SOURCE: Andresen, Julie T. “From Condillac to Condorcet: The Algebra of History.” In Progress in Linguistic Historiography: Papers From the International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, edited by Konrad Koerner, pp. 187-97. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980.

In the essay which follows, Andresen highlights the connection between Condorcet's idea of progress and his beliefs about language, including the language of mathematics as the reduction of natural language to its purest form.

In the 18th century the theory of language intersects with the theory of history. The epistemological framework that unifies these theories, the linguistic and the historic, reveals itself through the works of Condillac (1715-80), one of the most influential thinkers in the study of language, and Condorcet (1743-94), who, during the aftermath of the French revolution, composed the Enlightenment's ‘histoire générale et raisonnée’. In fact, Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès...