Keith Michael Baker

Condorcet, from natural philosophy to social mathematics

the donor, the recipient, and the doctors involved, the definitions of death, the uncertainty of recently evolved experimental techniques, and the problem of availability of organs and dialysis machines. Of a more fundamental nature are the scientific, social and religious repercussions and interactions which the authors suggest may lead to basic changes in attitudes to health and disease, life and death. Their book, which is very well written and fully documented, with a useful bibliography, is an important contribution and introduction to an area of medicine which is increasing in dimensions, dilemmas, complexities and social repercussions. It will be read widely by all those concerned with transplantation and dialysis, but the historian of medicine, who should preserve his contact with the modern medicine, must also know of its existence.

Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth‐Century France*

When Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes in 1791 prompted open calls for a republic in revolutionary France, they came from two quite distinct directions. One is best represented by Condorcet and Tom Paine, who formed a little “society of republicans” determined to “enlighten minds regarding that republicanism which is made an object of calumny because it is not known, and the uselessness, vices and abuses of royalty which prejudice is determined to defend even when they are known.”1 This republicanism was couched in the language of rights, reason, and representation; it deployed the rationalist discourse of modernity and social progress, the individualist discourse of civil society. For Condorcet and Paine, the progress of modern society had quite simply rendered kingship outmoded and dangerous, a source of contingency and disorder in a progressively more rational social order. It was time to rethink the exercise of executive power in order to discover some more intelligent and less arbitrary method of delegating executive power within a representative constitution. Paine spoke for them both when he insisted, on July 16, 1791, that “I do not understand by republicanism that which bears the name in Holland or some Italian states. I mean simply a government by representation; a government founded on the principles of the Declaration of Rights.”2 He expressed their common view, too, a few months later in the second part of his Rights of Man, when he mobilized the claims of modern society against outmoded and irrational political forms. In this analysis, the logic of republicanism derived from the principles of that “representative system [which] takes society and civilization for its basis; nature, reason, and experience for its guide.”3 This was the republicanism of the moderns.

On Condorcet's “Sketch”

Dædalus Summer 2004 Marie-Jean-Antoine Nicolas Caritat de Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind– perhaps the most influential formulation of the idea of progress ever written –was 1⁄2rst published in 1795, a year after its author’s death. Conceived as an introduction to a much more comprehensive work, Condorcet’s essay, hastily written while he was in hiding from his Jacobin enemies, was in part an ironic by-product of the author’s political defeat. In the Sketch Condorcet consoled himself with the conviction that expanding knowledge in the natural and social sciences would lead to an ever more just world of individual freedom, material affluence, and moral compassion. A year later Louis de Bonald published one of the earliest responses, a vehement critique that denounced the “apocalypse of this new gospel.” For this mighty theorist of the Counter-Revolution, Condorcet’s work epitomized everything that was wrong about the faith of godless men in secular progress. By Bonald’s account:

Political languages of the French Revolution

Although they were preceded by several decades of political contestation, the debates of the French Revolution can reasonably be said to have begun on 5 July 1788, when Louis XVI agreed to summon the Estates General after a lapse of almost two centuries. Declaring the royal archives inadequate to determine how that body had once been convened, the king invited his subjects to investigate the precedents for calling an assembly that would be ‘truly national, both in its composition and in its results’ (Baker 1987b, pp. 143–5). This was a remarkable pronouncement in what was still thought to be an absolute monarchy, since it invited public enquiry not only into the entire history of the realm but also the ultimate definition of the ‘truly national’. No earlier constitutional crisis in France had unleashed a response comparable in force and magnitude to the torrent of political argument that was now to sweep the country. Competing discourses of the Old Regime Participants in this debate could draw upon a variety of discourses forged in the course of several decades of political contestation. A discourse of justice drew on the conceptual resources of a French constitutional tradition dramatically revived and reworked by defenders of the parlements in opposition to the royal ‘despotism’ which was increasingly their target after 1750. Juxtaposing the lawful (justice) with the arbitrary (will), it upheld the principles of a society comprised of orders and Estates, governed according to regular legal forms, secured by magistrates exercising their functions of judicial review and registration of laws in the parlements .

In Memoriam: François Furet*

I believe that François first came to the University of Chicago to give a lecture in 1979, shortly after the publication of his key work, Penser la Révolution française. He was at the height of his intellectual powers, nor did they diminish before his sudden death, which has shocked us all so terribly. He returned to the university for a quarter as a visiting professor in the department of history in 1981, and again in 1983 and 1985. By that time it was clear that this was an ideal place for him, and he readily accepted the joint appointment in the history department and the committee on social thought that was to bring him back to the university for a quarter every year, making him such an indispensable member of its faculty. The major works that followed Penser la Révolution française in the 1980s and 1990s all took form in the courses and seminars he taught at the University of Chicago. François profoundly admired the great American universities, which he often compared to the French ones to the latter’s disadvantage. This is why, in later years, he became so concerned about the tendencies that seemed to him to threaten the fabric of American university life. Above all, he loved our great university libraries with their open stacks, which he saw as representing all that was best in our universities: their intellectual and institutional openness, their spirit of inquiry, their traditions of research, and the conditions they provided for serious work, not only for faculty members but for graduate students and undergraduates as well. I remember his telling me that he would never have discovered Cochin—in whose work he recognized one of the keys to understanding the French Revolution—had he not been able to browse the stacks in the library of the University of Michigan, which he visited frequently in the 1970s. But among American universities, François found his truest home at the University of Chicago. Looking through the letters I received from him over the years, I came across a copy of the one he sent in 1985 accepting a faculty appointment here. “J’aime beaucoup votre Université,” he wrote, “I am very fond of your university, where I already have friends and good memories, and I am above all conscious of the intellectual climate that reigns there,

A Genealogy of Dr Manette

The aim of this essay is to explore some possible sources for Dickens’s portrait of Dr Manette.1 When it came to this central figure in his novel, Dickens’s imagination was evidently fed by several springs, not least his memories of prisoners he had seen in Philadelphia.2 Perhaps, too, recalling a famous passage in Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), he also saw in his mind’s eye the Bastille prisoner Sterne’s Yorick fancied he might become, pale and feverish after thirty years in chains, hopelessly engaged in ‘work of affliction’ to mark the passage of his days, his body ‘half wasted away with long expectation and confinement’. In emphatically sentimentalist mode, Sterne had invited his readers to share with his protagonist in this imagined prisoner’s despair, feeling to the point of tears ‘what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferr’d’.3

Reason and Revolution: Political Consciousness and Ideological Invention at the End of the Old Regime

A reviewer of a volume I recently edited on The Political Culture of the Old Regime drew from its papers the conclusion that if the French Revolution is over (in the now-celebrated phrase of Francois Furet) so then is the Old Regime.1 There are several senses in which this might seem to be true.

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