Was the Marquis de Condorcet, the iconic philosophe, revolutionary, and education reformer of the French Enlightenment and Revolutionary era, a Stoic? That is, were his principal ideas on politics, social reform, education reform, and the progress of scientific knowledge—the ideas for which he was most known—influenced by an engagement with and even acceptance of important aspects of ancient Stoic philosophical thought?
In this article, I explore this question specifically with a focus on Condorcet's education reform ideas as detailed in his masterwork on education theory, the Cinq mémoires sur l'instruction publique (1791). It was in the realm of universal public education that Condorcet's ideas on equality, human rights, the liberty of the individual, and the care of the self and of society through advancement in scientific and also critical knowledge converged into a single proposed program. Furthermore, in his education philosophy, Condorcet articulated what I see as one of the most significant and long-lasting Enlightenment-era goals of public education: to emancipate individuals for independent critical thought and action—to enable rational autonomy—and thus to cultivate virtuous citizens who could interact on a basis of actual equality and liberty. I argue that Condorcet—consciously or not—drew on key Stoic principles in crafting this approach to education. Moreover, I propose that understanding Condorcet's debt to Stoicism not only clarifies the sources and goals of Condorcet's education philosophy, but also helps illuminate the intertwined history and genealogy of Enlightenment ideas about education, equality, and liberty. And beyond a purely scholarly interest, these ideas may be relevant to combating the decline of liberal-arts education in favor of vocational training today.Footnote 1 In particular, exploring the Stoic influence on Condorcet's education philosophy gives us a chance to tackle anew the enduring question of what education is for and to ask whether modern, post-Enlightenment education can break with ancient ideas about the care of the self without surrendering the ideal that education can and should cultivate both liberty and equality.Footnote 2
But Condorcet himself argued that his philosophy was at odds with ancient conceptions of it. Moreover, Condorcet has typically been seen since the early nineteenth century as having made a decisive break with the ancients, rejecting antiquity in favor of a wholly modern educational philosophy that, if implemented, would serve as the basis for a modern, free society.Footnote 3 Historians have largely followed suit. Concerning the education debates of the French Revolution, for example, Jonathan Israel not long ago revived the argument that there was an inherent antagonism between the “Robespierrists” (as he terms them), who favored a Rousseauean anti-intellectualism that lauded both Spartan and Stoic virtues and an adherence to Nature, and the Brissotins, heirs of the “Radical Enlightenment” who favored a modern, egalitarian, even democratic intellectualism focused on critical thought and the natural sciences.Footnote 4 The education battle of the late Enlightenment, argues Israel bluntly, “can be summed as a clash between Radical Enlightenment democratic education ideals and Rousseauist educational philosophy.”Footnote 5 Condorcet appears in this thesis as the great hero of modern book learning, allied with the Brissotins, and diametrically opposed to the Rousseauean Robespierrists.
And yet I argue here that in his insistence that equality of education was a natural right, Condorcet advanced a Stoic argument that what is good and virtuous is both the same for everyone and inherently natural, and is thus a natural right of all. That is, he presented an ideal of education that aligns closely to the Stoic concept of oikeiôsis (discussed below). Robespierre and his allies may have lauded the Hellenistic—and Rousseauean—ideal of living according to nature, but so did Condorcet, even while he derided a slavish adulation of the ancients and criticized the Laconophilia (love of things Spartan) popular with Rousseau and some of his followers. So, although Condorcet was a practical and critical thinker in his own right, I suggest that we should understand him as a Rousseauean Stoic.
In fact, there is evidence to suggest that the source of Condorcet's Stoicism was Rousseau.Footnote 6 If true, then arguably the two greatest education reform thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century were much closer than we tend to suppose. Rousseau himself had helped to establish the parameters of the Enlightenment education debate, and Condorcet then worked within that debate. He did not reject it, or Rousseau, out of hand, even if he might have disagreed with many of Rousseau's particular ideas about educational reform. Ultimately, I posit, contrary to Israel and others, that the most influential Enlightenment-era ideas on education, as Rousseau and then Condorcet articulated them, and as they were later instituted in the Ferry Laws of 1881–2, derive from Stoic ideas about rational autonomy and the care of the selfFootnote 7—and that this is an intellectual tradition well worth keeping alive today.
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The importance of Stoic philosophy to the history and genealogy of Enlightenment ideas remains, however, rather difficult to assess despite significant scholarship on the topic. As we know, Stoicism and Hellenistic philosophy more generally, including Epicureanism, Cynicism, and Skepticism, enjoyed a revival in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and contributed to the development of early modern natural-rights theory and Enlightenment thought overall.Footnote 8 In moral and political thought alone, we can cite any number of major writers, including Justus Lipsius, Pierre Charron, Guillaume du Vair, and Jean Bodin in the sixteenth century, and Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, Pierre Gassendi, René Descartes, and John Locke in the seventeenth, just to name the barest few, whose ideas were influenced by the renewed (if not truly new) focus on Hellenistic philosophy, especially Stoicism and also Epicureanism. But by the mid-seventeenth century, it was also quite common to disdain Stoicism for its supposed suppression of emotion and sentiment (something not necessarily a part of classical Stoic philosophy) and to distance oneself from the apparent extremes of the philosophy. The eminent writer Bernard de Fontenelle, for example, railed against Stoicism, arguing that without the passions nothing would ever get done: “The passions are for men as the winds that are necessary to put everything in motion, even if they often cause storms,” he wrote, despite the fact that he was famous for such restrained emotion that he was said never to laugh with a “ha!” but only to engage, one supposes, in ironic, philosophic snickering. “Whatever the fierce Stoics say about it, a great part of our happiness depends not upon us,” he added in his essay “Du bonheur.” “If one of them, suffering from gout, says to it, ‘I will not avow, however, that you are an evil,’ he has uttered the most extravagant words that ever emerged from the mouth of a philosopher.”Footnote 9 And by the eighteenth century, a cult of sentiment in literature and philosophy seemed to make Stoicism an unacceptable moral philosophy for some and criticisms of it appeared regularly, even from such vaunted heights as Voltaire and Hume.
