Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind

A sketch of human history as a story of progress, written in 1793–94 while Condorcet was hiding from arrest under the Jacobins, and published after his death in prison. He divides the past into nine epochs, from hunting peoples through pastoral and farming societies, the invention of alphabetic writing, Greek science, the decline and revival of learning and the invention of printing, to Descartes and the founding of the French Republic. The engine of progress is the growth of knowledge, above all science, and its obstacle is superstition kept alive by priests and tyrants. The tenth epoch turns to the future and predicts three things: the end of inequality between nations, progress towards equality within each nation, and the real improvement of humanity. Condorcet foresees universal education, equal rights for women, the end of slavery and colonial exploitation, the use of probability in social questions and much longer lives, and holds that human perfectibility has no assignable limit. Malthus wrote his Essay on Population partly to refute this hope.

It is the purest statement of the Enlightenment belief in progress, written by a man facing death, and it still frames arguments about science, education and whether history improves us.