Condorcet on Civilizational Progress, and its limits

It’s fair to say that interest in Condorcet is limited to aficionados that can be divided in a small number of (partially overlapping) groups: formal philosophers and social choice theorists who can legitimately claim him as their founder, and some of whom continue to develop the Jury theorem as a live program. (As I noted he could also play a role in population ethics.) Democratic theorists who treat him as epistemic defender of mass democracy and/or a key contributor to (majoritarian) democratic republicanism. And, third, moral egalitarians who admire his advocacy of equal rights, including women and religious minorities, as well as his criticism of slavery. (I return to the third below.)

Below I want to explore some of the complications with his moral egalitarianism. But it’s worth noting that so many of Condorcet’s ideas about progress and the nature of the welfare state (as an instrument of social insurance and deliverer of security) have become the oxygen of the air we breathe, that it is easy to miss his historical significance. (He also embraces a proto-difference principle.) I suspect this historical amnesia about Condorcet is partially the effect of the general loss in faith in progress and partially the effect of the fact that from the vantage point of contemporary cleavages his views are mostly banal (and taken as true).*

But I suspect the hesitation to really explore Condorcet’s views also is due to a kind of discomfort. Despite his very strong defense of sex equality his writings are shaped by a strain of sexism about women’s intellectual capacities (despite familiarity with the works of Du Châtelet and having partnered with the non-trivially brilliant Sophie Grouchy ).

A few years ago Liam Kofi Bright recommended (recall) Louis Sala-Molins Dark Side of the Light: Slavery and the French Enlightenment. The material in this book is not wholly new if you are familiar with C.R.L. James’ The Black Jacobins, which emphasizes the way the Girondins (the political movement Condorcet belonged to) are knee deep in profiting from slavery. Even so Sala-Molins documents in great detail how, not unlike J.S. Mill, Condorcet, when confronted by the political and financial power of slaveholding interests, proposes means of abolitionism that would end up putting more money in the hands of slavers. (Condorcet himself did not benefit financially from slavery; by contrast Mill did benefit directly from empire.)

As regular readers know, I am disinclined toward moralism about political agents when confronted with thoroughly awful alternative choices. It’s pretty clear that Condorcet and Mill thought they were pursuing what they viewed as the least evil political agendas. But that’s of course not the end of the matter.

For, in addition, Sala-Molins shows that in addition to his views on property rights, Condorcet’s gradualism in abolitionism is rooted in his economic and anthropological views (again anticipating Mill) on perfectibility that Africans needed time and education to be ready for full liberty. And so Condorcet found ways to justify his gradualist approach on high minded principles that are thoroughly unconvincing, and, as Sala-Molins suggest, smack of moral hypocrisy and worse. (Obviously, there are reactionaries today that would maintain the contrary.) As Sala-Molins shows, not unlike Hume, Condorcet lays the intellectual foundations for European civilization missions (see especially his second chapter). This I explore more in depth below.

As an important aside, some readers may be tempted here by what I (recall) call 'modern historicism. Modern historicism is constituted by three claims: first, our minds are "socially conditioned." Second, while we, too, will make socially conditioned moral mistakes, we are the products of moral progress or "Enlightenment." Third, some mechanism of historical change, even improvement, is required. In practice, modern historicism is trotted out to excuse the ‘mistakes’ of the past and to re-affirm our (moral and intellectual) superiority. 

For, usually, many of the moral ‘mistakes’ of the past were already long contested. Sara-Molins uses Las Casas to great effect to illustrate this. Even Grotius noted that the civilizational mission argument had been debunked long ago (although (recall) he misrepresents Plutarch in doing so):

Plutarch long since calleth it πρόϕασιν πλεονεξίας ημερώσαι τὰ βαρβαρικά, to wit, a wicked desire of that which is another’s, to pretend this color to himself that he may tame the barbarians. And now also that color of bringing the gentiles against their will to a more civil kind of behavior, which the Grecians in times past and Alexander used, is thought wicked and impious of all divines, but specially the Spaniards.--Hugo Grotius The Free Sea (Hakluyt trans.). Liberty Fund, 1609, chapter 2, pp. 15-16.

Critics of Condorcet often try to turn him into a partisan of cold rationality (and thereby condemn the whole Enlightenment and party of progress). As Emma Rothschild has rightly noted this is really incorrect: Condorcet recognized the clash of values and himself emphasized the significance of and respect for individual diversity in a way that anticipates Constant.

I take this as common ground.

However, there is another troubling argument in Condorcet that I don’t recall Sala-Molins picking up on, although I have not worked my way through his corpus so he may well have published on it. It’s interesting because, as it happens, Condorcet is not so optimistic that he thinks the civilizational mission of Enlightenment will succeed with all peoples. I have in mind a theme lodged in the closing argument of (1794) Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain) or Sketch of an historical view of the progress of the human mind. (The original translation, which is on libertyfund, is Outlines of an historical view of the progress of the human mind, and the page-numbers are to this edition.) This theme also puts pressure on some of the claims Rothschild makes on behalf of Condorcet.