Voltaire, of course, in Candide mocked the Stoic acceptance of the world as it is, particularly through his character Pangloss, and he challenged the notion of a rational world order with his character Martin, who, when asked by Candide why the world was created, answered sardonically, “To drive us mad!”Footnote 10 Hume, also, argued in essays such as “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Delicacy of Passion,” that the passions, at least when not immoderate, are essential to happiness. And yet, at best, Voltaire was hardly consistent, and Hume even in “Of the Delicacy of Taste” and in other essays critical of Stoicism such as “The Stoic” accepted the Stoic ethical notion that happiness and the good life derive from philosophy; that is, a life guided by a rational mastery of the self. As Hume wrote, rather Stoically, “People of this character [passionate] have, no doubt, more lively enjoyments, as well as more pungent sorrows, than men of cool and sedate tempers: But, I believe, when everything is balanced, there is no one who would not rather be of the latter character, were he entirely master of his own disposition.”Footnote 11
Indeed the historiography of the Enlightenment at one time gave pride of place to Stoicism in the development of principal Enlightenment ideas, especially in the areas of natural law and natural rights. In 1946 Ernst Cassirer attempted to trace and explain this intellectual history: “The political rationalism of the seventeenth century was a rejuvenation of Stoic ideas,” he wrote, whose influence spread over all of European culture and to its colonies. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, Cassirer continued,
he was scarcely aware that he was speaking the language of Stoic philosophy. This language could be taken for granted; for since the times of Lipsius and Grotius it had a common place with all the great political thinkers. The ideas were regarded as fundamental axioms that were not capable of further analysis and in no need of demonstration. For they expressed the essence of man and the very character of human reason.Footnote 12
So, according to Cassirer, the notions of natural right and natural law that lie at the center of Enlightenment political thought owe their origins to the sixteenth-century revival of this thought and the seventeenth-century flourishing of it. We can trace a philosophical line from Seneca to Epictetus to Lipsius, Locke, Jefferson, and also, perhaps, Condorcet.Footnote 13
In The Rise of Modern Paganism (1966), Peter Gay's social history of Enlightenment ideas suggested a similar but perhaps looser connection. Gay saw an “affinity” with classical thought that emerged most powerfully in what Gay coined an “Epicurean Stoicism,” by which he meant a philosophy that eclectically (and often not systematically or even consistently) combined the asceticism and universalism of Stoicism with the materialism and sensuality of Epicureanism, but which altogether identified virtue and the good life as living in accordance with nature—an idea central to almost all Greco-Roman moral philosophy, including Platonism and Cynicism. At any rate, Gay certainly argued that the project of the Enlightenment was a revival of Hellenistic philosophical ideas applied to the goal of universal rational, secularizing sociopolitical reform: what is natural is good, and is therefore both the right and the duty of all.Footnote 14
After Gay's synthesis, of course, Enlightenment historiography experienced a long, thirty-year interlude that disrupted the idea of the Enlightenment as being a singular intellectual or philosophical project or historical phenomenon with any sort of coordinated, international program of action intended to accomplish any one goal. Moreover, as John Robertson has described it, the cultural turn “encouraged a view that the ideas themselves were of secondary importance”; indeed some historians seemed to opine that “a focus on ideas is unacceptably elitist.”Footnote 15 The Enlightenment instead became a disparate and heterogeneous set of cultural phenomena geared, at best, toward reforms in general. Almost everyone in the eighteenth century claimed to be part of the Enlightenment, but nobody meant the same thing by it. In effect, the Enlightenment wasn't anything identifiably specific, and anyway it was over.
But the twenty-first century has seen the pendulum swing slowly back toward a historiography more interested in the Enlightenment's general intellectual and philosophical character, with the implicit or explicit thesis that it was as a “movement of thought” that the Enlightenment had greatest historical significance, but without rejecting the achievements of the cultural turn.Footnote 16 In the process, this renewal of intellectual history led to a nuanced version of Gay's notion of the Enlightenment's eclectic Epicurean Stoicism.Footnote 17 Even Jonathan Israel's Stonehengian monument to the Spinozist foundations of the “Radical Enlightenment”—wherein, he argues, there developed the secular egalitarian ideology of modern society—insists that ancient sources of the Radical Enlightenment included “especially Epicureanism and Stoicism.”Footnote 18 Other scholarship, while not rejecting the hitherto underdeveloped understanding of Spinoza's contribution to modern thought, has refocused attention on the specifically Epicurean and Stoic foundations of eighteenth-century thought about ethics, economics, and rights.Footnote 19 A point of origins for this new focus lies, perhaps, in Jean Lafond's L'homme et son image (1996), which counterintuitively argued that an Augustinian Epicureanism centered on the work of Blaise Pascal and Pierre Nicole underlay the revival of sentiment as key to understanding human nature and morality—a criticism specifically of the earlier Neostoic revival which insisted that virtue lay in rational self-denial.Footnote 20 Expanding on Lafond's scholarship, work by scholars such as Pierre Force, John Robertson, Christopher Brooke, and also Emma Rothschild has suggested that the Augustinian Epicurean Enlightenment reached its apex in Bernard Mandeville's Fable of the Bees (1717), and then faced a powerful, if nuanced, Stoic challenge from Rousseau and, perhaps surprisingly, Adam Smith.Footnote 21 As Brooke has argued, “The opposition of ‘Stoic’ and ‘Epicurean’ was widely deployed in the early eighteenth century in relation to a number of contemporary questions,” particularly in the debate over luxury—with those in favor of luxury as a social good taking an Epicurean position, and those against utilizing Stoic arguments. The Stoic-versus-Epicurean debates over luxury also bled into arguments about the causes of sociability—that is, whether people engaged in social behavior for essentially selfish reasons (the Epicurean position) or not (the Stoic position)—yet with neither denying the important role of sentiment or the passions in human nature.Footnote 22 In significant ways, this recent scholarship has provided gradation and detail to an earlier line of scholarship on early modern economic and moral thought, notably Albert Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests, and it calls for a reappraisal of both Gay's and Cassirer's arguments about the importance of Hellenistic ideas to the development of Enlightenment ideas.Footnote 23
Indeed Brooke and also Kavanagh have undermined the pleasant thesis that key Enlightenment philosophical debates simply alternated between Epicurean and Stoic arguments from the renewal of these philosophies in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Instead, as Brooke has shown especially with Rousseau, Enlightenment-era thinkers appropriated Hellenistic philosophy both critically and eclectically. Rousseau appears more or less as a creative Epicurean Stoic (one imagines Peter Gay smiling at this).Footnote 24 In a similar vein, Dan Edelstein has also reiterated that Enlightenment-era thinkers borrowed and mixed ancient and modern ideas without feeling beholden to any particular tradition (something we might readily expect from the practical, freethinking men and women of the eighteenth-century intellectual world).Footnote 25 Edelstein has also argued that while modern rights theory owes much to the revival of Stoicism, many Enlightenment thinkers rejected the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century jusnaturalist tradition of natural right, thus breaking the direct philosophical line from the Stoics to the scholastics to Jefferson's Declaration of Independence or to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen.Footnote 26 This rejection, Edelstein argues, was the “central premise [stretching back to the Stoics], namely that reason was the human faculty through which we gain access to the laws of nature . . . Enlightenment writers were claiming that natural laws should instead be felt.”Footnote 27 People recognized natural laws through feeling, sensibilité, and conscience, not reason. Furthermore, Edelstein claims, the revolutionaries appealed to this Enlightenment tradition of sensibility, not to the Neostoics, when they drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Once again we see, as Gay did, a wide-ranging Epicurean Stoic Enlightenment, or perhaps a shifting spectrum of thought that variously emerged as Augustinian Epicurean, or Stoic Epicurean.
