Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions: rendues à la pluralité des voix.

Paris: De k'Imprimerie Royale, 1785. The First Large-Scale Attempt to Apply Mathematics to Knowledge of Human Phenomena"

CONDORCET, [Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat], Marquis de. Essai sur l'application de l'analyse à la probabilité des décisions rendues à la pluralité des voix. Paris: De l'Imprimerie Royale, 1785.

First edition. Quarto. [2], cxci, [1, blank], 304 pp. Decorative woodcut head- and tail-pieces.

Contemporary French mottled calf, spine decorated in gilt with five raised bands. Marbled endpapers, all edges red. First and last few pages browned at edges, . gathering K is browned a Q and 2G is toned. Otherwise, very good and very scarce.

"Condorcet's most significant and fruitful endeavor was in a field entirely new at the time. The subject was one that departed from the natural sciences and mathematics but nevertheless showed the way toward a scientific comprehension of human phenomena, taking the empirical approach of natural science as its inspiration and employing mathematics as its tool. Condorcet called this new science ‘social mathematics.' It was apparently intended to comprise...a statistical description of society, a theory of political economy inspired by the Physiocrats, and a combinatorial theory of intellectual processes. The great work on the voting process, published in 1785, is related to the latter. Condorcet there sought to construct a scheme for an electoral body the purpose of which would be to determine the truth about a given subject by the process of voting and in which each elector would have the same chance of voicing the truth...No doubt the results obtained in the Essai d'application de l'analyse were modest ones. ‘In almost all cases,' Condorcet said, ‘the results are in conformity with what simple reason would have dictated; but it is so easy to obscure reason by sophistry and vain subtleties that I should feel rewarded if I had only founded a single useful truth on a mathematical demonstration' (Essai, p. ii). One must nevertheless recognize, in this work...the first large-scale attempt to apply mathematics to knowledge of human phenomena" (D.S.B.).

Brunet VI, col. 472.

HBS 66958.

$7,500.