à gagner l'assentiment de la Législative et de la Convention.

The publicity of parliamentary debates: a triumph for argumentation? Summary: The distinction between persuasion and conviction has often been used to disqualify the passions stirred up by ancient eloquence, which would have led popular assemblies to fall upon the spell of demagogues. On the contrary, according to Condorcet and Perelman, the publicity of parliamentary debates among elected representatives would guarantee the triumph of arguments weighted in fine by the " cold and severe " judgement of citizens elevated to the rank of " universal audience ". Between the public space of Enlightenment and the propaganda of mass democracies, as described by Habermas, the French Revolution gave voice to mixed forms of rhetoric that challenged the traditional categories of persuasion and conviction, deliberative and epideictic, giving room to strategic uses of publicity, with which Condorcet and Barère won the assent of the Legislative and of the Convention.

La serie de Declaraciones de Derechos de fines de Siglo XVIII,
constituyen un hito fundante de la lógica política de la sociedad
moderna al organizar las categorías y el léxico propios de la
modernidad política. Para interrogarlas, el presente trabajo se
propone revisar un cuerpo de iniciales consideraciones críticas
realizadas por pensadores conservadores (Burke, de Maistre),
utilitaristas (Bentham) y feministas avant la lettre (Condorcet,
Wollstronecraft, de Gouges). De la puesta en conjunto de estas críticas
surge un rasgo central de aquellos modernos derechos: su
abstracción. Pero cada crítica diagnosticará de forma divergente el
riesgo de tal abstracción (ya sea moral y políticamente endeble,
fuente de inestabilidad o coartada para una exclusión) y le opondrá
una forma particular de política de lo concreto: la certeza de la
historia y la tradición, la imprevisibilidad del cálculo político de la
utilidad, o una obligada ampliación a la situación particular de la
mujer oprimida.

En el presente trabajo, sin ánimo y sin posibilidad de ser exhaustivos, pretendemos hacer un recorrido que nos permita observar lo que ha significado, en diferentes contextos históricos, ese concepto de educación íntimamente vinculado a la independencia de la “voz de la razón”. Por tal independencia entendemos, de una manera muy amplia, la capacidad crítica que nos faculta como seres humanos lo suficientemente libres como para, si fuera menester (y casi siempre lo es), ser capaces de construir de forma autónoma juicios propios contra el peso inercial de la tradición y contra la fuerza de los consensos sociales que estructuran el sentido común de nuestra época. Podremos localizar esa “tensión ilustrada” a lo largo de la historia del pensamiento occidental, desde Platón a Condorcet, desde Kant a Paulo Freire. En ese sentido, y para concluir, será conveniente evaluar cuál es el papel que está adoptando el proceso educativo en una era –la contemporánea– donde los procesos de intensa mercantilización también han terminado permeando todas las dimensiones del conocimiento.

This article analyzes the approach of two philosophers of the Enlightenment: Immanuel Kant (1724/1804) and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (1743/1794). The main question of this paper is: If one is not born a person, but becomes a person, what is the place of history in human education before the autonomy of school discipline? We examine the texts produced the two thinkers between 1791 and 1803, which announce the visions on man, life, philosophy of history, empirical history, and human education with the purpose of discussing the presence of history as teachable knowledge in the eighteenth century. The text also aims to contribute to the knowledge of the uses of history in human formation in a long term perspective.

Condorcet’s voting paradox shows that pairwise majority voting may lead to cyclical majority preferences. In a famous paper, Sen (1966) identified a general condition on a profile of individual preference orderings, called triplewise value-restriction, which is sufficient for the avoidance of such cycles. This note aims to make Sen’s result easily accessible. We provide an elementary proof of Sen's possibility theorem and a simple reformulation of Sen’s condition. We discuss how Sen’s condition is logically related to a number of precursors. Finally, we state a necessary and sufficient condition for the avoidance of cycles, and suggest that, although there is still some logical space between that condition and Sen’s sufficient condition, Sen’s condition cannot be further generalized in an appealing way.
Preprint: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/LIST/PDF-files/value-restriction.pdf

The Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT), which provides a justification for democracy, is based on voters who are imperfectly informed insofar as they know the correct policy with a probability of less than one but greater than one-half. We reassess the consequences of the CJT for democracy when extension of the franchise adds equal numbers of non-distinguishable informed and uninformed voters to the collective decision making group. Uninformed voters vote correctly with probability one-half. We show that adding equal numbers of informed and uninformed voters maintains the CJT conclusion that enlarging the group of decision makers increases the likelihood of a correct collective decision.

Ik zal in deze inleiding deze vraag, mits enkele nuanceringen, met ja beantwoorden. Omdat ik er vanuit ga dat er over democratie en verlichting geen consensus bestaat, zelfs niet bij de gerespecteerde panelleden van vandaag, zal mijn argumentatie omstandig zijn. Ik zal daarbij een heel eind terug gaan in de tijd vooraleer ik effectief over N-VA en haar project an sich zal spreken.