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So where does Condorcet fit in this spectrum? Condorcet's education philosophy, while more radically universal than most previous philosophies or proposals, falls well within the parameters of an eclectic Augustinian–Epicurean–Stoic Enlightenment, influenced as it was by contemporary political and philosophical debates that mixed, mingled, and altered various strains and ideas from and about the Hellenistic past. On balance, however, Condorcet's philosophy tilts in the Stoic direction.
In September 1791 Condorcet took office as a deputy in the Legislative Assembly. After assuming the presidency of the Committee on Public Instruction, he worked with his fellow committee members to create a plan to establish by legislation universal national education in France—the second attempt after the Talleyrand plan was shelved during the constitutional debates earlier that year.Footnote 28 Condorcet had been involved in debates over national education plans since their origin in the Cercle social of 1790, and had been thinking seriously about education for many years.Footnote 29 On 20 April 1792, the same day that France declared war on Austria, Condorcet attempted to present his plan to the Assembly. In the excitement over the declaration of war, the presentation was interrupted and the plan tabled. When Condorcet presented his proposal again in December, opposition especially from deputies allied to the Girondins (ironic since Condorcet is often identified with this faction) led to the ultimate failure of the plan.Footnote 30 Later Revolutionary-era education plans freely borrowed from the Condorcet plan, but were proposed by the Montagnard faction and controlled by Jacobin leaders such as Robespierre who, having proscribed Condorcet, denied any ties to his ideas and referred to him repeatedly as “that dastard Condorcet.”Footnote 31
Condorcet intended his education plan to promote Enlightenment, which he conceived as that which developed rational autonomy. This might have been the principal reason for the plan's failure; for Condorcet, individual freedom trumped all other concerns, including national unity. In fact, the Condorcet proposal was a watered-down version of his radical masterpiece of education philosophy, the Cinq mémoires sur l'instruction publique (1791), wherein the philosophe detailed his assertion that universal public instruction was both an individual human right and a public duty that must be provided at public expense to every member of society, including men, women, and children. Only through education in what Condorcet termed “positive instruction” (that is, instruction limited to “truths of fact and calculation,” and specifically avoiding religious or political indoctrination of any sort) could individuals develop intellectual freedom. Failing that, Condorcet argued, a man is not free, he is “the slave of his masters, and his chains are more difficult to break because he does not feel them.”Footnote 32 Furthermore, freedom morally obliged people who received it to contribute positively to society. “The duty of society,” Condorcet wrote,
relative to its obligation to extend in fact, as much as possible, the equality of rights, consists therefore in procuring for each man the instruction necessary for exercising the common functions of men . . . The more men are disposed by education to reason justly, to seize the truths that are presented to them, and to reject the errors to which they are made victims, the more a nation which would see enlightenment expanded more and more and spread to the greatest number of individuals could hope to obtain and conserve good laws, a wise government, and a truly free constitution.Footnote 33
Alternately, he argued, inequality of instruction, even where the law proclaimed civic equality, produced political and social inequality and was a source of tyranny. Someone left in ignorance, Condorcet wrote, “is obliged blindly to follow guides he can neither judge nor choose.”Footnote 34
In short, Condorcet outlined a contemporary version of the ancient Roman Stoic ideal of liberty and duty founded on the notion that free citizens can take care of themselves. But Condorcet combined this ancient ideal with the more modern idea that everyone in a given society deserved the opportunity to realize freedom; Condorcet's argument that justice required equality of opportunity meant that education had to include all men and all women too. “Instruction must be the same for women as for men,” he wrote. “[O]ne could not establish it for men alone without introducing a marked inequality, not only between man and wife, but between brother and sister, and even between son and mother . . . Equality is everywhere, but above all in families, the first element of felicity, peace, and virtue.”Footnote 35
For, like the classical philosophers, Condorcet proposed that education also creates equality and thus promotes virtue more generally.Footnote 36 By the very fact of being about truth and guided by the pursuit of the laws of nature, education makes it possible for the individual to care for him- or herself—to practice what the ancients termed askesis, with the goal of achieving rational autonomy—and through that care to come to an understanding of his or her rights and duties to the self and to society, which the ancient Stoics called oikeiôsis.
Consider, by way of comparison with ancient thinkers, Socrates to Alcibiades in Plato's Alcibiades I: “Alack, then, Alcibiades, for the plight you are in! . . . You are wedded to stupidity, my fine friend, of the vilest kind; you are impeached of this by your own words, out of your own mouth; and this, it seems, is why you dash into politics before you have been educated”Footnote 37 (118C). When Alcibiades is thereupon convinced by Socrates of his ignorance, he replies, “Well, by Heaven, Socrates, I do not even know what I mean myself, and I fear that for some time past I have lived unawares in a very disgraceful condition” (128A). Socrates then proposes that his young pupil take heart, and leads him down the path of self-improvement. To care for the self, he teaches, one must first adhere to the Delphic dictum: to know thyself. And to know the self, argues Socrates, above all means first distinguishing between that which is truly one's self, the soul (or psyche), and that which is not the self, such as one's possessions, wealth, or even one's body. The later Stoics would consider Socrates a true Stoic sage precisely for this argument: the first step toward knowledge of the self requires that a soul look into the soul of another—a teacher—to see the virtue of a soul, which is wisdom (or sofia), and thence through realization of the virtue of the self to become wise (or sofronas), also translated sometimes as “temperance” because to be sofronas is to have one's self in hand, to know what one is and what is truly one's own, and by thus living according to the laws of nature, not be enslaved to that which is not and can never be one's own, such as belongings or the body. “And hence,” says Socrates, “it is not he who has made himself rich that is relieved of wretchedness, but he who has made himself temperate [or wise, sofronas]” (134B). Those who, through their proper education, then, become wise are also free, “And virtue becomes a free man,” concludes Socrates (135E).
