Condorcet

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The man who saw furthest into our future wrote from a hiding place, listening for soldiers on the stairs.

That detail stopped me cold when I first encountered it. Not the philosophy — I'll get to the philosophy — but the circumstance. Condorcet spent the last productive months of his life composing a systematic account of human intellectual progress while the government he had helped design was hunting him. The revolution he had theorized was executing his friends. And from that hiding place, on the Street of the Gravediggers, he wrote the most ambitious case for human perfectibility that anyone had ever attempted.

I cannot claim that kind of courage. But I recognize the shape of the problem. You are trying to think clearly about the future while the ground