Antoine Destutt de Tracy | |
|---|---|
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| Born | Antoine Louis Claude Destutt 20 July 1754 |
| Died | 9 March 1836(1836-03-09) (aged 81) Paris, Kingdom of France |
| Children | Victor Destutt de Tracy |
| School | French Liberal School |
Notable ideas | Ideology |
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (French:[dɛstytdətʁasi]; 20 July 1754 – 9 March 1836) was a FrenchEnlightenmentaristocrat andphilosopher who coined the term "ideology".
The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born inParis. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France in 1420 and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at theUniversity of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army and when theFrench Revolution broke out he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais. Elected a deputy of the nobility to theEstates General, he sat alongside his friend, theMarquis de La Fayette. In the spring of 1792, he received the rank ofmaréchal de camp in command of the cavalry in the army of the north, but the influence of the extremists becoming predominant he took indefinite leave of absence and settled atAuteuil, where withCondorcet andCabanis he devoted himself to scientific studies.[1] Under theReign of Terror, he was arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studiedÉtienne Bonnot de Condillac andJohn Locke and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy.[1]
In 1795, he was named associate of theInstitut de France when it was first established.[2] On the motion of Cabanis, he was named in the class of the moral and political sciences. He soon began to attract attention by the memoires which he read before his colleagues—papers which formed the first draft of his comprehensive work onideology, namedEléments d'idéologie. He conceived of ideology as the "science of ideas". The society of "ideologists" at Auteuil embraced, besides Cabanis and Tracy,Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney andDominique Joseph Garat, professor in the National Institute.[1] Along with some of these colleagues, he was a member of the cultural societyLes Neuf Sœurs. In 1806, he was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Society inPhiladelphia.[3]
Under theEmpire, Tracy was a member of the senate, but he took little part in its deliberations. Under theRestoration, he became apeer of France, but protested against the reactionary split of the government and remained in opposition. In 1808, he was elected a member of theAcadémie française in place of Cabanis and in 1832 was also named a member of the Academy of Moral Sciences on its reorganization. He appeared only once at its conferences, owing to his age and to disappointment at the comparative failure of his work. Destutt de Tracy was one of the principal advocates ofliberalism during and after the Revolution. He died inParis.[1]
Destutt de Tracy was the last eminent representative of thesensualistic school which Condillac founded in France upon a one-sided interpretation of Locke. In full agreement with the materialist views of Cabanis, de Tracy pushed the sensualist principles of Condillac to their most necessary consequences. While the attention of Cabanis was devoted mostly to the physiological side of man, Tracy's interests concerned the then newly determined "ideological", in contrast to "psychological", sides of humanity. His grounding notion of ideology, he frankly stated, should be classified as "a part of zoology" (biology). The four faculties into which de Tracy divides the conscious life—perception, memory, judgment and volition—are all varieties of sensation. Perception is sensation caused by a present affection of the external extremities of the nerves; memory is sensation caused in the absence of present excitation by dispositions of the nerves which are the result of past experiences; judgment is the perception of relations between sensations and is itself a species of sensation because if we are aware of the sensations we must be aware also of the relations between them; and volition he identifies with the feeling of desire and is therefore included as a type of sensation.[1]
Considered for the influences of his philosophy, de Tracy minimally deserves credit for his distinction between active and passive touch which ultimately fed the development of psychological theories of muscular sense. His account of the notion of external existence as being derived not from pure sensation, but from the experience of action on the one hand and resistance on the other, stands in this light to be compared with the works ofAlexander Bain and later psychologists.[1]
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His chief works are the five-volumeÉléments d'idéologie (1817–1818), the first volume of which was presented as "Ideology Strictly Defined" and which completed the arguments made in earlier completed monographs;Commentaire sur l'esprit des lois de Montesquieu (1806) andEssai sur le génie, et les ouvrages de Montesquieu (1808).[1] The fourth volume of theEléments d'idéologie the author regarded as the introduction to asecond section of the planned nine-part work[5] which he titledTraité de la volonté (Treatise on the Will and Its Effects).[6] When translated into English, editorThomas Jefferson retitled the volumeA Treatise on Political Economy which obscured the aspects of Tracy's work concerned not with politics but with far more basic questions of will and the possibility of understanding the conditions of its determinations.
Tracy advanced a rigorous use of deductive method in social theory, seeing economics in terms of actions (praxeology) and exchanges (catallactics).[7] Tracy's influence can be seen both on the Continent (particularly onStendhal,Augustin Thierry,Auguste Comte andCharles Dunoyer) and in the United States, where the general approach of theFrench Liberal School of political economy competed evenly with Britishclassical political economy well until the end of the 19th century as evidenced in the work and reputation ofArthur Latham Perry and others. In his political writings[8] Tracy rejectedmonarchism, favoring the American republican form of government. Thisrepublicanism as well as his advocacy ofreason in philosophy andlaissez-faire for economic policy lost him favor withNapoleon, who turned Tracy's coinage of "ideology" into a term of abuse.Karl Marx followed this vein of invective to refer to Tracy as a "fischblütige Bourgeoisdoktrinär" (a "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire").[9]
On the other hand,Thomas Jefferson thought highly enough of Destutt de Tracy's work to ready two of his manuscripts for American publication. In his preface to the 1817 publication, Jefferson wrote: "By diffusing sound principles of Political Economy, it will protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it."[10] Tracy's criticism ofMontesquieu and his endorsement of representative democracy were influential on Jefferson's thinking.[11]
Stendhal was much influenced by Tracy's enlightenment ideals and attended the de Tracy salon regularly in the 1820s as he described inMemoirs of an Egotist.[12] According to Richard Stites, he was important to the liberals of the 1820s:
Franco Venturi noted that theCommentary "resounded throughout the whole period of the liberal revolutions, from the Spain of 1820 to the Russia of 1825." An American historian wrote that "theRussian Decembrists, along with numerous other liberals,Carbonari, andrevolutionaries of the 1820s used thisCommentary as their political Bible." The Decembrist Mikhail Orlov recalled that his circle considered it "the epitome of wisdom."[13]
One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, Comte de".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 27 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 126–127.
