SOURCE: Lachterman, David R. “The Conquest of Nature and the Ambivalence of Man in the French Enlightenment: Reflections on Condorcet's Fragment Sur L'Atlantide.” In Man, God, and Nature in the Enlightenment, edited by Donald C. Mell, Jr. et al., pp. 19-27. Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1988.

In this essay, Lachterman discusses Condorcet's Fragment in terms of the conflict between technological progress—“the conquest of nature”—and individual liberty.

Condorcet's Fragment sur l'Atlantide (1793) is the third in a sequence of “Atlantean” texts. First came Plato's apparently incomplete Critias: then Bacon's The New Atlantis. Studying Condorcet's Fragment in the company of these two works allows us to throw light on some of the cardinal issues and dilemmas inseparable from the program of the scientific Enlightenment.

“Enlightenment” has long proved a polyvalent, even promiscuous concept. Let me briefly sketch the idea of the Enlightenment that sustains my analysis of Condorcet. It can...