Biology Reference
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the example I have chosen is the Marquis de Condorcet's influential
Esquisse
d'un Tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain
(“Sketch for a historical
picture of the progress of the human mind”). Because this work appeared
in 1795, just as the Enlightenment was about to give way to various descen-
dent movements in post-revolutionary France, its compact narrative pro-
vides a helpful retrospective on this secularizing pattern. By highlighting its
employment of a narrative structure similar to that found in Bacon's
Work s
,
I will show that it applied to society at large a displaced version of a narrative
that already featured scientific actors as history's protagonists. This Enlight-
enment transposition, in other words, while designed to craft a vision for
the renewal of European civilization, imitated the millenarian features
of the Baconian model. Condorcet's
Esquisse
continued to make the scien-
tific revelations of the present the interpretive center from which to compre-
hend the entire course of history.
In the next stage of evolutionism's evolution, the era of classical positiv-
ism in the first half of the nineteenth century, this view of history began to
be theorized, to be treated as a form of scientific knowledge. Condorcet had
only claimed that the historical plan of progress had come clear in the prog-
ress of science; Henri de Saint-Simon took this one step further by claim-
ing that he had discovered a scientific explanation of history's scientific
progression. This notion was subsequently systematized and popularized
by his onetime disciple, Auguste Comte, who also proposed to substitute
positive science for the Catholic worldview that the revolution had torn
down. Such scientistic aspirations show positivist philosophy to be a ver-
sion of evolutionism, and it is certainly not an extinct variety. (If we have
forgotten Saint-Simon and Comte for the most part, this is only because of
the greater success that Karl Marx's similar philosophy came to enjoy.) But
this is not the category of evolutionism that was illustrated in the opening
pages of this chapter. In Comte's vision of the evolution of knowledge, each
individual academic field was destined to achieve its final positive state on
its own terms. The end of the process he envisioned was not a world in
which natural science would subsume all other fields, but a world in which
every field would become a positive science in its own right. All sciences
would remain equal, each performing its own function within a natural
division of labor. But Comte's own field of sociology, since it was the posi-
tive science of history, was clearly (in an Orwellian sense) more equal than
others. Because it took command of historical knowledge, it was the master
science, the field that was to usher in a new European civilization. For this
reason, positivism had little rhetorical value as a platform for establishing