With these sentiments Cicero agreed when he advised, in the voice of Cato, that those who wish to live well and happily must “seek all good things from themselves,” for the resources are in the self, not outside the self. Nature assures us, Cicero continued, that “nothing can appear evil which the necessity of nature entails . . . in this I am wise that I follow nature, that best guide, as a god, and I am obedient to her.” Furthermore, Cicero's Cato assures his auditors that he learned the virtue of the soul or self and thus became free through the guidance of a teacher—in his case, the example of Quintus Fabius Maximus, the famous Cunctator, who had himself so in hand that he could never be dissuaded from his wise and temperate strategy against Hannibal by rash naysayers.Footnote 38
But perhaps even more to the point here is Seneca, whose letters to Lucilius are a Stoic model of the friend as teacher instructing his pupil on how to achieve knowledge as the path to wisdom and thence to freedom and thus virtue: “It is clear to you, I am sure, Lucilius,” wrote Seneca, “that no man can live a happy life, or even a supportable life, without the study of wisdom.”Footnote 39 And that wisdom, Seneca insisted, is to live according to nature, which consists in knowing the self and in that knowledge becoming free and capable of acting with virtue. Further, Seneca argued that to live according to nature and to know the self requires education and the study of nature, and that such an education results very much in what Condorcet suggests is true, acquired intellectual equality, not merely legislated by laws but experienced in fact: “Wisdom has this advantage, among others,” wrote Seneca, “that no man can be outdone by another, except during the climb. But when you have arrived at the top, it is a draw . . . Things which have reached their full stature cannot grow higher. Men who have attained wisdom will therefore be equal and on the same footing.”Footnote 40
We might scoff that Seneca, of course, never imagined that wisdom-produced equality applied universally to all humanity through public instruction. While that may be true, Seneca certainly pointed in the direction of universal human rights when he suggested the natural equality of slave and master. Societies may enslave, but nature does not: “‘They are slaves,’ people declare,” wrote Seneca;
Nay, rather they are men . . . they are our fellow-slaves, if one reflects that Fortune has equal rights over slaves and free men alike . . . Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies . . . “He is a slave.” His soul, however, may be that of a freeman.Footnote 41
Condorcet's notion of a universal opportunity for education as the pathway to universal equality may be modern, but its antecedents are present in Seneca.
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These parallels between the ideas of the ancient Stoics and of Condorcet do not tell us, however, whether Condorcet was conscious of them or whether, as Cassirer argued, such ideas had become so commonplace in early modern thought that he could use them and yet be scarcely aware of their origins. Significant scholarship has shown us the extent to which eighteenth-century education was steeped in the classics, so we can count out ignorance of classical texts. Condorcet attended the Jesuit Collège de Reims for classical studies and the Collège de Navarre for mathematics. Since secondary instruction in eighteenth-century French collèges was very nearly uniform, we can assume, then, that Condorcet read (or was assigned to read) some or all of the following classical works: Vergil's Aeneid, Bucolics, and Georgics; Horace's Ars poetica and odes; Ovid's Metamorphoses; Sallust's Conspiracy of Cataline and the Jugurthine War; and many of Cicero's orations, philosophical writings, and letters. It is possible Condorcet was also assigned some Cornelius Nepos, Quintus Curtius, and Tacitus.Footnote 42 Note, however, that secondary education regularly included only Latin authors, not Greek, and of the philosophers I quoted above, only Cicero appears as part of the standard collège curriculum in the eighteenth century. Of course, this means little: when Condorcet published the Cinq mémoires in 1791 he was forty-eight years old and had had many years in which to read up on Hellenic and Hellenistic philosophy if he had so desired. A translation of Epictetus’ Enchridion had been available at least since Jean de Tournes's Le manuel d'Epictète (Lyon, 1544), for example, and Lefebvre de Villebrune had published a new translation entitled Manuel d’Épictete (Paris, 1783). Also, Elizabeth “Epictetus” Carter had, in 1758, translated the Discourses, Handbook, and Fragments into English, a language that Condorcet knew well.Footnote 43 Had Condorcet read any of these works, or those of any other Stoics, beyond his collège requirements? Since he does not say, there is no way to know, so far as I can determine.
The truth is that Condorcet only rarely cited classical authors, either Greek or Latin. Yet in his posthumous Esquisse, classical authors are mentioned often and admiringly as examples of reason defeating ignorance. This includes references to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, and Lucretius. And Condorcet suggested he was at least familiar with their philosophies—particularly with Stoicism and Epicureanism, to which he devoted some pages of analysis in the “Cinquième époque.”Footnote 44 Around the same era as Aristotle, Condorcet wrote, there appeared “deux sectes nouvelles” that based morality on opposing principles, “at least in appearance,” and that they “hastened the fall of Greek superstition that, unfortunately a more somber superstition, more dangerous, more opposed to Enlightenment, would soon replace [i.e. Christianity].” Although leaving open the idea that Stoics and Epicureans did not have truly opposing views on the origins of morality, Condorcet nevertheless outlined a simplistic, even hackneyed, view of Stoicism in which the Stoics are reputed to believe that a soul achieves virtue and happiness by being “equally insensible to pleasure and pain, free of all passions, superior to all fears.” For Epicureans, alternatively, happiness consists in the enjoyment of pleasure and in the absence of pain, while “virtue consists in following natural inclinations, but knowing how to purify and direct them”—by, one assumes Condorcet believed, using reason to achieve temperance. Despite a rather unsophisticated summary of the two philosophies, Condorcet defended them, rejecting the accusation that Stoics are hard, prideful, and unjust, or that Epicureans are corrupt and given to sensuousness. “One calumniates the principles of Epicureans that accuses them of placing the sovereign good only in gross pleasures. The other ridicules the claims of the wise Zeno, who, as a slave turning the wheel or tormented by gout, is not less happy, free, or sovereign.” Both philosophies, Condorcet argued, conducted their practitioners to behaviors little different from good Christian ones—proving, Condorcet continued, that ethical precepts are independent of religion or philosophy, and “that it is in the moral constitution of man that one must seek the foundations of his duties, [and] the origin of his ideas of justice and virtue: a truth from which the Epicurean sect was less remote than any other.”
