But we have committed ourselves to Condorcet’s more fundamental belief, that a quantitative “social mathematics”—what we now call “social science”—ought to have a part in determining the proper conduct of government. These were “the instruments which increase the power and direct the exercise of [our] faculties” that Condorcet wrote about with such vigor in the Sketch. Condorcet’s idea is so thoroughly intertwined with the modern way of doing political business that we hardly see it as a choice. But it is a choice. I think it’s the right one.
