Podcasts about condorcet

Rubrique:histoire Auteur: taxile-delord Lecture: Daniel LuttringerDurée: 11min Fichier: 8 Mo Résumé du livre audio: Chronique de la prophétie faite par Jacques Cazotte, un an avant la Révolution française et qui décrit pour chaque personnage présent dans un salon (notamment Condorcet, Chamfort et madame de Gramont) où ils devisent, ce qu'il va advenir de lui durant la future révolution... Cet enregistrement est mis à disposition sous un contrat Creative Commons.

In this bonus episode for Patreon subscribers, Emerald and Tom are joined by one of Australia’s finest psephologists (election analysts), Dr Kevin Bonham! With the Greens winning 12% of the vote but only one lower house seat, is our voting system fair? And if not, what are the other options? Polling denialism, ‘wasted’ votes, Condorcet vs instant runoff, unicameralism, range voting, multi-member proportional… Let’s get our wonk on. ---------- The show can only exist because of our wonderful Patreon subscriber’s support. Subscribe for $3/month to get access to our fortnightly subscriber-only full episode, and unlock our complete library of over SEVENTY past bonus episodes. https://www.patreon.com/SeriousDangerAU ---------- Links - Follow Kevin Bonham - https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/ https://x.com/kevinbonham https://bsky.app/profile/kevinbonham.bsky.social Produced by Michael Griffin https://www.instagram.com/mikeskillz Follow us on https://twitter.com/SeriousDangerAU https://www.instagram.com/seriousdangerau https://www.tiktok.com/@seriousdangerauSupport the show: http://patreon.com/seriousdangerauSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

"De la Baltique à la Méditerranée. Mémoires politiques et souvenirs poétiques." Linda Gil et Franck Salaün. Dialogue autour de "Catherine de Russie, Mémoires" et "Paul Valéry. La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée" – Éditions RivagesComment devient-on Catherine la Grande, « impératrice et autocrate de toutes les Russies », qui régna en despote sur un territoire d'une superficie de 17 millions de kilomètres carrés, de 1762 à 1796 ? C'est par une série de métamorphoses successives que la jeune Sophie Frédérique Augusta d'Anhalt-Zerbst, née dans une famille allemande sur les rives de la mer Baltique s'est muée, à l'âge de 33 ans, en monarque crainte et révérée dans le monde entier.Linda Gil est une spécialiste de Voltaire. Elle a notamment publié les ouvrages Condorcet, vie de Voltaire et Casanova, quatre jours chez Voltaire aux éditions Rivages.Natif de Sète, Paul Valéry est resté fidèle à la mer, sur tous les plans et dans tous les sens. On pense à ses souvenirs d'enfance, et au poème intitulé "Le cimetière marin", mais ce n'est pas tout. La mer l'obsède. Il aime nager, observer les vagues, l'écume, que l'on retrouve dans ses textes. Il pense aussi à partir de ce qu'elle rend possible pêche, commerce, voyages, échanges et mélanges et de ce qu'elle suggère.La Méditerranée lui fournit des images poétiques et un modèle politique. Mais la mer, c'est aussi l'élément liquide, un modèle du phénomène de la pensée. Est-ce un hasard si le dialogue connu sous le titre "L'Idée fixe" est en fait intitulé : "L'Idée fixe ou Deux hommes à la mer" ?Les textes réunis dans ce volume permettent de découvrir l'importance de la mer, au propre et au figuré, dans la vie personnelle et la pensée de Valéry.Frank Salaün est professeur de littérature à l'Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3. Ses travaux portent principalement sur les Lumières et sur les rapports entre littérature et philosophie du XVIIème siècle à aujourd'hui.