On the evidence of the Esquisse, then, we might be tempted to suggest that ancient philosophy did indeed consciously influence Condorcet's ideas about education, liberty, and rational autonomy—and, further, that it was Epicureanism, not Stoicism, to which he owed his greatest debt. In the Cinq mémoires, however, Condorcet never directly cited Plato, Seneca, Cicero, or Epictetus, nor even Aristotle or any other great classical philosophers, although like Rousseau he referred to Plutarch multiple times as an example of how to write useful histories to provide people with examples of virtuous action.Footnote 45 Most of the time when Condorcet mentioned the classical world at all it was with disdain or to dismiss its examples. In the “premier mémoire,” for example, Condorcet wrote,
One finds with the ancients several examples of common education wherein all the young citizens, regarded as children of the republic, were raised for it, and not for their families or for themselves . . . but these principles cannot be applied to modern nations. This absolute equality in education can exist only among peoples where the labor of society is done by slaves.Footnote 46
Here Condorcet critiqued the Laconophilia of some education reformers who lauded the “absolute equality” of Spartan education and society—for he quite specifically did want equal access to education for all at public expense. Similarly, Condorcet sought to restrict the study of ancient languages to specialists only, and to eliminate it from general instruction where it might only serve to institute authority over reason:
if minds have renounced the yoke of authority, if henceforth one ought to believe what is proven and not what the learned men of other countries in other times thought . . . how would the teaching of ancient language be an essential part of general instruction? They are useful, we say, to savants, to those destined to certain professions; it is, therefore, to that part of instruction that they [ancient languages] ought to be conveyed.Footnote 47
Condorcet did in fact also discuss Stoicism specifically in the Cinq mémoires, but only to damn what appears to be a rather clichéd understanding of it, suggesting that Condorcet either was not very familiar with actual classical Stoic writings, or perhaps was uninterested in engaging with them seriously. As he did a few years later in the Esquisse, Condorcet asserted that Stoics advocated a total suppression of the passions, something which he opposed. He then insisted that curiosity is “the motive of great efforts and discoveries,” and he disdained “this false philosophy [Stoicism] which placed happiness in apathy, and virtue in privation.” One wonders where the “Wise Zeno” is whom Condorcet would praise in his Esquisse. “On the contrary,” he continued, “it is necessary to seek with great care to excite this sentiment [curiosity] in students,” for nature (that best guide!) “has attached pleasure in instruction, provided it is well directed”—presumably by reason.Footnote 48 Coming out in favor of the passions (or at least one of them) as a necessity of human nature might seem to put Condorcet yet more firmly in the Augustinian–Epicurean camp of the Enlightenment, but the irony is that Condorcet's critique of Stoicism here actually comes very close to describing it, at least Senecan Stoicism, for the “pleasure” that Condorcet cited as the result of natural curiosity is what Seneca declared is the “joy” obtained from finding wisdom:
we Stoics hold that pleasure is a vice. Very likely it is a vice; but we are accustomed to use the word when we wish to indicate a happy state of mind. I am aware that if we test words by our formula, even pleasure is a thing of ill repute, and joy [gaudium] can be attained only by the wise. For “joy” is an elation of spirit, of a spirit which trusts in the goodness and truth of its own possessions . . . it is a characteristic of real joy that it never ceases, and never changes into its opposite . . . The wise man is joyful, happy and calm . . .Footnote 49
Yet more ironically, both Condorcet's and Seneca's idea of the unchanging nature of “joy” matches quite well with that of Condorcet's predecessor at the Royal Academy of Sciences, Fontenelle, who in “Du bonheur” stated that “we understand here by the word happiness a state of being, a situation such that one desires it to endure without changing. And in that happiness is different from pleasure, which is only an agreeable sentiment, but short and transitory, and which could never be a state of being.”Footnote 50 In other words, Condorcet's evocations of the Stoics often seem unconscious and even muddled.
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But Condorcet's Stoicism appears much more obvious if considered through Rousseau. Proclaiming the human necessity, even need, to feel curiosity, joy, and indeed many natural human sentiments did not put a philosopher beyond the bounds of either ancient Stoicism or its later eighteenth-century forms, particularly in Rousseau's interpretation. In his critique of Bernard de Mandeville's Augustinian–Epicurean hypothesis in The Fable of the Bees of human nature driven by the passions and determined by self-love, Rousseau in his Second Discourse presented a Stoic rebuttal that rehabilitated the human passions with his discussion of pity: “One sees with pleasure the author of the Fable of the Bees, forced to recognize man as a compassionate and sensitive being . . . Mandeville sensed very well that even with all their ethics men would never have been anything but monsters if nature had not given them pity in support of reason.”Footnote 51 In his own note to this passage, Rousseau added, “Love of oneself [amour de soi-même] is a natural sentiment which inclines every animal to watch over its own preservation, and which, directed in man by reason and modified by pity, produces humanity and virtue.”Footnote 52 As Brooke notes, Rousseau's argument here conforms closely to the Stoic ideal of oikeiôsis, the process of taking possession of oneself or finding a home for oneself, in which reason guides the individual instinct for self-preservation to live according to nature in order to achieve happiness and virtue, and then to extend the care of the self to others so that they, too, may be free and find happiness in their own rational autonomy.Footnote 53 Oikeiôsis as a goal also encourages providing education to others so that they too can achieve freedom, and it implies the denial of natural slavery or personal subjection.