Social choice literature proposes several decision processes to achieve a social compromise. We know that different procedures may yield different solutions. However, no study has been done to estimate the probability that they simultaneously pick the same outcome. We partially answer this question for three-candidate elections. Let P U be the probability that almost all the voting rules: the Condorcet procedures, the scoring rules and the runoff methods select simultaneously the same winner. We provide new techniques for the computation of the occurrence of voting outcomes when the number of voters approaches infinity and each voter selects independently a linear preference order on the candidates according to a uniform probability distribution. With these assumptions, the exact value of P U turns out to be 0.50116. q 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved. JEL classification: D71 0304-4068r00r$ -see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved. Ž . PII: S 0 3 0 4 -4 0 6 8 9 9 0 0 0 1 2 -9 ( ) V. Merlin et al.

Constitutional democracies have allowed for patterns of accumulation of wealth at the top, leading to acute inequality and dangerous oligarchization of power. Moreover, the theoretical tools that liberal constitutionalism offers are inadequate to recognize systemic corruption and structural forms of domination that are enabled by law or its absence. As an alternative, the article proposes a material methodological approach to the study of constitutions. In the first section, it offers a critical analysis of the intellectual foundations of liberal constitutionalism, engaging with the right to property, political representation, and separation of powers. In the second section, it presents the intellectual foundations of plebeian constitutionalism in the works of Machiavelli, Condorcet, and Marx. Finally, it proposes a material approach to assessing constitutions, identifying the shortcomings of contemporary legal frameworks to materialize social rights, as well as new avenues for institutional anti-oligarchic innovation.

RESUMO. O artigo discute as contribuições de Condorcet (1743-1794) sobre a educação pública. Esse intelectual participou da Revolução Francesa e colaborou para estabelecer as bases doutrinárias do sistema educativo burguês e definir o projeto educativo liberal republicano, baseado nos postulados teóricos e ideológicos da Ilustração e dos filósofos iluministas que influenciaram o pensamento pedagógico contemporâneo. Para tanto, analisam-se várias fontes documentais escritas por Condorcet. Inicialmente, o Relatório e Projeto de Decreto sobre a Organização Geral da Instrução Pública, apresentado à Assembléia Nacional, em nome do Comitê de Instrução Pública (1792). Além desse texto, também são analisados outros documentos breves, em que o autor insiste na necessidade de se instaurar a instrução pública na República, tais como: a) Sobre as Assembléias Provinciais (1788); b) Postscriptum (1788); c) o discurso pronunciado à Assembléia Nacional em nome da Academia das Ciências (1790); d) Apresentação Geral da Biblioteca do Homem Público (1790); e) Sobre a Necessidade da Instrução Pública . Nas fontes analisadas, observa-se a insistência na formação moral do homem e da mulher, percebida como uma união radical entre a razão e a moral vivenciada, alicerçada no princípio da autonomia e independência absoluta de qualquer influência, seja religiosa ou do poder político. Nos escritos, propõe-se que todos os cidadãos tenham acesso a uma instrução gratuita em todos os níveis, com o intuito de se oferecer formação física, intelectual e moral para ambos os sexos.

Les éloges prononcés à l’Académie royale des sciences fournissent des éléments précieux pour comprendre son fonctionnement à la  n de l’Ancien Régime. En e et, rédigés et lus publiquement par le Secrétaire perpétuel, porte-parole de l’institution, les éloges sont l’occasion de mettre en valeur le rôle des savants dans la société. Par conséquent, une lecture croisée de certains passages des éloges qu’on doit au marquis de Condorcet, le dernier Secrétaire, et de sources qui docu- mentent l’histoire sociale de l’Académie donne des résultats intéressants. Elle permet de constater que dans les éloges, le secrétaire signale et regrette la faible prise en compte des sciences dans l’appareil administratif, et va jusqu’à proposer un mode collectif du travail savant, sous forme de commissions d’experts, qui permettrait de mieux répondre aux besoins émanant de la société. Mais d’un autre côté, ce sont les pratiques traditionnelles de l’Académie elles-mêmes qui empêchent une telle mobilisation des Académiciens en tant qu’experts scienti-  ques, en particulier en raison d’une interdiction d’oeuvrer à des disciplines qui ne sont pas inscrites dans le Règlement. L’enquête montre en n, sur cette volonté de donner à l’expertise scienti que des académiciens une place et une légitimité institutionnelles, une convergence entre l’idéal décrit par Condorcet et une série d’essais contemporains de réforme de l’Académie autour de l’an 1785.

The history of political theory finds itself vulnerable to the spectre of redundancy, which always seems to overshadow philosophers who unfortunately find themselves in historical contexts prior to the 20th century. Using contemporary conceptions of liberty as a foundation from which to provide an analysis, Anna Spieser seeks to rescue the French Enlightenment’s political theorist Condorcet from precisely this threat. Drawing upon Isaiah Berlin’s cardinal work on the twofold concept of freedom, this article aims at and succeeds in drawing meaningful connections between, on the one hand, philosophers such as Rousseau and Condorcet, and on the other hand, contemporary political theory so as to preserve the significance of these theorists beyond the scope of
their time.