So what, exactly, was “The Enlightenment”? According to the Princeton historian David A. Bell, it was an intellectual movement roughly spanning the early 18th century through to the French Revolution. In his Spring 2025 Liberties Quarterly piece “The Enlightenment, Then and Now”, Bell charts the Enlightenment as a complex intellectual movement centered in Paris but with hubs across Europe and America. He highlights key figures like Montesquieu, Voltaire, Kant, and Franklin, discussing their contributions to concepts of religious tolerance, free speech, and rationality. In our conversation, Bell addresses criticisms of the Enlightenment, including its complicated relationship with colonialism and slavery, while arguing that its principles of freedom and reason remain relevant today. 5 Key Takeaways* The Enlightenment emerged in the early 18th century (around 1720s) and was characterized by intellectual inquiry, skepticism toward religion, and a growing sense among thinkers that they were living in an "enlightened century."* While Paris was the central hub, the Enlightenment had multiple centers including Scotland, Germany, and America, with thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, Hume, and Franklin contributing to its development.* The Enlightenment introduced the concept of "society" as a sphere of human existence separate from religion and politics, forming the basis of modern social sciences.* The movement had a complex relationship with colonialism and slavery - many Enlightenment thinkers criticized slavery, but some of their ideas about human progress were later used to justify imperialism.* According to Bell, rather than trying to "return to the Enlightenment," modern society should selectively adopt and adapt its valuable principles of free speech, religious tolerance, and education to create our "own Enlightenment."David Avrom Bell is a historian of early modern and modern Europe at Princeton University. His most recent book, published in 2020 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Men on Horseback: The Power of Charisma in the Age of Revolution. Described in the Journal of Modern History as an "instant classic," it is available in paperback from Picador, in French translation from Fayard, and in Italian translation from Viella. A study of how new forms of political charisma arose in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the book shows that charismatic authoritarianism is as modern a political form as liberal democracy, and shares many of the same origins. Based on exhaustive research in original sources, the book includes case studies of the careers of George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Toussaint Louverture and Simon Bolivar. The book's Introduction can be read here. An online conversation about the book with Annette Gordon-Reed, hosted by the Cullman Center of the New York Public Library, can be viewed here. Links to material about the book, including reviews in The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Harper's, The New Republic, The Nation, Le Monde, The Los Angeles Review of Books and other venues can be found here. Bell is also the author of six previous books. He has published academic articles in both English and French and contributes regularly to general interest publications on a variety of subjects, ranging from modern warfare, to contemporary French politics, to the impact of digital technology on learning and scholarship, and of course French history. A list of his publications from 2023 and 2024 can be found here. His Substack newsletter can be found here. His writings have been translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Hebrew, Swedish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Italian, Turkish and Japanese. At the History Department at Princeton University, he holds the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Chair in the Era of North Atlantic Revolutions, and offers courses on early modern Europe, on military history, and on the early modern French empire. Previously, he spent fourteen years at Johns Hopkins University, including three as Dean of Faculty in its School of Arts and Sciences. From 2020 to 2024 he served as Director of the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a corresponding fellow of the British Academy. Bell's new project is a history of the Enlightenment. A preliminary article from the project was published in early 2022 by Modern Intellectual History. Another is now out in French History.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children. FULL TRANSCRIPTAndrew Keen: Hello everybody, in these supposedly dark times, the E word comes up a lot, the Enlightenment. Are we at the end of the Enlightenment or the beginning? Was there even an Enlightenment? My guest today, David Bell, a professor of history, very distinguished professor of history at Princeton University, has an interesting piece in the spring issue of It is One of our, our favorite quarterlies here on Keen on America, Bell's piece is The Enlightenment Then and Now, and David is joining us from the home of the Enlightenment, perhaps Paris in France, where he's on sabbatical hard life. David being an academic these days, isn't it?David Bell: Very difficult. I'm having to suffer the Parisian bread and croissant. It's terrible.Andrew Keen: Yeah. Well, I won't keep you too long. Is Paris then, or France? Is it the home of the Enlightenment? I know there are many Enlightenments, the French, the Scottish, maybe even the English, perhaps even the American.David Bell: It's certainly one of the homes of the Enlightenment, and it's probably the closest that the Enlightened had to a center, absolutely. But as you say, there were Edinburgh, Glasgow, plenty of places in Germany, Philadelphia, all those places have good claims to being centers of the enlightenment as well.Andrew Keen: All the same David, is it like one of those sports games in California where everyone gets a medal?David Bell: Well, they're different metals, right, but I think certainly Paris is where everybody went. I mean, if you look at the figures from the German Enlightenment, from the Scottish Enlightenment from the American Enlightenment they all tended to congregate in Paris and the Parisians didn't tend to go anywhere else unless they were forced to. So that gives you a pretty good sense of where the most important center was.Andrew Keen: So David, before we get to specifics, map out for us, because everyone is perhaps as familiar or comfortable with the history of the Enlightenment, and certainly as you are. When did it happen? What years? And who are the leaders of this thing called the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, that's a big question. And I'm afraid, of course, that if you ask 10 historians, you'll get 10 different answers.Andrew Keen: Well, I'm only asking you, so I only want one answer.David Bell: So I would say that the Enlightenment really gets going around the first couple of decades of the 18th century. And that's when people really start to think that they are actually living in what they start to call an Enlightenment century. There are a lot of reasons for this. They are seeing what we now call the scientific revolution. They're looking at the progress that has been made with that. They are experiencing the changes in the religious sphere, including the end of religious wars, coming with a great deal of skepticism about religion. They are living in a relative period of peace where they're able to speculate much more broadly and daringly than before. But it's really in those first couple of decades that they start thinking of themselves as living in an enlightened century. They start defining themselves as something that would later be called the enlightenment. So I would say that it's, really, really there between maybe the end of the 17th century and 1720s that it really gets started.Andrew Keen: So let's have some names, David, of philosophers, I guess. I mean, if those are the right words. I know that there was a term in French. There is a term called philosoph. Were they the founders, the leaders of the Enlightenment?David Bell: Well, there is a... Again, I don't want to descend into academic quibbling here, but there were lots of leaders. Let me give an example, though. So the year 1721 is a remarkable year. So in the year, 1721, two amazing events happened within a couple of months of each other. So in May, Montesquieu, one of the great philosophers by any definition, publishes his novel called Persian Letters. And this is an incredible novel. Still, I think one of greatest novels ever written, and it's very daring. It is the account, it is supposedly a an account written by two Persian travelers to Europe who are writing back to people in Isfahan about what they're seeing. And it is very critical of French society. It is very of religion. It is, as I said, very daring philosophically. It is a product in part of the increasing contact between Europe and the rest of the world that is also very central to the Enlightenment. So that novel comes out. So it's immediately, you know, the police try to suppress it. But they don't have much success because it's incredibly popular and Montesquieu doesn't suffer any particular problems because...Andrew Keen: And the French police have never been the most efficient police force in the world, have they?David Bell: Oh, they could be, but not in this case. And then two months later, after Montesquieu published this novel, there's a German philosopher much less well-known than Montesqiu, than Christian Bolz, who is a professor at the Universität Haller in Prussia, and he gives an oration in Latin, a very typical university oration for the time, about Chinese philosophy, in which he says that the Chinese have sort of proved to the world, particularly through the writings of Confucius and others, that you can have a virtuous society without religion. Obviously very controversial. Statement for the time it actually gets him fired from his job, he has to leave the Kingdom of Prussia within 48 hours on penalty of death, starts an enormous controversy. But here are two events, both of which involving non-European people, involving the way in which Europeans are starting to look out at the rest of the world and starting to imagine Europe as just one part of a larger humanity, and at the same time they are starting to speculate very daringly about whether you can have. You know, what it means to have a society, do you need to have religion in order to have morality in society? Do you need the proper, what kind of government do you need to to have virtuous conduct and a proper society? So all of these things get, you know, really crystallize, I think, around these two incidents as much as anything. So if I had to pick a single date for when the enlightenment starts, I'd probably pick that 1721.Andrew Keen: And when was, David, I thought you were going to tell me about the earthquake in Lisbon, when was that earthquake?David Bell: That earthquake comes quite a bit later. That comes, and now historians should be better with dates than I am. It's in the 1750s, I think it's the late 1750's. Again, this historian is proving he's getting a very bad grade for forgetting the exact date, but it's in 1750. So that's a different kind of event, which sparks off a great deal of commentary, because it's a terrible earthquake. It destroys most of the city of Lisbon, it destroys other cities throughout Portugal, and it leads a lot of the philosophy to philosophers at the time to be speculating very daringly again on whether there is any kind of real purpose to the universe and whether there's any kind divine purpose. Why would such a terrible thing happen? Why would God do such a thing to his followers? And certainly VoltaireAndrew Keen: Yeah, Votav, of course, comes to mind of questioning.David Bell: And Condit, Voltaire's novel Condit gives a very good description of the earthquake in Lisbon and uses that as a centerpiece. Voltair also read other things about the earthquake, a poem about Lisbon earthquake. But in Condit he gives a lasting, very scathing portrait of the Catholic Church in general and then of what happens in Portugal. And so the Lisbon Earthquake is certainly another one of the events, but it happens considerably later. Really in the middle of the end of life.Andrew Keen: So, David, you believe in this idea of the Enlightenment. I take your point that there are more than one Enlightenment in more than one center, but in broad historical terms, the 18th century could be defined at least in Western and Northern Europe as the period of the Enlightenment, would that be a fair generalization?David Bell: I think it's perfectly fair generalization. Of course, there are historians who say that it never happened. There's a conservative British historian, J.C.D. Clark, who published a book last summer, saying that the Enlightenment is a kind of myth, that there was a lot of intellectual activity in Europe, obviously, but that the idea that it formed a coherent Enlightenment was really invented in the 20th century by a bunch of progressive reformers who wanted to claim a kind of venerable and august pedigree for their own reform, liberal reform plans. I think that's an exaggeration. People in the 18th century defined very clearly what was going on, both people who were in favor of it and people who are against it. And while you can, if you look very closely at it, of course it gets a bit fuzzy. Of course it's gets, there's no single, you can't define a single enlightenment project or a single enlightened ideology. But then, I think people would be hard pressed to define any intellectual movement. You know, in perfect, incoherent terms. So the enlightenment is, you know by compared with almost any other intellectual movement certainly existed.Andrew Keen: In terms of a philosophy of the Enlightenment, the German thinker, Immanuel Kant, seems to be often, and when you describe him as the conscience or the brain or a mixture of the conscience and brain of the enlightenment, why is Kant and Kantian thinking so important in the development of the Enlightenment.David Bell: Well, that's a really interesting question. And one reason is because most of the Enlightenment was not very rigorously philosophical. A lot of the major figures of the enlightenment before Kant tended to be writing for a general public. And they often were writing with a very specific agenda. We look at Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau. Now you look at Adam Smith in Scotland. We look David Hume or Adam Ferguson. You look at Benjamin Franklin in the United States. These people wrote in all sorts of different genres. They wrote in, they wrote all sorts of different kinds of books. They have many different purposes and very few of them did a lot of what we would call rigorous academic philosophy. And Kant was different. Kant was very much an academic philosopher. Kant was nothing if not rigorous. He came at the end of the enlightenment by most people's measure. He wrote these very, very difficult, very rigorous, very brilliant works, such as The Creek of Pure Reason. And so, it's certainly been the case that people who wanted to describe the Enlightenment as a philosophy have tended to look to Kant. So for example, there's a great German philosopher and intellectual historian of the early 20th century named Ernst Kassirer, who had to leave Germany because of the Nazis. And he wrote a great book called The Philosophy of the Enlightened. And that leads directly to Immanuel Kant. And of course, Casir himself was a Kantian, identified with Kant. And so he wanted to make Kant, in a sense, the telos, the end point, the culmination, the fulfillment of the Enlightenment. But so I think that's why Kant has such a particularly important position. You're defining it both ways.Andrew Keen: I've always struggled to understand what Kant was trying to say. I'm certainly not alone there. Might it be fair to say that he was trying to transform the universe and certainly traditional Christian notions into the Enlightenment, so the entire universe, the world, God, whatever that means, that they were all somehow according to Kant enlightened.David Bell: Well, I think that I'm certainly no expert on Immanuel Kant. And I would say that he is trying to, I mean, his major philosophical works are trying to put together a system of philosophical thinking which will justify why people have to act morally, why people act rationally, without the need for Christian revelation to bolster them. That's a very, very crude and reductionist way of putting it, but that's essentially at the heart of it. At the same time, Kant was very much aware of his own place in history. So Kant didn't simply write these very difficult, thick, dense philosophical works. He also wrote things that were more like journalism or like tablets. He wrote a famous essay called What is Enlightenment? And in that, he said that the 18th century was the period in which humankind was simply beginning to. Reach a period of enlightenment. And he said, he starts the essay by saying, this is the period when humankind is being released from its self-imposed tutelage. And we are still, and he said we do not yet live in the midst of a completely enlightened century, but we are getting there. We are living in a century that is enlightening.Andrew Keen: So the seeds, the seeds of Hegel and maybe even Marx are incant in that German thinking, that historical thinking.David Bell: In some ways, in some ways of course Hegel very much reacts against Kant and so and then Marx reacts against Hegel. So it's not exactly.Andrew Keen: Well, that's the dialectic, isn't it, David?David Bell: A simple easy path from one to the other, no, but Hegel is unimaginable without Kant of course and Marx is unimagineable without Hegel.Andrew Keen: You note that Kant represents a shift in some ways into the university and the walls of the universities were going up, and that some of the other figures associated with the the Enlightenment and Scottish Enlightenment, human and Smith and the French Enlightenment Voltaire and the others, they were more generalist writers. Should we be nostalgic for the pre-university period in the Enlightenment, or? Did things start getting serious once the heavyweights, the academic heavyweighs like Emmanuel Kant got into this thing?David Bell: I think it depends on where we're talking about. I mean, Adam Smith was a professor at Glasgow in Edinburgh, so Smith, the Scottish Enlightenment was definitely at least partly in the universities. The German Enlightenment took place very heavily in universities. Christian Vodafoy I just mentioned was the most important German philosopher of the 18th century before Kant, and he had positions in university. Even the French university system, for a while, what's interesting about the French University system, particularly the Sorbonne, which was the theology faculty, It was that. Throughout the first half of the 18th century, there were very vigorous, very interesting philosophical debates going on there, in which the people there, particularly even Jesuits there, were very open to a lot of the ideas we now call enlightenment. They were reading John Locke, they were reading Mel Pench, they were read Dekalb. What happened though in the French universities was that as more daring stuff was getting published elsewhere. Church, the Catholic Church, started to say, all right, these philosophers, these philosophies, these are our enemies, these are people we have to get at. And so at that point, anybody who was in the university, who was still in dialog with these people was basically purged. And the universities became much less interesting after that. But to come back to your question, I do think that I am very nostalgic for that period. I think that the Enlightenment was an extraordinary period, because if you look between. In the 17th century, not all, but a great deal of the most interesting intellectual work is happening in the so-called Republic of Letters. It's happening in Latin language. It is happening on a very small circle of RUD, of scholars. By the 19th century following Kant and Hegel and then the birth of the research university in Germany, which is copied everywhere, philosophy and the most advanced thinking goes back into the university. And the 18th century, particularly in France, I will say, is a time when the most advanced thought is being written for a general public. It is being in the form of novels, of dialogs, of stories, of reference works, and it is very, very accessible. The most profound thought of the West has never been as accessible overall as in the 18 century.Andrew Keen: Again, excuse this question, it might seem a bit naive, but there's a lot of pre-Enlightenment work, books, thinking that we read now that's very accessible from Erasmus and Thomas More to Machiavelli. Why weren't characters like, or are characters like Erasmuus, More's Utopia, Machiavell's prints and discourses, why aren't they considered part of the Enlightenment? What's the difference between? Enlightened thinkers or the supposedly enlightened thinkers of the 18th century and thinkers and writers of the 16th and 17th centuries.David Bell: That's a good question, you know, I think you have to, you, you know, again, one has to draw a line somewhere. That's not a very good answer, of course. All these people that you just mentioned are, in one way or another, predecessors to the Enlightenment. And of course, there were lots of people. I don't mean to say that nobody wrote in an accessible way before 1700. Obviously, lots of the people you mentioned did. Although a lot of them originally wrote in Latin, Erasmus, also Thomas More. But I think what makes the Enlightened different is that you have, again, you have a sense. These people have have a sense that they are themselves engaged in a collective project, that it is a collective project of enlightenment, of enlightening the world. They believe that they live in a century of progress. And there are certain principles. They don't agree on everything by any means. The philosophy of enlightenment is like nothing more than ripping each other to shreds, like any decent group of intellectuals. But that said, they generally did believe That people needed to have freedom of speech. They believed that you needed to have toleration of different religions. They believed in education and the need for a broadly educated public that could be as broad as possible. They generally believed in keeping religion out of the public sphere as much as possible, so all those principles came together into a program that we can consider at least a kind of... You know, not that everybody read it at every moment by any means, but there is an identifiable enlightenment program there, and in this case an identifiable enlightenment mindset. One other thing, I think, which is crucial to the Enlightenment, is that it was the attention they started to pay to something that we now take almost entirely for granted, which is the idea of society. The word society is so entirely ubiquitous, we assume it's always been there, and in one sense it has, because the word societas is a Latin word. But until... The 18th century, the word society generally had a much narrower meaning. It referred to, you know, particular institution most often, like when we talk about the society of, you know, the American philosophical society or something like that. And the idea that there exists something called society, which is the general sphere of human existence that is separate from religion and is separate from the political sphere, that's actually something which only really emerged at the end of the 1600s. And it became really the focus of you know, much, if not most, of enlightenment thinking. When you look at someone like Montesquieu and you look something, somebody like Rousseau or Voltaire or Adam Smith, probably above all, they were concerned with understanding how society works, not how government works only, but how society, what social interactions are like beginning of what we would now call social science. So that's yet another thing that distinguishes the enlightened from people like Machiavelli, often people like Thomas More, and people like bonuses.Andrew Keen: You noted earlier that the idea of progress is somehow baked in, in part, and certainly when it comes to Kant, certainly the French Enlightenment, although, of course, Rousseau challenged