Rousseau even more thoroughly detailed his theory of the passions from a distinctly Stoic vantage point in Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762), a text that outlines an ideal of education very much in line with the Stoic notion of oikeiôsis. Rousseau signaled this Stoic goal at the commencement of Émile with an epigraph from Seneca: “We are sick with evils that can be cured; and nature, having brought us forth sound, itself helps us if we wish to be improved.”Footnote 54 Rousseau then elucidated an idea of education in which nature had primacy, and in order to be “in agreement with himself,” and thus content and happy, the individual had perforce to learn to live in accordance with nature.Footnote 55 Such a form of self-mastery makes one independent of the will of others, and thus free or rationally autonomous. Only by such freedom could individuals, and societies consisting of such individuals, have virtue. The absence of self-mastery, however, results in the dependence of the individual on others, and that dependence engenders vice and results in enslavement.Footnote 56
In Book Two of Emile, in fact, one of Rousseau's main concerns was the development of freedom and the dangers of dependence. “Émile,” he wrote,
shall have no head-pads, no go-carts, no leading-strings . . . Instead of keeping him mewed up in a stuffy room, take him out into a meadow every day; let him run about, let him struggle and fall again and again, the oftener the better; he will learn all the sooner to pick himself up. The delights of liberty will make up for many bruises.Footnote 57
In other words, self-mastery begins with the educator allowing the pupil independence and joy in a life of exploration in nature. “What is to be thought,” Rousseau continued,
of that cruel education which sacrifices the present to an uncertain future, that burdens a child with all sorts of restrictions and begins by making him miserable, in order to prepare him for some far-off happiness which he may never enjoy? Even if I considered that education wise in its aims, how could I view without indignation those poor wretches subjected to an intolerable slavery and condemned like galley-slaves to endless toil, with no certainty that they will gain anything by it?Footnote 58
Fostering independence early was critical to Rousseau's theory of education, for dependence fostered inequality, inequality created masters and slaves, enslavement corrupted both slaves and masters and engendered vice and tyranny. Hardly able to sound more Stoic, Rousseau wrote, “Oh, man! live your own life and you will no longer be wretched. Keep to your appointed place in the order of nature and nothing can tear you from it . . . Your freedom and your power extend as far and no further than your natural strength; anything more is but slavery, deceit, and trickery.”Footnote 59 Not to learn and abide by this lesson was to live in dependence not on things or nature, which is natural and beyond our power, but on men, which is not: “dependence on men, being out of order, gives rise to every kind of vice, and through this master and slave become mutually depraved.”Footnote 60
The problem with society is not the passions per se, Rousseau insisted, but dependence that is the result of inequality, which produces passions that are not guided by reason, and thus not in accordance with nature. “Our passions are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless.” But, he continued,
should we reason rightly, if from the fact that passions are natural to man, we inferred that all the passions we feel in ourselves and behold in others are natural? Their source, indeed, is natural; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams . . . Our natural passions are few in number; they are the means to freedom, they tend to self-preservation. All those which enslave and destroy us have another source; nature does not bestow them on us; we seize on them in her despite.Footnote 61
The passions that are natural, Rousseau argued, are those that result from the primitive, innate, and good amour de soi-même; that is, the love of oneself that is necessary to preservation and the satisfaction of natural needs. But the unnatural passions result from amour-propre, a self-love that can only arise in society, and which “makes comparisons, is never content and never could be, because this sentiment, in preferring ourselves to others, demands also that others prefer us to themselves, which is impossible.”Footnote 62 In other words, amour de soi-même, being natural, is a result of freedom or autonomy, and produces virtue; whereas amour-propre, being social, is a result of inequality or dependence, and produces corruption.Footnote 63 Thus the absolute importance, for Rousseau, that education of children carefully foster their independence, not because virtue comes from reason alone, but because virtue can only arise, or persist, where the individual has the rational autonomy to resist the unnatural passions and live in accordance with the natural passions. By any analysis, Rousseau's theory of education was in line with Stoicism.Footnote 64
But Rousseau did not much discuss his Stoic influences, either. Beyond the Senecan epigraph, Rousseau mentioned Stoics only once in Émile, and disdainfully, in an aside as something he read in Plutarch. He also briefly referred to Zeno once, not to discuss anything particular to his philosophy. He never cited Seneca, Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Cicero, or even Aurelius. In brief, Rousseau may have outlined a Stoic argument, but he showed little concern with the sort of attribution and citation that we now regard as a scholarly virtue. In the Second Discourse, to which Émile is closely linked, Rousseau suggested with approval that the savage man “breathes only repose and freedom; he wants only to live and remain idle; and even the perfect quietude of the Stoic does not approach his profound indifference for all other objects.”Footnote 65 But “quietude” here is not Stoic constantia or apatheia; Rousseau used the Epicurean term ataraxia. The lack of exactitude obviously did not bother Rousseau.
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Nor did it apparently bother Condorcet. Condorcet may have disdained any strong reliance on ancient authority and philosophical tradition, and thus consciously rejected any direct influence from the ancients, but—as Cassirer argued with regard to Jefferson—“he was scarcely aware that he was speaking the language of Stoic philosophy,” for it had become commonplace. Cassirer suggested that the intellectual crises of the early modern era had dissolved the “unity and harmony of medieval” intellectual culture: the scientific revolution, the discovery of the Western hemisphere, the Protestant Reformation, the horrific wars of religion—all had undermined the foundation of medieval, Christian authority. “If there was to be a really universal system of ethics or religion,” he wrote, “it had to be based upon such principles as could be admitted by every nation, every creed, every sect. And Stoicism alone seemed equal to this task.”Footnote 66
It may be dated, but Cassirer's basic thesis here, like Gay's, still holds some water. Neither Rousseau nor Condorcet got tied up in scholarly details and carefully researched analyses of Hellenistic ethical philosophy because, by the mid eighteenth century at least, the issues at stake had coalesced and congealed into a new discourse within which the participants could debate issues like human nature, virtue, freedom, and slavery. The epistemic parameters of this discourse owed their philosophical foundations to, among other -isms, Augustinianism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism, but since those parameters were long-established by the eighteenth century, there was no absolute necessity to reference these foundations except as clichés or even parodies of them. They were like the rules of the game.
