Condorcet, too, held fast to his formalist ideas about politics even when they didn’t conform well to reality. The existence of Condorcet cycles meant that any voting system that obeyed his basic, seemingly inarguable axiom—when the majority prefers A to B, B cannot be the winner—can fall prey to self-contradiction. Condorcet spent much of the last decade of his life grappling with the problem of the cycles, developing more and more intricate voting systems intended to evade the problem of collective inconsistency. He never succeeded.