that. I'm not sure whether Rousseaut, as always, is both in and out of the Enlightenment and he seems to be in and out of everything. How did the Enlightement, though, make sense of itself in the context of antiquity, as it was, of Terms, it was the Renaissance that supposedly discovered or rediscovered antiquity. How did many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers, writers, how did they think of their own society in the context of not just antiquity, but even the idea of a European or Western society?David Bell: Well, there was a great book, one of the great histories of the Enlightenment was written about more than 50 years ago by the Yale professor named Peter Gay, and the first part of that book was called The Modern Paganism. So it was about the, you know, it was very much about the relationship between the Enlightenment and the ancient Greek synonyms. And certainly the writers of the enlightenment felt a great deal of kinship with the ancient Greek synonymous. They felt a common bond, particularly in the posing. Christianity and opposing what they believed the Christian Church had wrought on Europe in suppressing freedom and suppressing free thought and suppassing free inquiry. And so they felt that they were both recovering but also going beyond antiquity at the same time. And of course they were all, I mean everybody at the time, every single major figure of the Enlightenment, their education consisted in large part of what we would now call classics, right? I mean, there was an educational reformer in France in the 1760s who said, you know, our educational system is great if the purpose is to train Roman centurions, if it's to train modern people who are not doing both so well. And it's true. I mean they would spend, certainly, you know in Germany, in much of Europe, in the Netherlands, even in France, I mean people were trained not simply to read Latin, but to write in Latin. In Germany, university courses took part in the Latin language. So there's an enormous, you know, so they're certainly very, very conversant with the Greek and Roman classics, and they identify with them to a very great extent. Someone like Rousseau, I mean, and many others, and what's his first reading? How did he learn to read by reading Plutarch? In translation, but he learns to read reading Plutach. He sees from the beginning by this enormous admiration for the ancients that we get from Bhutan.Andrew Keen: Was Socrates relevant here? Was the Enlightenment somehow replacing Aristotle with Socrates and making him and his spirit of Enlightenment, of asking questions rather than answering questions, the symbol of a new way of thinking?David Bell: I would say to a certain extent, so I mean, much of the Enlightenment criticizes scholasticism, medieval scholastic, very, very sharply, and medieval scholasticism is founded philosophically very heavily upon Aristotle, so to that extent. And the spirit of skepticism that Socrates embodied, the idea of taking nothing for granted and asking questions about everything, including questions of oneself, yes, absolutely. That said, while the great figures of the Red Plato, you know, Socrates was generally I mean, it was not all that present as they come. But certainly have people with people with red play-doh in the entire virus.Andrew Keen: You mentioned Benjamin Franklin earlier, David. Most of the Enlightenment, of course, seems to be centered in France and Scotland, Germany, England. But America, many Europeans went to America then as a, what some people would call a settler colonial society, or certainly an offshoot of the European world. Was the settling of America and the American Revolution Was it the quintessential Enlightenment project?David Bell: Another very good question, and again, it depends a bit on who you talk to. I just mentioned this book by Peter Gay, and the last part of his book is called The Science of Freedom, and it's all about the American Revolution. So certainly a lot of interpreters of the Enlightenment have said that, yes, the American revolution represents in a sense the best possible outcome of the American Revolution, it was the best, possible outcome of the enlightened. Certainly there you look at the founding fathers of the United States and there's a great deal that they took from me like Certainly, they took a great great number of political ideas from Obviously Madison was very much inspired and drafting the edifice of the Constitution by Montesquieu to see himself Was happy to admit in addition most of the founding Fathers of the united states were you know had kind of you know We still had we were still definitely Christians, but we're also but we were also very much influenced by deism were very much against the idea of making the United States a kind of confessional country where Christianity was dominant. They wanted to believe in the enlightenment principles of free speech, religious toleration and so on and so forth. So in all those senses and very much the gun was probably more inspired than Franklin was somebody who was very conversant with the European Enlightenment. He spent a large part of his life in London. Where he was in contact with figures of the Enlightenment. He also, during the American Revolution, of course, he was mostly in France, where he is vetted by some of the surviving fellows and were very much in contact for them as well. So yes, I would say the American revolution is certainly... And then the American revolutionary scene, of course by the Europeans, very much as a kind of offshoot of the enlightenment. So one of the great books of the late Enlightenment is by Condor Say, which he wrote while he was hiding actually in the future evolution of the chariot. It's called a historical sketch of the progress of the human spirit, or the human mind, and you know he writes about the American Revolution as being, basically owing its existence to being like...Andrew Keen: Franklin is of course an example of your pre-academic enlightenment, a generalist, inventor, scientist, entrepreneur, political thinker. What about the role of science and indeed economics in the Enlightenment? David, we're going to talk of course about the Marxist interpretation, perhaps the Marxist interpretation which sees The Enlightenment is just a euphemism, perhaps, for exploitative capitalism. How central was the growth and development of the market, of economics, and innovation, and capitalism in your reading of The Enlightened?David Bell: Well, in my reading, it was very important, but not in the way that the Marxists used to say. So Friedrich Engels once said that the Enlightenment was basically the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie, and there was whole strain of Marxist thinking that followed the assumption that, and then Karl Marx himself argued that the documents like the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, which obviously were inspired by the Enlightment, were simply kind of the near, or kind of. Way that the bourgeoisie was able to advance itself ideologically, and I don't think that holds much water, which is very little indication that any particular economic class motivated the Enlightenment or was using the Enlightment in any way. That said, I think it's very difficult to imagine the Enlightement without the social and economic changes that come in with the 18th century. To begin with globalization. If you read the great works of the Enlightenment, it's remarkable just how open they are to talking about humanity in general. So one of Voltaire's largest works, one of his most important works, is something called Essay on Customs and the Spirit of Nations, which is actually History of the World, where he talks learnedly not simply about Europe, but about the Americas, about China, about Africa, about India. Montesquieu writes Persian letters. Christian Volpe writes about Chinese philosophy. You know, Rousseau writes about... You know, the earliest days of humankind talks about Africa. All the great figures of the Enlightenment are writing about the rest of the world, and this is a period in which contacts between Europe and the rest the world are exploding along with international trade. So by the end of the 18th century, there are 4,000 to 5,000 ships a year crossing the Atlantic. It's an enormous number. And that's one context in which the enlightenment takes place. Another is what we call the consumer revolution. So in the 18th century, certainly in the major cities of Western Europe, people of a wide range of social classes, including even artisans, sort of somewhat wealthy artisians, shopkeepers, are suddenly able to buy a much larger range of products than they were before. They're able to choose how to basically furnish their own lives, if you will, how they're gonna dress, what they're going to eat, what they gonna put on the walls of their apartments and so on and so forth. And so they become accustomed to exercising a great deal more personal choice than their ancestors have done. And the Enlightenment really develops in tandem with this. Most of the great works of the Enlightment, they're not really written to, they're treatises, they're like Kant, they're written to persuade you to think in a single way. Really written to make you ask questions yourself, to force you to ponder things. They're written in the form of puzzles and riddles. Voltaire had a great line there, he wrote that the best kind of books are the books that readers write half of themselves as they read, and that's sort of the quintessence of the Enlightenment as far as I'm concerned.Andrew Keen: Yeah, Voltaire might have been comfortable on YouTube or Facebook. David, you mentioned all those ships going from Europe across the Atlantic. Of course, many of those ships were filled with African slaves. You mentioned this in your piece. I mean, this is no secret, of course. You also mentioned a couple of times Montesquieu's Persian letters. To what extent is... The enlightenment then perhaps the birth of Western power, of Western colonialism, of going to Africa, seizing people, selling them in North America, the French, the English, Dutch colonization of the rest of the world. Of course, later more sophisticated Marxist thinkers from the Frankfurt School, you mentioned these in your essay, Odorno and Horkheimer in particular, See the Enlightenment as... A project, if you like, of Western domination. I remember reading many years ago when I was in graduate school, Edward Said, his analysis of books like The Persian Letters, which is a form of cultural Western power. How much of this is simply bound up in the profound, perhaps, injustice of the Western achievement? And of course, some of the justice as well. We haven't talked about Jefferson, but perhaps in Jefferson's life and his thinking and his enlightened principles and his... Life as a slave owner, these contradictions are most self-evident.David Bell: Well, there are certainly contradictions, and there's certainly... I think what's remarkable, if you think about it, is that if you read through works of the Enlightenment, you would be hard-pressed to find a justification for slavery. You do find a lot of critiques of slavery, and I think that's something very important to keep in mind. Obviously, the chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas began well before the Enlightment, it began in 1500. The Enlightenment doesn't have the credit for being the first movement to oppose slavery. That really goes back to various religious groups, especially the Fakers. But that said, you have in France, you had in Britain, in America even, you'd have a lot of figures associated with the Enlightenment who were pretty sure of becoming very forceful opponents of slavery very early. Now, when it comes to imperialism, that's a tricky issue. What I think you'd find in these light bulbs, you'd different sorts of tendencies and different sorts of writings. So there are certainly a lot of writers of the Enlightenment who are deeply opposed to European authorities. One of the most popular works of the late Enlightenment was a collective work edited by the man named the Abbe Rinal, which is called The History of the Two Indies. And that is a book which is deeply, deeply critical of European imperialism. At the same time, at the same of the enlightenment, a lot the works of history written during the Enlightment. Tended, such as Voltaire's essay on customs, which I just mentioned, tend to give a kind of very linear version of history. They suggest that all societies follow the same path, from sort of primitive savagery, hunter-gatherers, through early agriculture, feudal stages, and on into sort of modern commercial society and civilization. And so they're basically saying, okay, we, the Europeans, are the most advanced. People like the Africans and the Native Americans are the least advanced, and so perhaps we're justified in going and quote, bringing our civilization to them, what later generations would call the civilizing missions, or possibly just, you know, going over and exploiting them because we are stronger and we are more, and again, we are the best. And then there's another thing that the Enlightenment did. The Enlightenment tended to destroy an older Christian view of humankind, which in some ways militated against modern racism. Christians believed, of course, that everyone was the same from Adam and Eve, which meant that there was an essential similarity in the world. And the Enlightenment challenged this by challenging the biblical kind of creation. The Enlightenment challenges this. Voltaire, for instance, believed that there had actually been several different human species that had different origins, and that can very easily become a justification for racism. Buffon, one of the most Figures of the French Enlightenment, one of the early naturalists, was crucial for trying to show that in fact nature is not static, that nature is always changing, that species are changing, including human beings. And so again, that allowed people to think in terms of human beings at different stages of evolution, and perhaps this would be a justification for privileging the more advanced humans over the less advanced. In the 18th century itself, most of these things remain potential, rather than really being acted upon. But in the 19th century, figures of writers who would draw upon these things certainly went much further, and these became justifications for slavery, imperialism, and other things. So again, the Enlightenment is the source of a great deal of stuff here, and you can't simply put it into one box or more.Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier, David, that Concorda wrote one of the later classics of the... Condorcet? Sorry, Condorcets, excuse my French. Condorcès wrote one the later Classics of the Enlightenment when he was hiding from the French Revolution. In your mind, was the revolution itself the natural conclusion, climax? Perhaps anti-climax of the Enlightenment. Certainly, it seems as if a lot of the critiques of the French Revolution, particularly the more conservative ones, Burke comes to mind, suggested that perhaps the principles of in the Enlightment inevitably led to the guillotine, or is that an unfair way of thinking of it?David Bell: Well, there are a lot of people who have thought like that. Edmund Burke already, writing in 1790, in his reflections on the revolution in France, he said that everything which was great in the old regime is being dissolved and, quoting, dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. And then he said about the French that in the groves of their academy at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing but the Gallows. So there, in 1780, he already seemed to be predicting the reign of terror and blaming it. A certain extent from the Enlightenment. That said, I think, you know, again, the French Revolution is incredibly complicated event. I mean, you certainly have, you know, an explosion of what we could call Enlightenment thinking all over the place. In France, it happened in France. What happened there was that you had a, you know, the collapse of an extraordinarily inefficient government and a very, you know, in a very antiquated, paralyzed system of government kind of collapsed, created a kind of political vacuum. Into that vacuum stepped a lot of figures who were definitely readers of the Enlightenment. Oh so um but again the Enlightment had I said I don't think you can call the Enlightement a single thing so to say that the Enlightiment inspired the French Revolution rather than the There you go.Andrew Keen: Although your essay on liberties is the Enlightenment then and now you probably didn't write is always these lazy editors who come up with inaccurate and inaccurate titles. So for you, there is no such thing as the Enlighten.David Bell: No, there is. There is. But still, it's a complex thing. It contains multitudes.Andrew Keen: So it's the Enlightenment rather than the United States.David Bell: Conflicting tendencies, it has contradictions within it. There's enough unity to refer to it as a singular noun, but it doesn't mean that it all went in one single direction.Andrew Keen: But in historical terms, did the failure of the French Revolution, its descent into Robespierre and then Bonaparte, did it mark the end in historical terms a kind of bookend of history? You began in 1720 by 1820. Was the age of the Enlightenment pretty much over?David Bell: I would say yes. I think that, again, one of the things about the French Revolution is that people who are reading these books and they're reading these ideas and they are discussing things really start to act on them in a very different way from what it did before the French revolution. You have a lot of absolute monarchs who are trying to bring certain enlightenment principles to bear in their form of government, but they're not. But it's difficult to talk about a full-fledged attempt to enact a kind of enlightenment program. Certainly a lot of the people in the French Revolution saw themselves as doing that. But as they did it, they ran into reality, I would say. I mean, now Tocqueville, when he writes his old regime in the revolution, talks about how the French philosophes were full of these abstract ideas that were divorced from reality. And while that's an exaggeration, there was a certain truth to them. And as soon as you start having the age of revolutions, as soon you start people having to devise systems of government that will actually last, and as you have people, democratic representative systems that will last, and as they start revising these systems under the pressure of actual events, then you're not simply talking about an intellectual movement anymore, you're talking about something very different. And so I would say that, well, obviously the ideas of the Enlightenment continue to inspire people, the books continue to be read, debated. They lead on to figures like Kant, and as we talked about earlier, Kant leads to Hegel, Hegel leads to Marx in a certain sense. Nonetheless, by the time you're getting into the 19th century, what you have, you know, has connections to the Enlightenment, but can we really still call it the Enlightment? I would sayAndrew Keen: And Tocqueville, of course, found democracy in America. Is democracy itself? I know it's a big question. But is it? Bound up in the Enlightenment. You've written extensively, David, both for liberties and elsewhere on liberalism. Is the promise of democracy, democratic systems, the one born in the American Revolution, promised in the French Revolution, not realized? Are they products of the Enlightment, or is the 19th century and the democratic systems that in the 19th century, is that just a separate historical track?David Bell: Again, I would say there are certain things in the Enlightenment that do lead in that direction. Certainly, I think most figures in the enlightenment in one general sense or another accepted the idea of a kind of general notion of popular sovereignty. It didn't mean that they always felt that this was going to be something that could necessarily be acted upon or implemented in their own day. And they didn't necessarily associate generalized popular sovereignty with what we would now call democracy with people being able to actually govern themselves. Would be certain figures, certainly Diderot and some of his essays, what we saw very much in the social contract, you know, were sketching out, you knows, models for possible democratic system. Condorcet, who actually lived into the French Revolution, wrote one of the most draft constitutions for France, that's one of most democratic documents ever proposed. But of course there were lots of figures in the Enlightenment, Voltaire, and others who actually believed much more in absolute monarchy, who believed that you just, you know, you should have. Freedom of speech and freedom of discussion, out of which the best ideas would emerge, but then you had to give those ideas to the prince who imposed them by poor sicknesses.Andrew Keen: And of course, Rousseau himself, his social contract, some historians have seen that as the foundations of totalitarian, modern totalitarianism. Finally, David, your wonderful essay in Liberties in the spring quarterly 2025 is The Enlightenment, Then and Now. What about now? You work at Princeton, your president has very bravely stood up to the new presidential regime in the United States, in defense of academic intellectual freedom. Does the word and the movement, does it have any relevance in the 2020s, particularly in an age of neo-authoritarianism around the world?David Bell: I think it does. I think we have to be careful about it. I always get a little nervous when people say, well, we should simply go back to the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenments is history. We don't go back the 18th century. I think what we need to do is to recover certain principles, certain ideals from the 18 century, the ones that matter to us, the ones we think are right, and make our own Enlightenment better. I don't think we need be governed by the 18 century. Thomas Paine once said that no generation should necessarily rule over every generation to come, and I think that's probably right. Unfortunately in the United States, we have a constitution which is now essentially unamendable, so we're doomed to live by a constitution largely from the 18th century. But are there many things in the Enlightenment that we should look back to, absolutely?Andrew Keen: Well, David, I am going to free you for your own French Enlightenment. You can go and have some croissant now in your local cafe in Paris. Thank you so much for a very, I excuse the pun, enlightening conversation on the Enlightenment then and now, Essential Essay in Liberties. I'd love to get you back on the show. Talk more history. Thank you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Virginie Girod raconte Condorcet (1743-1794), homme du XVIIIe siècle et figure oubliée des Lumières sacrifiée par la Révolution. Dans le premier épisode de ce double récit inédit d'Au cœur de l'Histoire, Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, porte les idées des Lumières. Formé à Paris, proche des encyclopédistes, il prend fait et cause pour les droits de l'homme, défendant des idées modernes telles la fin de l'esclavage et l'émancipation des femmes. En 1789, Condorcet prend part à la Révolution française. Distribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Virginie Girod raconte Condorcet (1743-1794), homme du XVIIIe siècle et figure oubliée des Lumières sacrifiée par la Révolution. Dans le deuxième épisode de ce double récit inédit d'Au coeur de l'Histoire, Condorcet est élu député deux ans après l'éclatement de la Révolution française. Rallié au parti des Girondins, il est contraint de fuir en 1793, alors que la Convention nationale ordonne son arrestation. Neuf mois plus tard, il est arrêté après avoir été reconnu dans une auberge. Le lendemain, Condorcet est retrouvé mort dans sa cellule. En 1989, il fait son entrée au Panthéon. Distribué par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Acquista il mio nuovo libro, “Anche Socrate qualche dubbio ce l'aveva”: https://amzn.to/3wPZfmCTurgot e Condorcet non furono solo dei filosofi, ma soprattutto degli economisti e degli scienziati. E però diedero un importante contributo anche all'idea di progresso.Diventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/dentro-alla-filosofia--4778244/support.