At the start of the tenth and final epoch/chapter he asks rhetorically, “Will not every nation one day arrive at the state of civilization attained by those people who are most enlightened, most free, most exempt from prejudices, as the French, for instance, and the Anglo-Americans?” (pp. 251-2; Here’s the French.) And while one expects the answer to be ‘yes,’ it turns out to be ‘no.’ Condorcet’s underlying argument is not racist in character, but what we may call ‘cultural.’

Let me explain. Condorcet uses a contrast between savages (or a rude/uncultivated society) and civilized peoples throughout stadial analysis of the Sketch. Not unlike in Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith, in Condorcet this contrast is fundamentally about being law-governed or not; being law-governed involves a range of legal, economic, political, and cultural institutions that can vary (often as a linked package [this is rather important in Condorcet]) depending on local circumstances and path dependent features of development. Crucially, for Condorcet there is no racial or ethnic reason why a people cannot become civilized (which he explicitly thinks comes “in degrees” (first epoch)). One distinctive feature of Condorcet’s account is that for him civilization also produces social/collective intelligence (in solving social problems).**

The first hint of trouble occurs in the following passage:

European nations, co-operating with the slow but certain effects of the progress of their colonies, will not shortly produce the independence of the entire new world; and that then, European population, lending its aid, will sail to civilize or cause to disappear, even without conquest, those savage nations still occupying there immense tracts of country? p. 254 (Here’s the French)

Now, first, Condorcet is not naive about existing European colonists. These exist for plunder and profit, and support mercantilism at home: “Run through the history of our projects and establishments in Africa or in Asia, and you will see our monopolies, our treachery, our sanguinary contempt for men of a different complexion or different creed, and the proselyting fury or the intrigues of our priests, destroying that sentiment of respect and benevolence which the superiority of our information and the advantages of our commerce had at first obtained.” (pp. 254-5) He is clearly familiar with the kind of arguments we find in Smith and Cugoano.

But he thinks these bad colonists will be replaced by civilizing, enlightening (European) colonists who will bring trade and knowledge: “But the period is doubtless approaching, when, no longer exhibiting to the view of these people corruptors only or tyrants, we shall become to them instruments of benefit, and the generous champions of their redemption from bondage.” (p. 255) And “those settlements of robbers will then become colonies of citizens, by whom will be planted in Africa and Asia the principles and example of the freedom, reason, and illumination of Europe.” (256) He expects the breakup of European monopolies, and thinks the introduction of sugar cane in Africa will introduce a virtuous cycle of development and growth. This will also alter the attitudes among Europeans: “Then will the inhabitants of the European quarter of the world, satisfied with an unrestricted commerce, too enlightened as to their own rights to sport with the rights of others, respect that independence which they have hitherto violated with such audacity.” (p. 256)

Second, as the passage from p. 254 suggests, Condorcet foresees two outcomes of the purportedly pacific European civilization process: the locals will also become civilized or they will be made to vanish [disparoitre, which is archaic version of disparaître.] And, in fact, he explicitly returns to this option below when he describes the process of civilization:

[W]hile a third will exhibit either tribes nearly savage, excluded from the benefits of superior civilization by the severity of their climate, which deters those who might otherwise be disposed to communicate these benefits from making the attempt; or else conquering hordes, knowing no law but force, no trade but robbery. The advances of these two last classes will be more slow, and accompanied with more frequent storms; it may even happen that, reduced in numbers in proportion as they see themselves repelled by civilized nations, they will in the end wholly disappear, or their scanty remains become blended with their neighbours. (p. 257)

Lurking here is the thought that civilization also furnishes superiority of arms. (This was also Smith’s view.) But unlike Smith, and like Hume, Condorcet also seems to foresee the violent extension of civilization. So much so that the un-civilized will be —and this is the implication of Condorcet’s analysis — reduced in the means of subsistence, deprived as they are of their arable lands, and so (through famine) be “reduced in numbers” such that they cannot maintain themselves as a people. They will be forced to die or intermarry into civilized society (“their scanty remains become blended with their neighbours.”)

Unlike Hume, who really is rather explicit about the violent means to expand civilization (and justifies it in consequentialist fashion), Condorcet describes all of this euphemistically and invokes historical necessity (see p. 257-8: “inevitable consequence.”) To the best of my knowledge Condorcet was unfamiliar with Herder, and so he does not see the involuntary disappearance of particular ‘backward’ ways of life as a loss. Condorcet was familiar with Smith, and, as Maureen Harkin (2005) emphasized, Smith did think civilizational progress also involved genuine, lamentable loss (including the loss of virtues that may be more likely cultivated in societies deemed rude). But the great, humane Condorcet does not treat social or collective diversity as something worth cherishing.

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*Professional philosophers may also find his lack of interest in developing very fine-grained arguments also off-putting. But he shares this feature with other philosophes, who wrote for a learned public, and it hasn’t stopped us from developing a scholarly industry on, say, Rousseau.

**There is no crisp passage that states this, but here is a paragraph from the eight epoch/chapter: “In fine, we are now come to that point of civilization, at which the people derive a profit from intellectual knowledge, not only by the services it reaps from men uncommonly instructed, but by means of having made of intellectual knowledge a sort of patrimony, and employing it directly and in its proper form to resist error, to anticipate or supply their wants, to relieve themselves from the ills of life, or take off the poignancy of these ills by the intervention of additional pleasure.”