<p>Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-94), known as the Last of the Philosophes, the intellectuals in the French Enlightenment who sought to apply their learning to solving the problems of their world. He became a passionate believer in the progress of society, an advocate for equal rights for women and the abolition of the slave trade and for representative government. The French Revolution gave him a chance to advance those ideas and, while the Terror brought his life to an end, his wife Sophie de Grouchy 91764-1822) ensured his influence into the next century and beyond. </p><p>With</p><p>Rachel Hammersley
Professor of Intellectual History at Newcastle University</p><p>Richard Whatmore
Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History</p><p>And </p><p>Tom Hopkins
Senior Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College</p><p>Producer: Simon Tillotson</p><p>Reading list: </p><p>Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (University of Chicago Press, 1974)</p><p>Keith Michael Baker, ‘On Condorcet’s Sketch’ (Daedalus, summer 2004)</p><p>Lorraine Daston, ‘Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment’ (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2009)</p><p>Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago University Press, 2010)</p><p>Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (eds), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially ‘Ideology and the Origins of Social Science’ by Robert Wokler</p><p>Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1985)</p><p>Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (eds.), Condorcet: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009)</p><p>Kathleen McCrudden Illert, A Republic of Sympathy: Sophie de Grouchy's Politics and Philosophy, 1785-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)</p><p>Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt (eds.), Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 1994)</p><p>Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, (Harvard University Press, 2001)</p><p>Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment (Allen Lane, 2023)</p><p>David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004)</p>
