Although the Marquis de Condorcet welcomed the French revolution, his critique of the execution of Louix XVI led to his condemnation as an enemy of the republic of France. It was Condorcet’s believe that a conspiracy between priest and king as models of government were responsible for the greatest assault on the rights of man which constituted the largest body of his political work.
Condorcet’s ideas paved the way for a new kind of nationalism, one born out of the individual man’s pursuit of self-interest. The individual improvement of man would make for a stronger thread for which the fabric of a national identity would eventually be composed. In a way, though the individualism born out of the ideas of hobbes, locke, rousseau, Condorcet, and others, would usher in a relatively quick decline of the European states, it bred the ascendancy of the modern superpower in the form of American nationalism.
Condorcet’s rationalism was a key component of the French enlightenment, paving the way for the enumeration of the rights of man, stated in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man. “After long periods of error, after being led astray by fake were incomplete theories, publicists have at last discovered the true rights of man and how they can all be deduced from the single truth, that man is a sentient being, capable of reasoning and of acquiring moral ideas. . . .
At last man could proclaim aloud his right, which for so long had been ignored, to submit all opinions to his own reason and to use in the search for truth the only instruments for its recognition that he has been given. Every man learnt with a sort of pride that nature had not forever condemned him to base his beliefs on the opinions of others; the superstitions of antiquity and the basement of reason before the [rapture] of supernatural religion disappeared from society as from philosophy.”
Condorcet’s abandonment of religion can be compared to the evolution of thought in Hobbes’ Leviathan. Since the idea of the body of Christ no longer exists for Hobbes, he can have no view of any transcendant power that unifies human nature into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The very foundation for understanding any transcendant view of human nature, and thus community life, is eradicated. The application and reason to understand and apply the biblical command to love is rooted in the idea that there exists something greater than the individual which motivates an individual to think less of himself and more of someone or something else, thus forming a basic link or connection to the second thing and creating in effect a third thing. When government is a necessary beast, existing on a basis of practical despotism, government becomes a negative, not a positive, thing. Its role is divisionary, separatist, and keeping one person from another, because the assumption is that the activity is a violent activity. The individual is the only thing that can exist for Hobbes, and that individual’s motives to move about arise out of self-interest and fear.
1. Condorcet lists equality between nations as a hope for a better condition for the future of the human race. How does this compare to the declarations of rights of man’s assumption that sovereignty resides in the nation?
2. What are the effects of rousseau’s rationalism on state local sovereignty?
3. is the declaration of the rights of man an decidedly atheist document? (man is capable of reasoning and acquiring moral ideas)
4. What is the general will?
5. Just how important is Liberty to God?
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