| Summary: | This paper starts from the essay dedicated to the thought of the Marquis de Condorcet by Javier de Lucas, as a tribute to his academic retirement. After an introduction, the article contains the following sections: the second, devoted to Condorcet's paradox, which anticipates today's rational choice theory and prefigures Arrow's well-known impossibility theorem. This section will also go backwards, to show that some of Condorcet's ideas were already in the Majorcan thinker Ramon Llull in the Middle Ages, and forwards, to show that they also anticipated today's doctrinal paradox or discursive dilemma. The third section will deal with Condorcet's so-called jury theorem, according to which the probability of a decision on a given question be correct, given certain preconditions, increases as the number of people who have to make the decision increases. This is a theorem that can be proved from the basic axioms of probability theory. This idea is at the origin of current epistemic conceptions of democracy. In the fourth section, it will be shown that John Rawls' so-called difference principle, according to which inequalities are only justified when they are to the benefit of the most disadvantaged in society, had been clearly formulated by Condorcet. Section five will conclude.
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