En clin d'œil à l'Exposition du Fabriqué en France organisée au Palais de l'Élysée en octobre dernier, Le French Market by LCS a mis à l'honneur les multiples expressions de l'artisanat #madeinFrance le temps d'un podcast qui s'est tenu au Lycée Français de Sydney, le Lycée Condorcet le 14 décembre dernier, sous l'égide de Pierre André-Imbert, ambassadeur de France en Australie, et de l'équipe du Lycée Condorcet de Sydney, Nicolas L'Hotellier, proviseur et Elise Lombrage, directrice de la communication.

Mardi 4 février, Frédéric Simottel a reçu Bernard Gavgani, directeur des systèmes d'information de BNP Paribas, Ludovic Anne, proviseur au Lycée Condorcet à Montreuil, Jean-Yves Gras, directeur général de Colissimo, Jean-Baptiste Paccoud, Associé Lead AI & Data France chez Deloitte, Thomas Leblanc, directeur général de Cellenza, et William Eldin, président de XXII, dans l'émission Tech&Co Business sur BFM Business. Retrouvez l'émission le samedi et réécoutez la en podcast.

Ce mardi 4 février, Bernard Gavgani, directeur des systèmes d'information de BNP Paribas ; Ludovic Anne, proviseur au Lycée Condorcet à Montreuil, se sont penchés sur la formation des jeunes à la tech, les dispositifs mis en œuvre pour les attirer vers les nouvelles technologies et l'intelligence artificielle, dans l'émission Tech&Co Business présentée par Frédéric Simottel. Tech&Co Business est à voir ou écouter le mardi sur BFM Business.

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/european-studies

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/french-studies

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter.

