Join us Wednesday, November 15th, from 4-5 p.m. ET for a hybrid Fellow’s Forum with Iain McLean, Emeritus Professor of Politics, Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College.

Attend in person: Berkeley Conference Room, the Jefferson Library 

Preregistration is not required to attend. Zoom link will become active November 15th.

Join via ZOOM »  

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About the Presentation

It was already known that one of Thomas Jefferson’s associates in Paris between 1784 and 1789 was the great (but misunderstood) mathematician the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), and that Jefferson, and through him Madison and possibly Hamilton, may have absorbed some of Condorcet’s revolutionary work in probability theory and (what we now call) social choice.  This talk moves on to other Condorcet documents from Jefferson’s time in Paris. I show that Jefferson was more fluent in reading and understanding French than has often been assumed; that his fragmentary translation of Condorcet’s Réflexions sur l‘esclavage des Nègres was done earlier than the Princeton editors of the Jefferson Papers believed; and that a character assassination of the French finance minister Necker, transcribed laboriously by TJ who omitted a lot of accents, was written by Condorcet.

About Iain McLean

Iain McLean is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College. He is a Fellow of the British Academy (former Vice-President) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has been working on Jefferson, Condorcet, and other figures of the Scottish, American, and French Enlightenments for over 30 years. He taught an advanced-level undergrad course ‘Jefferson in Paris’ while on an earlier sabbatical in Yale. His book of that title, an intellectual history rather than a day-to-day saga, is under contract to Lexington Books for delivery by January 2024.