How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking

by Jordan Ellenberg

Shortly after the above passage was written, in March 1794 (or, in the rationalized revolutionary calendar, in Germinal of Year 2), Condorcet was captured and arrested. Two days later he was found dead—some say it was suicide, others that he was murdered. Just as Hilbert’s style of mathematics persisted despite the destruction of his formal program by Gödel, Condorcet’s approach to politics survived his demise. We no longer hope to find voting systems that satisfy his axiom. 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.