The French have long self-identified as champions of universal emancipation, yet the republicanism they adopted has often been faulted for being exclusionary – of women, foreigners, and religious and ethnic minorities. Can republicanism be an attractive alternative to liberalism, communism, and communitarianism, or is it fundamentally flawed? Sharing Freedom: Republicanism and Exclusion in Revolutionary France (Cambridge UP, 2024) traces the development of republicanism from an older elitist theory of freedom into an inclusive theory of emancipation during the French Revolution. It uncovers the theoretical innovations of Rousseau and of revolutionaries such as Sieyès, Robespierre, Condorcet, and Grouchy. We learn how they struggled to adapt republicanism to the new circumstances of a large and diverse France, full of poor and dependent individuals with little education or experience of freedom. Analysing the argumentative logic that led republicans to justify the exclusion of many, this book renews the republican tradition and connects it with the enduring issues of colonialism, immigration, slavery, poverty and gender. Geneviève Rousselière is a Franco-American political theorist. She is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Duke University. She is the co-editor of Republicanism and the Future of Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2019). Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I discuss how the role of voting is intended to garner the consent of the governed, not to accomplish the will of the governed. The system will carry on as it is until voters disenfranchise themselves from the ballot box and move into the streets. A huge thanks to Seth White for the awesome music!Thanks to Palmtoptiger17 for the beautiful logo: https://www.instagram.com/palmtoptiger17/Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/thewayfourth/?modal=admin_todo_tourYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTd3KlRte86eG9U40ncZ4XA?view_as=subscriberInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/theway4th/ Kingdom Outpost: https://kingdomoutpost.org/My Reading List Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/21940220.J_G_ElliotLe Bon, Condorcet, and Galton Episode: https://share.transistor.fm/s/39cf19bb Thanks to our monthly supporters Laverne Miller Jesse Killion ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

En el programa de hoy os ofrecemos un nuevo episodio In memoriam de Francisco Grande Covián. En esta ocasión, el Dr. Grande Covián se erige como defensor de las ideas de Thomas Robert Malthus, uno de los principales pensadores del siglo dieciocho, sobre el futuro de la humanidad, y en particular de su capacidad para alimentarse adecuadamente utilizando los limitados recursos del planeta Tierra. El Dr. Grande contrapone las ideas de Malthus, teñidas de un cierto pesimismo, con las más bien optimistas, por no decir utópicas, ideas de otros dos importantes pensadores de ese mismo siglo, el inglés William Godwin y el marqués de Condorcet, de nacionalidad francesa.

En el programa de hoy os ofrecemos un nuevo episodio In memoriam de Francisco Grande Covián. En esta ocasión, el Dr. Grande Covián se erige como defensor de las ideas de Thomas Robert Malthus, uno de los principales pensadores del siglo dieciocho, sobre el futuro de la humanidad, y en particular de su capacidad para alimentarse adecuadamente utilizando los limitados recursos del planeta Tierra. El Dr. Grande contrapone las ideas de Malthus, teñidas de un cierto pesimismo, con las más bien optimistas, por no decir utópicas, ideas de otros dos importantes pensadores de ese mismo siglo, el inglés William Godwin y el marqués de Condorcet, de nacionalidad francesa.

Fala, pirataria! Está no mar o nosso novo podcast! Neste episódio, Daniel Gomes de Carvalho (@danielgomesdecr) e Rafinha (@rafaverdasca) recebem o mestre em história pela Unicamp, Ronaldo Francisco de Santos Júnior (@ronaldo_santosjr), para uma conversa sobre Marquês de Sade. Canal do História Pirata no YouTube: www.youtube.com/@historiapirata chave pix: podcast.historiapirata@gmail.com Livro do Prof. Daniel sobre a Revolução Francesa: www.editoracontexto.com.br/produto/rev…esa/5105603 Esse episódio foi editado por: Gabriel Campos (@_grcampos) Bibliografia: Livros do Marquês de Sade traduzidos para o português: Os 120 dias de Sodoma. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2006 (https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=594CE1841988CDE4FD4F8A633101D4A7) Os Crimes do Amor e A arte de escrever ao gosto do público. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 2014 (https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=61034C7F295830165CD2FF25DBBDA622) A Filosofia na Alcova ou, Os preceptores imorais. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1999 (https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=D238DEA6D73B989222EAF74BAFB5356B) História de Juliette, ou As Prosperidades do Vício. Lisboa: Guerra e Paz, 2007. Os Infortúnios da Virtude. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2006 (https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=749633FC48E24C6922F4C6AEEBCDCD72) Justine, ou Os Tormentos da Virtude. São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2021. Dissertação do Ronaldo sobre o marquês de Sade e a Revolução: 1) Ronaldo Francisco dos Santos Junior. As utopias revolucionárias e a revolução libertina. Sade e sua apropriação da linguagem política revolucionária. Atuação política e crítica ao governo republicano (1792-1795). Dissertação de Mestrado em História. Campinas: Unicamp, 2022. Esta dissertação explora a relação entre o marquês de Sade e a Revolução Francesa abordando como foi pensada construção do Estado revolucionário, a educação/instrução pública e as políticas e práticas ligadas à religião a partir da comparação dos escritos e discursos do marquês de Sade, o jacobino Robespierre e o filósofo Condorcet. 2) Podcast do Ronaldo: Esse dia foi Loko – História de Cabeça para Baixo: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/essediafoiloko/e

Dans le cadre du Grasse summer podcast festival (festival historique du podcast du salon du livre d'histoire de Grasse), retrouvez chaque semaine cet été une historienne/un historien qui vous parle de son sujet de prédilection.Aujourd'hui, je reçois Cécile Berly, directrice artistique du salon d'histoire de Grasse, historienne spécialiste du XVIIIe siècle pour parler des femmes au XVIIIe siècle.Retrouvez ses dernières publications :Elles écrivent: Les plus belles lettres de femmes au XVIIIe siècle, Passés composés, 2024Guillotinées: Marie-Antoinette, Madame du Barry, Madame Roland, Olympe de Gouges, Passés composés, 2023Marie-Antoinette, PUF, 2020Bonne écoute !✉️ Contact: tasquienhistoire@gmail.com*** Sur les réseaux sociaux ***Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/TasQuiEnHistoireTwitter : @AsHistoire Instagram : @tasquienhistoire*** Crédits Sons ***Audiojungle : Be inspired (droits acquis)Hébergé par Ausha. Visitez ausha.co/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Important open problems in voting, published by Closed Limelike Curves on July 2, 2024 on LessWrong. Strategy-resistance Identify, or prove impossibility, of a voting system which incentivizes 1. A strictly sincere ranking of all candidates in the zero-information setting, where it implements a "good" social choice rule such as the relative (normalized) utilitarian rule, a Condorcet social choice rule, or the Borda rule. 2. In a Poisson game or similar setting: a unique semi-sincere Nash equilibrium that elects the Condorcet winner (if one exists), similar to those shown for approval voting by Myerson and Weber (1993) and Durand et al. (2019). Properties of Multiwinner voting systems There's strikingly little research on multiwinner voting systems. You can find a table of criteria for single-winner systems on Wikipedia, but if you try and find the same for multi-winner systems, there's nothing. Here's 9 important criteria we can judge multiwinner voting systems on: 1. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives 2. Independence of Universally-Approved Candidates 3. Monotonicity 4. Participation 5. Precinct-summability 6. Polynomial-time approximation scheme 7. Proportionality for solid coalitions 8. Perfect representation in the limit 9. Core-stability (may need to be approximated within a constant factor) I'm curious which combinations of these properties exist. Probabilistic/weighted voting systems are allowed. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Important open problems in voting, published by Closed Limelike Curves on July 2, 2024 on LessWrong. Strategy-resistance Identify, or prove impossibility, of a voting system which incentivizes 1. A strictly sincere ranking of all candidates in the zero-information setting, where it implements a "good" social choice rule such as the relative (normalized) utilitarian rule, a Condorcet social choice rule, or the Borda rule. 2. In a Poisson game or similar setting: a unique semi-sincere Nash equilibrium that elects the Condorcet winner (if one exists), similar to those shown for approval voting by Myerson and Weber (1993) and Durand et al. (2019). Properties of Multiwinner voting systems There's strikingly little research on multiwinner voting systems. You can find a table of criteria for single-winner systems on Wikipedia, but if you try and find the same for multi-winner systems, there's nothing. Here's 9 important criteria we can judge multiwinner voting systems on: 1. Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives 2. Independence of Universally-Approved Candidates 3. Monotonicity 4. Participation 5. Precinct-summability 6. Polynomial-time approximation scheme 7. Proportionality for solid coalitions 8. Perfect representation in the limit 9. Core-stability (may need to be approximated within a constant factor) I'm curious which combinations of these properties exist. Probabilistic/weighted voting systems are allowed. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Marlies Dekkers in gesprek met hoogleraar Rechtsfilosofie Andreas Kinneging over Goed en Kwaad, de morele tekortkomingen van het liberalisme en de diepere lagen van sprookjes. Bronnen en links bij deze uitzending: - Het boek 'Over vooruitgang van de menselijke geest' van Markies de Condorcet: https://anhypotheton.eu/condorcet.php - Het boek 'De Onzichtbare Maat' van Kinneging: https://uitgeverijprometheus.nl/boeken/onzichtbare-maat-gebonden/ - Het boek 'Hercules op de Tweesprong': https://uitgeverijprometheus.nl/boeken/hercules-op-de-tweesprong-gebonden/ - Het boek 'Je mag zeggen wat je denkt': https://uitgeverijprometheus.nl/boeken/je-mag-zeggen-wat-je-denkt-paperback/ - De verzamelde sprookjes van de gebroeders Grimm: https://lemniscaat.nl/boeken/grimm

Episode: 1921 Arrow's Paradox and third party candidates.  Today, guest scientist Andrew Boyd votes.

