AUTHORITY AND THE CHURCH

For Condorcet the political organisation of society was without purpose unless it was closely identified with the pursuit of human happiness, and embedded in a well-understood moral order of a strictly secular nature. Reference to the moral dimensions of human sociability provides one of the continuities that run through all aspects of Condorcet's thought on the management of public affairs, and characteristically consideration of morality in the modern polity is not confined to abstractions, but anchored to practicalities. Like equality and freedom, happiness was a concept with tangible, and therefore manageable, extensions in the real world of ordinary people's lives. Much of Condorcet's achievement as a political thinker and legislator derives from his understanding of the responsibilities of governments with regard to the moral implications and consequences of political decision-making:

In the Vie de m. Turgot Condorcet expressed his admiration for a statesman familiar with the delicate balance between the moral and the political orders, and with the threat posed to that balance by a fanatical church