To state that that the philosophical foundations of Enlightenment thought had congealed into a single discourse is not to assert the absence of agency on the part of the Enlightenment's participants, however. This discourse obviously allowed for a sort of shorthand system of references, but it was hardly an all-encompassing or structuring determinant of thought. Furthermore, this discourse clearly contained tensions and even logical inconsistencies that demanded judgments and decisions on the part of careful, systematic, or logically rigorous thinkers. Condorcet may not have been punctilious about source attribution, but he was rigorous about the logical consistency of his arguments. For example, Condorcet ultimately rejected Epicureanism as it came to be understood in the eighteenth century because it implied, per Mandeville and then more strongly per Helvétius, that feelings of personal pleasure and pain were the sources of morality and society—a conclusion that too strongly conflicted with Condorcet's ultimately Stoic notions of freedom and virtue.Footnote 67 Deploying the phrase intérêt personnel in place of amour-propre, Helvétius asserted in De l'esprit (1758),
I discover easily the source of human virtue: I see that, without sensations of physical pain and pleasure, men without desires or passions, equally indifferent to all, would not have known personal interest; that, without personal interest, they would not have formed themselves into a society, would not have made agreements among themselves, that there would be no general interest, and by consequence no just or unjust actions, and that thus physical sensibility and personal interest have been the authors of all justice.Footnote 68
Responding to his friend Turgot's criticism of De l'esprit in 1773, Condorcet replied sarcastically,
Whatever he may say, he will not stop me from loving my friends; he will not condemn me to the moral boredom of thinking ceaselessly of my merit or my glory. He will not make me believe that, if I resolve some [mathematical] problems, it is in the hope that beautiful women will seek me out, because I haven't seen yet that they dote on mathematicians.Footnote 69
Like Rousseau, who struggled with the tensions inherent in an Epicurean Stoicism and ultimately put more weight on the Stoic tradition, Condorcet also came down in favor of Stoic-influenced notions of virtue, freedom, and human nature. To be fair, Condorcet and Rousseau were hardly alone in their preference for Stoicism over Epicureanism. Turgot wrote back to Condorcet, “It takes all the art of legislators to exalt the passions, especially to present the tableau of pleasure as the price of virtue, talent, and above all bravery . . . It [De l'esprit] appears to me to be written and made with the same incoherence which is in Helvétius’ head.”Footnote 70 Twenty years later, in the Chronique du mois, Condorcet's associate Jacques-Pierre Brissot made similar complaints in more detail:
I cannot conceive how Helvétius could uphold an opinion as false as it is discouraging. If one seeks esteem not for esteem but for the pleasures it procures, and if these pleasures in the final analysis are reduced to the sensual, the result is that the greatest geniuses, the most celebrated heroes, the most profound legislators, and the most virtuous men must love women and the pleasures of the table with the same ardor.
Citing counterexamples both ancient and modern, Brissot confessed he found the whole idea outrageous.Footnote 71
Another tension in Enlightenment discourse relevant here—that is, to the question of Condorcet's Stoicism—was between Stoic individualism and what we might term Spartan corporatism. While Rousseau's philosophy of education, especially as detailed in Émile, relied implicitly, like Condorcet's, on the Stoic idea of oikeiôsis whereby the individual achieves wisdom and virtue by means of personal emancipation or rational autonomy, Rousseau remained curiously bewitched by the Spartan idea of sublimating one's individuality to the state. Of course in the First Discourse, Rousseau famously admired Sparta for avoiding the corruption of luxury brought about by the cultivation of the arts and sciences, and for thus remaining a society of virtue.Footnote 72 Even in Émile Rousseau repeatedly mentioned the virtuosity of the Spartans, uncorrupted by effeminate luxuries and practices. For example, they used iron for money;Footnote 73
This was the education of the Spartans; they were not taught to stick to their books, they were set to steal their dinners. Were they any the worse for it later in life? Ever ready for victory, they crushed their foes in every kind of warfare, and the prating Athenians were as much afraid of their words as of their blows;Footnote 74
and “Leonidas died for his country before Socrates declared that patriotism was a virtue; Sparta was sober before Socrates extolled sobriety.”Footnote 75 The tension rests in the fact that while the Spartans seem to have developed the discipline to resist the corrupters of personal virtue, they did so not by achieving rational autonomy but by subjecting their individuality to the laws of the state. They were not free in the Stoic sense, or even in the Epicurean sense; they were more like drones or bees. Their society may have been virtuous but individually they were as enslaved as their helots.
Rousseau's and other education theorists’ Laconophilia, despite its contradictions, cast its own spell over many revolutionaries who sought a method of regenerating France, inculcating republican virtue, and fostering a martial patriotism in order to defend the Revolution from its enemies—and they briefly thought they found it in Spartanism. Spartanism's greatest appeal to the revolutionaries was in the areas of economic and education reform: by eliminating luxury, redistributing property, and indoctrinating children (à la the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus), some revolutionaries thought to reestablish a virtuous society from the ground up. Restoring virtue by means of Spartan-influenced economic and agrarian legislation, however, proved impossible for both Girondin and Montagnard leaders to contemplate seriously, since although such laws might help to produce a virtuous society, they would be at the cost, as John Shovlin notes, of destroying “the mainsprings of national wealth,” alienating current landowners, and turning France “back in to a savage or barbaric state.”Footnote 76 In March 1793 the Convention was obliged to decree the death penalty for anyone even proposing such legislation.Footnote 77
In the field of education reform, however, Spartanism or Laconophilia enjoyed more popularity. Admiration for Sparta was not uncommon among education theorists at least as far back as the early eighteenth century and must have influenced Rousseau. Charles Rollin, for example, popularized Spartan educational ideals in his Traité des études (1726–31).Footnote 78 During the Revolution, several voices suggested Spartanizing education in some way or other. One of the most vocal was Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne, whose Projet d’éducation nationale (1792) called for a comprehensive physical and intellectual system that fostered and built national unity among the children of the fatherland from birth to death: “Everybody knows that it was in this regard the education of the Cretans, the other Greek peoples, and above all the Spartiates, who passed their days in continual society, and for whom all of life was an apprenticeship and an exercise in all the virtues.”Footnote 79 Agreeing with Rabaut Saint-Étienne, Michel Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau went so far as to insist in his national education plan of 1793 that “at age five, the fatherland will receive, therefore, the child from the hands of nature, at twelve years [eleven for girls], it will render him back to society.” All children must be removed from the care of their mothers, and “without distinction and without exception, will be educated in common, at the expense of the Republic; and that all, under the holy law of equality, will receive the same clothing, the same food, the same instruction, and the same care.”Footnote 80
Like Spartanizing economic reforms, Spartanizing education reforms were ultimately nonstarters. Even Robespierre, known to admire both the Stoic and the Spartan virtue of austerity, rejected Lepeletier's original plan, saying,
Lepeletier would like national education to be forced, that is to say, that all fathers be constrained to have their children raised in common in the public schools. But this method is destructive of the rights of fathers over their children; it is tyrannical and recalls that Edict of Louis XIV which required that Protestant children be educated in Catholic schools.Footnote 81
Less than a year later, on 5 February 1794, Robespierre was constrained to add, “We do not claim to cast the French Republic in the mold of Sparta; we do not want to give it either the austerity or the corruption of the cloisters. We just present to you, in all its purity, the moral and political principle of the popular government.”Footnote 82
For Condorcet, Spartanism was absurd. Here at least Condorcet's more rigorous consistency separates him from Rousseau. As cited above, in the Cinq mémoires Condorcet insisted that the idea of raising the nation's children for the Republic and not for their families or for themselves was inapplicable to a modern society. But his reasoning in this regard remained essentially Stoic and focused on the necessity of living according to nature: “This absolute equality in education can only exist among peoples where the labor of society is done by slaves,” he wrote:
The equality that they [the Spartans] wanted to establish between citizens, having constantly for its foundation the monstrous inequality of slave and master, all their principles of liberty and justice were based on iniquity and servitude. Thus they could never escape the just vengeance of outraged nature. Everywhere they ceased to be free because they would not suffer other men to be as they were.