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. WithRachel Hammersley Professor of Intellectual History at Newcastle UniversityRichard Whatmore Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual HistoryAnd Tom Hopkins Senior Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn CollegeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (University of Chicago Press, 1974)Keith Michael Baker, ‘On Condorcet's Sketch' (Daedalus, summer 2004)Lorraine Daston, ‘Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment' (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2009)Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago University Press, 2010)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 WoklerGary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1985)Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (eds.), Condorcet: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Kathleen McCrudden Illert, A Republic of Sympathy: Sophie de Grouchy's Politics and Philosophy, 1785-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt (eds.), Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 1994)Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, (Harvard University Press, 2001)Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment (Allen Lane, 2023)David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

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. WithRachel Hammersley Professor of Intellectual History at Newcastle UniversityRichard Whatmore Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual HistoryAnd Tom Hopkins Senior Teaching Associate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn CollegeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (University of Chicago Press, 1974)Keith Michael Baker, ‘On Condorcet's Sketch' (Daedalus, summer 2004)Lorraine Daston, ‘Condorcet and the Meaning of Enlightenment' (Proceedings of the British Academy, 2009)Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago University Press, 2010)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 WoklerGary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (Princeton University Press, 1985)Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (eds.), Condorcet: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Kathleen McCrudden Illert, A Republic of Sympathy: Sophie de Grouchy's Politics and Philosophy, 1785-1815 (Cambridge University Press, 2024)Iain McLean and Fiona Hewitt (eds.), Condorcet: Foundations of Social Choice and Political Theory (Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd, 1994)Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, (Harvard University Press, 2001)Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment (Allen Lane, 2023)David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

The Power of Song https://pca.st/94dujh8r Condorcet, French Philosopher (via ChatGPT) https://chat.openai.com/share/5410cf11-f6f4-41f3-87c2-12722c2a765e 7 Unusual Writing Systems From Around the World & How They Developed https://www.thecollector.com/unusual-writing-systems/ Unboxing a (gross) vomit-inducing cup | V&A https://youtu.be/kKbNcR6ce7Y?si=o1w–Kj0Q2oCbupb When Lee Miller Took a Bath in Hitler's Tub https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/when-lee-miller-took-a-bath-in-hitlers-tub In Our TimeCondorcet https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001v3wy Archéologie de la guerre : aux origines de la ... Read more

Quel point commun peut-il y avoir entre Condorcet, Louis Delgrès, l'abbé Grégoire et Toussaint Louverture ? Sans doute un Idéal qui aura été défendu par des anonymes et d'illustres figures, mais aussi bafoué et piétiné en plein siècle des Lumières. Oser la liberté, figures des combats contre l'esclavage… expose et éclaire la généalogie d'une volonté partagée de liberté comme processus universel. C'est ce que nous explique Florence Alexis, commissaire de cette grande exposition à voir actuellement dans ce lieu si symbolique qu'est le Panthéon à Paris. Une commande du Centre des Monuments nationaux et de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de l'Esclavage. Signe des temps qui changent dans notre France si mal à l'aise avec son passé colonial ? Peut-être. Florence Alexis qui n'est pas que la fille de l'immense Jacques Stéphen Alexis nous le dira. Signe en tout cas que certains gestes viennent de mains précieuses, chargées d'histoire, de mémoire et de voix tutélaires…Les choix musicaux de Florence AlexisMaya Angelou Still I riseHarry Belafonte Merci Bon DieuDanyèl Waro Mandela

In this episode, we start to add nuance to our understanding of power by investigating the three dimensions of power, as identified by Dr. Steven Lukes. Dr. Lukes, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at New York University, joins us for the conversation and walks us through his understanding of decision-making power, agenda-setting power, and ideological power. He encourages us to look more deeply into how pervasive and nuanced power can be. --- Dr. Steven Lukes is the author of numerous books and articles about political and social theory. Currently, he is a professor emeritus of sociology at New York University. He was formerly a fellow in politics and sociology at Balliol College, Oxford. He was then, in turn, a professor of political and social theory at the European University Institute, Florence, of  moral philosophy at the University of Siena and of sociology at the London School of Economics. His interests include political sociology, focusing on the study of power; political theory and philosophy; Marxism and other socialist traditions; philosophy of the social sciences; the history of ideas, in particular the political thought of Condorcet; political humour and satire; and, most recently, the sociology of morals, his current preoccupation. Lukes's best-known, still controversial academic theory is his so-called ‘radical' view of power. It can be simply stated. It claims there are three dimensions of power. The first is overt power, typically exhibited in the presence of conflict in decision-making situations, where power consists in winning, that is prevailing over another or others. The second is covert power, consisting in control over what gets decided, by ignoring or deflecting existing grievances. And the third is the power to shape desires and beliefs, thereby averting both conflict and grievances. It is the most hidden from view—the least accessible to observation by social actors and observers alike. It can be at work, despite apparent consensus between the powerful and the powerless. He is a member of the editorial board of the European Journal of Sociology and a fellow of the British Academy. --- Dr. Lukes has written widely on power from a number of perspectives, but these publications provide a useful introduction to his scholarship addressing the topic: Lukes, S. (2021). Power: A radical view. Bloomsbury Publishing. Lukes, S. (Ed.). (1986). Power (Vol. 2). NYU Press. Lukes, S. (2005). Power and the Battle for Hearts and Minds. Millennium, 33(3), 477-493. Lukes, S. (2006). Individualism. ECPr Press. The Social Science for Public Good Podcast is a project of the Virginia Tech Institute for Policy and Governance and VT Publishing intended to make social science theories accessible and available to individuals and organizations seeking to promote social change. Music: Purple-planet.com

On August 19, 1662, French philosopher, mathematician, and apologist Blaise Pascal died at just 39 years old. Pascal, despite his shortened life, is renowned for pioneering work in geometry, physics, and probability theory. His most powerful legacy, however, involves the ways he engaged with life's biggest questions.   Pascal's intellect garnered attention at an early age. At 16, he produced an essay on the geometry of cones so impressive that René Descartes initially refused to believe it could possibly be attributed to a “sixteen-year-old child.” Later, Pascal advanced the study of vacuums in the face of a prevailing (and misplaced) belief that nature is completely filled with matter, and thus “abhors a vacuum.”   In 1654, his work on probability took a new turn when he was sent a brainteaser by a friend. Applying mathematics to the problem, Pascal laid out rows of numbers in a triangle formation, a formation that now bears his name. As author John F. Ross described,   Here was the very idea of probability: establishing the numerical odds of a future event with mathematical precision. Remarkably, no one else had cracked the puzzle of probability before, although the Greeks and Romans had come close.  In 1646, Blaise Pascal encountered the kindness of two Jansenist Christians caring for his injured father. Their love in action earned Pascal's admiration. Then, on the evening of November 23, 1654, Pascal experienced God's presence in a new and personal way, which he described on a scrap of parchment that he sewed into his jacket and carried with him for the rest of his life:   FIRE—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certitude, certitude. Heartfelt joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ. My God and thy God. Thy God shall be my God.   In his writing, Pascal's notions of probability met his faith in God. A compilation of his collected manuscripts was published after his death in a volume entitled, Pensées, or “Thoughts.” Best known is his famous “wager” that, facing uncertainty and in a game with such high stakes, it makes far more sense for fallen human beings to believe in God's existence than doubt it. “If you gain,” he wrote, “you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.”  Pascal also offered among the keenest diagnoses of humanity:   The human being is only a reed, the most feeble in nature; but this is a thinking reed. It isn't necessary for the entire universe to arm itself in order to crush him; a whiff of vapor, a taste of water, suffices to kill him. But when the universe crushes him, the human being becomes still more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and the advantage that the universe has over him. The universe, it does not have a clue.  Or, even better:   What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.  He also described our moral conditions as human beings,  “[W]e hate truth and those who tell it [to] us, and … we like them to be deceived in our favour” (Pensées 100).  Apart from God, Pascal observed, people distract themselves from the reality of death. But the diversions run out, and then mankind   feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness. There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart weariness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair. (Pensées 131)  “Between us and heaven or hell there is only life, which is the frailest thing in the world” (Pensées 213 ).  With a poetic nod to his work on vacuums, Pascal concluded:  What is it then that this desire and this inability proclaim to us, but that there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace …? But these are all inadequate, because the infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.   A generation later, as waves of the Enlightenment swept over Europe, the continent's most prominent thinkers could not escape Pascal's brilliance. According to philosopher Dr. Patrick Riley,  Holbach, as late as the 1770s, still found it necessary to quarrel with the author of the Pensées, Condorcet, when editing Pascal's works, renewed the old debate; Voltaire throughout his life, and even in his last year, launched sally after sally at the writer who frightened him every time he—a hypochondriac—felt ill.   On the human condition in particular, the French Revolution would prove Pascal right and Voltaire wrong. Divorced from God and instead committed to the worship of “pure reason,” France devolved into a violent, anarchic wasteland.  Even today, Blaise Pascal's intellect, passion, and eloquence have lost none of their fire, dedicated as they were to the God who claimed his total devotion. As he wrote on the parchment sewn into his jacket,   Jesus Christ. I have fallen away: I have fled from Him, denied Him, crucified him. May I not fall away forever. We keep hold of him only by the ways taught in the Gospel. Renunciation, total and sweet. Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director. Eternally in joy for a day's exercise on earth. I will not forget Thy word. Amen.  This Breakpoint was co-authored by Kasey Leander. If you enjoy Breakpoint, leave a review on your favorite podcast app. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to breakpoint.org. 

durée : 00:44:08 - Le Temps du débat d'été - par : François Saltiel - Donné perdant des élections législatives par tous les sondages, le Premier ministre socialiste Pedro Sánchez est parvenu dimanche à limiter les gains de l'opposition de droite et conserve, contre toute attente, une chance de se maintenir au pouvoir in extremis grâce au jeu des alliances. - invités : Barbara Loyer Géographe, professeure à l'Institut Français de Géopolitique - Université Paris 8; Juan Jose Dorado Journaliste au groupe média espagnol "La Region" (Galice), correspondant à Paris; Benoît Pellistrandi Historien, spécialiste de l'Espagne contemporaine, professeur en classes préparatoires au Lycée Condorcet à Paris

durée : 00:14:59 - Journal de 22h - La gauche gouvernementale a été sèchement battue lors des élections municipales et régionales en Espagne. Conséquence, le Premier ministre socialiste Pedro Sanchez annonce des législatives en juillet. Les sondages donnent la droite et l'extrême droite aux portes du pouvoir à Madrid. - invités : Benoît Pellistrandi historien, spécialiste de l'Espagne contemporaine, professeur en classes préparatoires au Lycée Condorcet à Paris

durée : 00:14:59 - Journal de 22h - La gauche gouvernementale a été sèchement battue lors des élections municipales et régionales en Espagne. Conséquence, le Premier ministre socialiste Pedro Sanchez annonce des législatives en juillet. Les sondages donnent la droite et l'extrême droite aux portes du pouvoir à Madrid. - invités : Benoît Pellistrandi Historien, spécialiste de l'Espagne contemporaine, professeur en classes préparatoires au Lycée Condorcet à Paris

"This Essay May be Considered as the Germ of the Treatise on The Wealth of Nations, Written by the Celebrated Smith" —Condorcet's Life of Turgot A. R. J. Turgot (1727-81), one of the greatest thinkers of the century of the Enlightenment, is known to political historians as a pioneer of the doctrine of universal progress, which he first put forward when a student at the Sorbonne in a lecture on The Successive Advances of the Human Mind. He is also well known to economists as the author of Reflections on the Formation and the Distribution of Wealth, in which he anticipated - and in some respects surpassed - the theoretical system of classical political economy. In this volume, translations of these two works are printed together with a lesser-known work entitled On Universal History, which should be of great interest to sociologists. Professor Meek has prefaced his own translations of the three texts with an introduction in which he analyses the interesting interrelationship between Turgot's political, economic and sociological theories. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/librivox1/support

Vous aimez apprendre des choses (mais pas forcément toujours dans le cadre de l'école), Condorcet et l'égalité ? Alors vous risquez d'adorer cet épisode sur l'éducation populaire. Et ça tombe bien, c'est ce qu'on tente de faire avec Culture 2000 avec nos petits moyens à nous ! - Rejoignez nous partout les manos et les womanos : frequencemoderne.frtwitter.com/Culture_2000facebook.com/culture2000.fminstagram.com/culture2000.fm - Vous voulez nous soutenir financièrement ? Merci, déjà ! Et c'est par là utip.io/frequencemoderne/ - Parlez de nous à vos copains, si vous le voulez bien, comme ça tout le monde sera plein de connaissance et le monde sera plus doux (résultat non contractuel) - Et sinon, à dans 15 jours en podcast pour un nouvel épisode

Na de executie van Marie Antoinette en de Girondijnen steekt de terreur nog een tandje bij. Het komt nu aan op de zuivering van geheel Frankrijk, opdat het een echte republikeinse gemeenschap kan worden. Elke niet zuivere citoyen wordt nu opgejaagd wild. Zelfs gematigde revolutionairen als Manon Roland belanden onder de guillotine. Condorcet, schrijver van de nieuwe grondwet, de laatste grote verlichtingsfilosoof moet onderduiken.

durée : 00:15:17 - Journal de 8 h - Une trentaine d'étudiants ont été envoyés en garde à vue près de Paris pour s'être rassemblé dans un bâtiment associatif du campus Condorcet.

