SOURCE: Bates, David. “Between Error and Enlightenment: Condorcet and the Political Decision.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 36, no. 1 (spring 1995): 55-74.

In this essay, Bates attempts to define Condorcet's position on political decision-making and the public interest.

In the Encyclopédie, a decision was defined briefly but significantly as a “resolution taken on some question that was controversial or in doubt.”¹ The decision was made in a state of uncertainty and thus constituted a risk, and although this risk might be characterized in many different ways, depending on how this situation was understood, it would seem that the very conditions that made a decision necessary, namely doubt or controversy, are what make the decision itself problematic: by definition it can have no precedent. Any problem that cannot be solved in its own terms or within the parameters of established norms requires some kind of intrusion from the outside, which...