Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
of illegitimate government and priestcraft—would become visible. “Man is
born free; and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau famously wrote, and if
society was ever to be brought into conformity with humanity's true nature,
it was necessary first to recognize the conditions of its bondage.
7
But the
phase of the Enlightenment with which he is associated was dominated by a
rhetoric of critique rather than a rhetoric of world-building.
In his effort to illuminate the pessimistic tendencies of the earlier
phi-
losophes
, Henry Vyverberg has also tended to soften Condorcet's progressive
philosophy, calling it a “doctrine of regeneration” that “includes a Rous-
seauistic protest against the denaturing of man and demands the reestab-
lishment and extension of man's natural faculties.” Condorcet certainly
participated in this protest, but he did not hold that progress occurs, as
Vyverberg asserts, only as people “break free from institutional restraints.”
8
This is evident in Condorcet's many efforts to build new social institutions.
Most notable in this campaign was his
Bibliothèque de l'homme public
(179 0),
a series of five memoirs written during the revolution as a blueprint for
erecting a state system of public education to replace that of the Catholic
Church.
9
Work of this kind seemed to call for a visionary historical frame-
work, and so even as he joined the prophetic chorus of the older
philosophes
in denouncing the evils of the monarchy and the church, he was also critical
of their inability or unwillingness to strategize a better world. Condorcet
thus shunned Montesquieu's influential and pessimistic history,
Considéra-
tions sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence
(
Considerations
on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans
) (1734), arguing
that it would have been of more use if it had been less preoccupied with
“finding the reasons for that which is than with seeking that which ought to
be.”
10
The
Esquisse
appears to have been inspired by Condorcet's recognition
that the crafting of a doctrine of historical progress was a necessary step
toward building a new France.
The
Esquisse
, though the work of an outcast Girondist, soon became the
official philosophical manifesto of post-Thermidorian reconstruction and
was distributed throughout France by the National Convention—perhaps
as penance for having persecuted a sainted author who was destined for
symbolic burial (his remains having been lost) in France's Panthéon along
with Rousseau and Voltaire. The enduring influence of his new apocalypse
is perhaps best shown by what it anticipates, namely the utopian turn that
would gain prominence in various secular ideologies of the next century—
the worldviews of the ideologues, Saint-Simonians, positivists, Marxists,
and finally, that of the rhetorical Darwinists. These systems of thought