Nationalité : France Né(e) à : Montevideo, Uruguay , le 16/08/1860 Mort(e) à : Paris , le 20/08/1887 Biographie : Jules Laforgue est un poète du mouvement décadent français. Né dans une famille qui avait émigré en espérant faire fortune, il est le deuxième de onze enfants. À l'âge de dix ans, il est envoyé en France, dans la ville de Tarbes d'où est originaire son père. Jules et son frère aîné y sont confiés à des cousins. Entre 1868 et 1875, il est pensionnaire au lycée de Tarbes. En octobre 1876, il part vivre, avec sa famille rentrée d'Uruguay, à Paris. Sa mère meurt en couches en 1877 alors qu'il a 17 ans. Son père retourne à Tarbes tandis que Laforgue reste à Paris poursuivre ses études au lycée Condorcet. Après des études avortées, il mène une vie relativement difficile. Il fréquente le groupe littéraire des Hydropathes, qui réunit ceux qu'on appellera plus tard les symbolistes. Sur la recommandation de son ami Gustave Kahn et par l'intermédiaire de Paul Bourget, il devient secrétaire du critique et collectionneur d'art Charles Ephrussi, qui possède une collection de tableaux impressionnistes. Jules Laforgue acquiert ainsi un goût sûr pour la peinture. Lorsqu'il apprend la mort de son père, en 1881, il part pour Berlin, où il devient lecteur de l'Impératrice d'Allemagne Augusta de Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, grand-mère du futur Guillaume II. Son travail consiste à lire à l'impératrice, deux heures par jour, les meilleures pages des romans français et des articles de journaux comme ceux de La Revue des Deux Mondes. Il s'agit d'un emploi très rémunérateur (sa fratrie lui est à charge) qui lui laisse du temps libre et qui lui permet de voyager à travers l'Europe. Malgré cela, il éprouve ennui et mal de vivre. En 1885, il publie "Les Complaintes" et l'année suivante "L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune", toujours à compte d'auteur. La même année, il quitte son poste. A Berlin, il rencontre une jeune anglaise, Leah Lee, qu'il épouse le 31 décembre à Londres. Il rentre alors à Paris. Mais son état de santé se dégrade rapidement : atteint de phtisie, il meurt l'année suivante ; sa femme, atteinte du même mal, succombera un an après.

La semaine dernière, le lycée Condorcet inaugurait officiellement un nouveau bâtiment, dont les élèves et les enseignants ont pris possession lors de la dernière rentrée scolaire. Une extension qui va permettre aux élèves de se sentir moins à l'étroit et au lycée de continuer à grandir.

