Marquis de Condorcet

Condorcet died on the floor of a jail cell in Bourg-la-Reine in March 1794, arrested—so the story goes—because a fugitive aristocrat who orders twelve eggs for an omelette betrays his class. The manuscript he had been writing in hiding, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, was smuggled out by his wife Sophie de Condorcet and published posthumously in 1795. In it, Condorcet divided human intellectual history into nine epochs—each defined by a transformation in the species' capacity to understand and improve its condition—and projected a tenth epoch in which the perfectibility of the human understanding would be realized at last through universal education and the removal of the concentrated knowledge that functions as intellectual tyranny. He was also a mathematician of collective decision-making: his 1785 Essai gave us both the jury theorem—now literally running inside modern AI ensemble systems—and the Condorcet paradox, which remains the deepest mathematical constraint on value alignment. He