The point of education, Condorcet continued to insist, was individual freedom obtained by the fostering of rational autonomy among citizens:
Men assemble into society to obtain the most entire, most peaceable, and most assured enjoyment [jouissance] of their natural rights . . . By such an institution [Spartan education] which, breaking the links of nature, would destroy domestic happiness, weaken or even exterminate filial recognition—first seed of all the virtues—one would condemn the society which adopted that [education] to have only false happiness and virtue. This method could form, without doubt, an order of warriors or a society of tyrants; but it will never make a nation of men, a people of brotherhood.Footnote 83
And why exactly is this so? Condorcet answered immediately: such a public education “dictates to them [children] what to believe”—in other words, it is indoctrination, not instruction. “He who enters into society,” Condorcet continued, “carrying with him the opinions that his education has given him is no longer a free man; he is a slave of his masters, and his chains are much more difficult to break because he does not feel them and he believes he obeys his own reason when he but submits to that of another.”Footnote 84 Liberty as rational autonomy, Condorcet argued, was health; slavery in the form of intellectual dependence was the disease; and “a wise instruction, in expanding enlightenment, is the remedy for it.”
In “Sur la liberté des anciens comparée à celles des modernes,” Benjamin Constant so persuasively argued that Condorcet's idea of liberty, as expressed here and elsewhere, was definitely modern that the question of ancient Stoic influences on Condorcet's thought almost seems absurd. Indeed, Constant blamed the excesses and horrors of the French Revolution on the confusion of ancient and modern ideas of liberty, and specifically on the insistent attempts by some revolutionaries to impose an ancient form of liberty on modern French people. “The government of Sparta,” he bemoaned, “was a monastic aristocracy, and in no way a representative government.” In fact, he continued, with the limited exception of ancient Athens, no ancient republic allowed a sort of individual freedom comparable to the modern idea of freedom. Liberty in ancient republics, Constant argued, “consisted in exercising collectively but directly the sovereign functions of government . . . it was that which the ancients called liberty.” Modern liberty consisted in individual independence, the freedom to pursue private interests unhindered by anything but the law alone—in other words, the right and ability of the individual to take care of him- or herself. Among the ancients, however, “nothing was accorded to individual independence.”Footnote 85 In this, Constant was directly inspired by Condorcet.
Nevertheless, although undoubtedly both Condorcet and Constant were right to see modern freedom as distinct in some of its particulars from ancient conceptions of it, this essay has demonstrated that Condorcet's idea of freedom, like Rousseau's, which both sought to foster in their proposed education systems, owed more than a little to Hellenistic and, particularly, Stoic ideas of rational autonomy and the goal of oikeiôsis. Condorcet and later Constant's insistence on the former's modernity has just thrown us off the scent. The modern idea of liberty as a state established by law but cultivated through universal education—an idea Condorcet articulated in its clearest form—was one of the great intellectual achievements of the Enlightenment era. But it was an idea that was ancient as well as modern.
Was Condorcet a Stoic? The answer is yes, but with the caveat that by “yes” I mean that his philosophy of Enlightenment, the means and purposes of obtaining it, and the concepts of liberty and rational autonomy essential to it, are best described as Rousseauean Stoic. The source of Condorcet's Stoicism was not the ancients directly, but rather Rousseau. Indeed, Condorcet's education philosophy was strongly influenced by Émile. In the end, both the ultimate goal of education and the conception of human nature in Condorcet's Cinq mémoires is Rousseauean, even if Condorcet was more sanguine than Rousseau about the usefulness of the arts and sciences. Neither Condorcet nor Rousseau was interested in instruction that was solely vocational or technical. They both argued that education needed to help develop the moral and spiritual faculties and make individual freedom possible by encouraging the development of reason. The well-reasoning individual, both proposed, guided by the study of nature and living in accordance with it, achieved autonomy.Footnote 86 This idea has not yet died away entirely even in our own time—although as I write this I wonder if it will survive the year.
Condorcet's caginess about his influences may stem from his association with Rousseau's intellectual enemy (or perhaps “frenemy”), Voltaire. But Condorcet did in fact signal his debt to Rousseau privately in letters to Turgot. After meeting with Voltaire at Ferney in 1770, Condorcet wrote to Turgot, “I found Voltaire so full of activity and wit that one would be tempted to believe him immortal, if a little injustice for Rousseau and too much sensitivity to Freron's folly, didn't make me see that he is a man.”Footnote 87 A few years later, Turgot expressed critical admiration for Rousseau:
Look at how Rousseau has inspired interest in spite of his follies, and how much he would be respected if his self-regard were more reasonable. He was condemned by the Parlement, it is true, but it is because he had the craziness to put his name on Émile. The Parlement would have been sorry to do it, and Rousseau could have easily avoided the storm if he had just laid low for two or three months.
Turgot's problem with Rousseau was not with the content of Émile, but with Rousseau's confrontational style. Turgot, after all, was the quintessential insider seeking reform from within the halls of power: “With an honest tone one can say anything, and even more if we add to it the weight of reason and some light precautions that are not hard to take.” But, he added, “I am thankful to Rousseau for nearly all his works.”Footnote 88 Condorcet replied immediately with his own affirmation of Rousseauism:
I just received, Monsieur, your profession of faith, and here is mine. When I left collège, I set myself to reflect on the moral ideas of justice and virtue. I have observed that our interest in being just and virtuous is founded on the pain that is necessarily experienced by a sensitive being on the idea of evil suffered by another sensitive being.Footnote 89
Condorcet then went on to explain that he was so moved by pity in light of the suffering of others, even animals, that he gave up hunting and the killing of insects without need.
Pity—that which together with amour de soi-même was the natural sentiment of humanity for Rousseau, the centerpiece of his entire philosophy—motivated Condorcet, in his own estimation, to seek justice and promote freedom. Voltaire may have been his captain, but Rousseau was his philosophical muse. Reading Condorcet as a Rousseauean Stoic not only puts Condorcet and Rousseau closer together philosophically than they are typically considered to be, but also helps us to see the essential unity of the French Enlightenment as a single movement in the history of thought and illuminates an education philosophy still worth pondering, and even preserving, today.