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Maximal Lottery-Lotteries, published by Scott Garrabrant on October 17, 2022 on LessWrong. In the last post we saw how by introducing lotteries, we could resolve one of the major conflicts in voting theory, between Condorcet and consistency (while also satisfying participation and clone independence). Now, we are going to make it better. How? By adding even more lotteries! As far as I know, unlike the previous posts, the content of this post is a new proposal by me. Everything in this post should be treated as conjecture, rather than proven. The Proposal Fix a finite set C of candidates, and an electorate V∈Δ(C[0,1]). First, recall the following definition of maximal lotteries. Given lotteries A,B∈Δ(C), we say that A dominates B if Pa∼A,b∼B,v∼V(v(a)>v(b))≥Pa∼A,b∼B,v∼V(v(b)>v(a)). A maximal lottery is an M∈Δ(C) such that for all other L∈Δ(C), M dominates L. Now for maximal lottery-lotteries. Given lottery-lotteries A,B∈Δ(Δ(C)), we say that A dominates B if PA∼A,B∼B,v∼V(v(A)>v(B))≥PA∼A,B∼B,v∼V(v(B)>v(A)). A maximal lottery-lottery is an M∈Δ(Δ(C)) such that for all other L∈Δ(Δ(C)), M dominates L. Note that when we say v(A), since A is not a candidate, but a distribution of candidates, we mean the expected value of v(a) when a is sampled from A, and similarly for v(B). Unlike in maximal lotteries, to determine whether v(A)>v(B), we need the full information of v as a utility function (up to affine transformation), not just the preference ordering over candidates. M is a distribution on distributions on candidates, but we need to output a distribution on candidates. Thus, we imagine sampling a distribution at random from M, and then sampling a candidate at random from that distribution. The output of the maximal lottery-lotteries voting system is the distribution that assigns each candidate the probability that they would be sampled from the above procedure. Lottery Independence To argue for maximal lottery-lotteries, I introduce a new criterion: lottery independence. Given an initial set of candidates, C, we could imagine fixing any distribution over candidates P∈Δ(C), and introducing a new lottery candidate, representing P. Voters vote for the lottery candidate based on their expected utility from the lottery. Whenever the lottery candidate wins, we sample a candidate according to P. A voting system satisfies lottery independence if introducing lottery candidates does not change the probability that any candidate is elected. This is not a criterion that voting theorists would normally talk about, because in order to satisfy it, you both have to allow the voting system to be non-deterministic, and you have to collect utility data from the voters. Lottery independence can be thought of as a strengthening of clone independence. Instead of introducing a clone of a single candidate, we introduce a lottery, which is like a randomized clone which clones a candidate at random after the election is over. Maximal lottery-lotteries satisfies lottery independence. Indeed, one way to think of maximal lottery-lotteries, is first we close the set of candidates under all possible lotteries, and then we run maximal lotteries on the resulting set of candidates. Maximal lottery-lotteries also satisfies consistency and participation, since they are just maximal lotteries over a larger set of candidates. Lottery Condorcet Criterion Since Condorcet, consistency, and clone independence uniquely specify Maximal lotteries, if maximal lottery-lotteries is different, it must sacrifice one of these properties. It sacrifices the Condorcet criterion. Note that in most contexts, this is where I would stop reading. My normal first question when I see a new voting system is, "Is it Condorcet?" If the answer is no, my next follow-up questions are "How often does it correctly find the correct (Condorcet)...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Voting Theory Introduction, published by Scott Garrabrant on October 17, 2022 on LessWrong. Sequence Introduction This is the first post in a sequence in which I will propose a new voting system! In this post, I introduce the framework and notation, and give some background on voting theory. In the next post, I will show you the best voting system you've probably never heard of, maximal lotteries. (Seriously, it's really good.) After that, I will make it even better, and propose a new system: maximal lottery-lotteries. Then comes the bad news: I can't prove that maximal lottery-lotteries exist! (Or alternatively, good news: You can try to solve a cool new open problem in voting theory!) Thanks to Jessica Taylor for first introducing me to maximal lotteries, and Sam Eisenstat for spending many hours with me trying to prove the existence of maximal lottery-lotteries. Generalizing Voting Theory A voting system is a function that takes in a distribution on utility functions on a set of candidates, and produces a distribution on that set of candidates. This is not what a voting theorist will tell you a voting system is. That is because they like to make a bunch of extra assumptions: The set of candidates is finite. The function only uses the preorders on candidates implied by the utility functions. The output distribution assigns probability 1 to a single candidate. The input distribution is the uniform distribution on some finite set. I am going to play along with some of these assumptions, but I want my types and notation to treat them as explicit assumptions, so I will use notation that will make it easy to remove these assumptions as needed. Technically, I also make one assumption that voting theorists usually don't make. That is that the voting system is homogeneous. Homogeneous voting systems are only a function of what proportion of voters have each preference, not on the absolute number of voters that have each preference. Thus, when I said the input was a distribution on utility functions, rather than a multi-set of utility functions, I threw out the information that would have allowed for non-homogeneous voting systems. I don't know of any seriously proposed voting systems that are non-homogeneous, so this is not a significant extra assumption. Throughout the sequence, I will take for granted that all voting systems are homogeneous. Assumption 2 is most likely to be violated by voting theorists, as in approval voting and range voting. Next is 3, and there is a small subset of voting theorists who think about non-determinism. Assumption 4 is not very important, and while it is usually made, it also usually does not matter. Assumption 1 is almost never violated, or at least when it is, the field is called something other than voting theory. A utility function on a set S is just a function from S[0,1]. I will write Δ(S) for the set of distributions on the set S. (I'm not going to worry about the sigma algebras; usually it will be obvious/not matter.) If f is a voting system, C is a set of candidates, and V∈Δ(C[0,1]) is a distribution on utility functions on C, I will write fC(V) for the output of the voting system on V, so fC(V)∈Δ(C). Some Important Criteria To get more comfortable with this formalism, we will translate three important voting criteria. Condorcet Criterion If a candidate would defeat all others in one-on-one elections, that candidate should win. Translated to our formalism, f satisfies the Condorcet criterion if whenever there exists a c∈C such that for all d∈C, we have Pv∼V(v(c)>v(d))>12, we havefC(V)(c)=1. We can think of Pv∼V(v(c)>v(d)) as saying when we randomly choose a voter v, what is the probability that v prefers c to d. If this probability is greater than 12, then a majority of voters prefer c to d. Consistency Criterion If two disjoint el...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Maximal Lotteries, published by Scott Garrabrant on October 17, 2022 on LessWrong. Probabilistic Voting Theory Recall that in the last post I said that a voting system is a function that takes in a distribution on utility functions on a set of candidates, and produces a distribution on that set of candidates, and that voting theorists tend to make four assumptions: The set of candidates is finite. The function only uses the preorders on candidates implied by the utility functions. The output distribution assigns probability 1 to a single candidate. The input distribution is the uniform distribution on some finite set. The fourth assumption doesn't really matter, and isn't really used, so we can just remove it. The third assumption, on the other hand, is important for many of the voting theory conclusions, but we are now going to see what happens if we remove it. We will keep the first two assumptions. So now, we will be considering lotteries (i.e. distributions) over candidates, since that will be the output of our voting system. Given a set C of candidates, lotteries A,B∈Δ(C), and an electorate V∈Δ(C[0,1]), we say that A dominates B if Pa∼A,b∼B,v∼V(v(a)>v(b))≥Pa∼A,b∼B,v∼V(v(b)>v(a)). Lets unpack this definition. We are given three distributions V, a distribution on voters, and A and B, distributions on candidates. We are imagining independently sampling from these three distributions to get v, a, and b respectively. When we do this, one of three things will happen: v will prefer a to b. (v(a)>v(b)) v will prefer b to a. (v(b)>v(a)) v will be indifferent. (v(a)=v(b)) We say that A dominates B if the first outcome is at least as likely as the second outcome. Note that we don't need to look at the actual utility functions to determine whether A dominates B, we only need to look at the partial ordering of preferences over candidates, so we are not violating assumption 2. Also note that domination need not be transitive. Maximal Lotteries Given a set C of candidates, and an electorate V∈Δ(C[0,1]), a maximal lottery is an M∈Δ(C) such that for all other L∈Δ(C), M dominates L. Sounds great, but surely that is too strong a condition, domination isn't even transitive. Doesn't matter. Maximal lotteries always exist! What? Is this some silly Brouwer's fixed point thing, where you can't find them, and they aren't unique? Nope. Maximal lotteries are basically unique. The only reason they aren't unique is because of ties. For example, if your electorate is the uniform distribution on an odd number of voters that are never indifferent, there will be a unique maximal lottery. And you can find them quickly. Wow, so this is like a proper voting system then: given an electorate, just output the maximal lottery. Yep. Is it any good? Well, it's Condorcet. Wow! This is has got to be the most elegant Condorcet voting system I have ever seen! Most of the Condorcet systems I have seen have basically looked like they took the Condorcet criterion, and then wrote an algorithm around it. Is it Clone invariant? Yep.....And it satisfies consistency and participation. What? Those are incompatible with Condorcet! Only for deterministic voting systems! Wow! I don't really have an intuition for probabilistic voting systems, There must be all sorts of cool stuff you can do once you allow randomness. No, this is basically it. You could choose a random voter to be dictator, which is nice for being strategy-proof, but that isn't Condorcet. In fact, Maximal Lotteries are uniquely characterized as the only probabilistic voting system that is Condorcet, consistent, and clone invariant. (See this paper by Florian Brandl, Felix Brandt, and Hans Georg Seedig.) I'm sold. But are people ready to start flipping coins in elections? They usually don't have to! Remember, maximal lotteries satisfy the Condorcet Criter...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Rejected Early Drafts of Newcomb's Problem, published by zahmahkibo on September 6, 2022 on LessWrong. Discovered inside an opaque box at the University of California and shared by an anonymous source, please enjoy these unpublished variations of physicist William Newcomb's famous thought experiment. Newcomb's Advanced Problem If Omega predicted that, when presented with this exact scenario in a hypothetical context, you would lie about your intentions because you think that somehow matters to an omniscient godlike entity, Box B contains lethal poison gas. Newcomb's Market Before your arrival, Omega created questions for your decision on each of the ten leading prediction markets. If Omega predicted you will one-box, Box B contains one million dollars multiplied by the maximum arbitrage between those markets due to insufficient liquidity. Newcomb's Auction Before making your decision, you must auction off the rights to your winnings via the mechanism of your choice. Box B contains $1,000,000 if Omega predicted that your auction will be won by economist Paul Milgrom. Newcomb's Paradox: Director's Cut Extended Edition (2011 Blu-ray re-release) This four-disc set contains 190 minutes of never-before-seen footage, including: the legendary original "three-box" ending, unaired behind-the-scenes interviews with director John Carpenter and creature designer Stan Winston, a remastering of the 1996 Christmas special, four commentary tracks, and one unsimulated sex scene. Newcomb's Nonfungible Problem If Omega predicted you will one-box, Box B contains a piece of paper with the words "Omega paid [your name] $1,000,000." Newcomb's Condorcet's Paradox Omega's opening explanation quickly derails into a rant at the innumerable evils of first-past-the-post winner-take-all voting systems. If you listen politely for 45 minutes, a world-weary Omega will just give you the money. Newcomb's Prob7em (1995 film) Box B contains Gwyneth Paltrow's head. Fast Times at Newcomb High Box B is always empty, but if you one-box, Omega will think you're cool. Newcomb's Problem (3rd level enchantment spell) Casting Time: 1 actionRange: 60 feetComponents: Verbal, Somatic, Material (two small glass cubes, one quartz and one obsidian)Duration: 1 round A creature of your choice that you can see within range must make a Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, the target takes 3d8 psychic damage and is stunned until the end of its next turn as its mind is overwhelmed by the implications of retrocausality. The spell has no effect if the target is undead or evidentialist. Newcomb's Basilisk If you one-box, Omega will donate the remaining $1,000 toward the creation of a malevolent AI that seeks to torment one-boxers. RE: RE: RE: RE: Newcomb's Paradox Dear Friend, I have decided to contact you regarding a matter that requires your confidentiality and discretion. This is urgent, confidential and profitable Business for both of us to the degree of One Million United State Dollars ($1,000,000 USD). I have placed these Funds in the National Bank of my country and require a trusted Beneficiary to secure their deposit for foreign investments. With your Cooperation I will withdraw these funds into your personal account. I require only $1,000 to satisfy the transfer and processing duties to secure my escape. Sincerely, Crown Prince Agemo The Legend of Newcomb's Gold If you made any friends along the way, Box B is empty. Otherwise it contains $1,000,000. Newcomb's Information Hazard Box B contains $1,000,000 only if Omega predicts that why are you still reading? Omega knows you saw the title and this giant block of text after it. Omega predicts that you already know Omega is going to pull some meta-bullshit and say you only get the money if you skipped over this section as soon as you saw the words "information hazard" or...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: [Cause Exploration Prizes] Voting Methods, published by Marcus Ogren on August 17, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. This essay was submitted to Open Philanthropy's Cause Exploration Prizes contest. If you're seeing this in summer 2022, we'll be posting many submissions in a short period. If you want to stop seeing them so often, apply a filter for the appropriate tag! By Marcus Ogren What is the problem? The United States uses choose-one Plurality voting, in which voters may vote for only a single candidate, for most of its elections. This is a notoriously terrible way of determining leaders; it frequently leads to people who don't reflect the preferences of the electorate getting elected, and bears much of the responsibility for the two-party system and excessive polarization. By switching to better voting methods we can avoid consequences of polarization such as legislative gridlock or a possible civil war. What are some better voting methods we might support? It is important to distinguish between single-winner and multi-winner voting methods. For electing someone to an executive office (e.g., governor), only a single-winner voting method can be used. For electing a larger body (such as a city council or the US House of Representatives) either a multi-winner voting method can be used or the jurisdiction can be divided into single-member districts that use a single-winner voting method. The multi-winner case can involve either at-large elections or splitting the jurisdiction into multi-member districts that each elect multiple representatives at once. Single-winner voting methods: Approval Voting: Every voter can vote for as many candidates as they like. Whoever gets the most votes wins. STAR Voting: Voters score the candidates from 0 to 5; multiple candidates may receive the same score. The two candidates with the highest total score advance to an automatic runoff with the already-cast ballots. In the runoff, each ballot counts as a single vote for whichever of the finalists is scored higher on it, regardless of the difference in scores. Condorcet Voting: Voters rank the candidates. To determine the winner, look at each ballot to see which candidate is preferred in every possible head-to-head matchup. The candidate who beats everyone else head-to-head wins. Instant Runoff Voting (IRV, the best-known form of Ranked Choice Voting): Voters rank the candidates. Each ballot counts as one vote to the candidate that is ranked the highest on it. If one candidate is the first choice on a majority of ballots, that candidate is elected. Otherwise, the candidate with the fewest voters is eliminated, and their votes are transferred to the next highest choices on their supporters' ballots. This process of eliminations and transfers continues until a candidate has a majority of votes among ballots that display a preference between the non-eliminated candidates. A basic summary of the relative virtues of these voting methods: Approval Voting is by far the simplest reasonable voting method and it delivers the majority of the benefits of the more complicated ones in electing better leaders. STAR is somewhat better at picking the right winner than Approval and is exceptionally good at incentivizing candidates to care about the opinions of voters in opposing factions. Condorcet methods are comparable to STAR at picking the right winner and are unparalleled at reducing the importance of strategic voting and at incentivizing candidates to endorse one another as a second choice and having it be meaningful. IRV is a significant improvement over Plurality, but elects worse leaders than these other methods, is nearly as bad as Plurality when it comes to third-party visibility, and can mimic the incentives of the partisan primary system. However, IRV has gained the most traction, has b...

durée : 00:03:53 - Le Pourquoi du comment : histoire - par : Gérard Noiriel - Représentant des Lumières, le marquis de Condorcet, à la fois, mathématicien, philosophe, homme politique, plaida pour la mise en place d'un système scolaire ouvert à tous et d'un suivi "toute la durée de la vie".

How many eligible men can we send to fight France? Are there enough food supplies to feed the population for the next century? Until 10th March 1801, the British Parliament weren't sure - which is why they commissioned the first national headcount since the Doomsday Book.  Unlike a modern-day census - which harvests data on religion, education and even sexuality - their first efforts only totted up the numbers of men and women, and their engagement in certain employment, such as agricultural work. Despite this, they still managed to balls it up - with some parishes never bothering to return the paperwork properly. In this episode, Arion, Rebecca and Olly explain why birthplace and employment came to be introduced in later surveys; consider the problem of dishonesty in self-declaration; and reveal how suffragettes used the census as a clever tactic for protest…  Further Reading: • ‘10 March 1801: Britain conducts its first census' (MoneyWeek, 2020): https://moneyweek.com/383334/10-march-1801-britain-conducts-its-first-census • ‘An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers' (Thomas Malthus, 1798):  http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf • ‘Who Had To Return To Their Birthplace For The Census?' (QI, 2003): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWa7LEl36UY Photo courtesy of Essex University. For bonus material and to support the show, visit Patreon.com/Retrospectors We'll be back tomorrow! Follow us wherever you get your podcasts: podfollow.com/Retrospectors The Retrospectors are Olly Mann, Rebecca Messina & Arion McNicoll, with Matt Hill. Theme Music: Pass The Peas. Announcer: Bob Ravelli. Graphic Design: Terry Saunders. Edit Producer: Emma Corsham. Copyright: Rethink Audio / Olly Mann 2022. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices