Politics and Philosophy in the Thought of Destutt de Tracy

Brian W. Head

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032807713
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000706482
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1987. This study describes and analyses the published writings of the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy. The author focuses on the three decades from the calling of the Etats-généraux to the early years of the Restoration – the period of Tracy's entire literary production, and the period of his greatest influence and reputation. This title will be of great interest to students of history, philosophy and politics.

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: THE INTELLECTUAL AND POLITICAL BACKGROUND

I Perspectives on Tracy and the idéologues

II Intellectuals and Politics: philosophes and idéologues

III Tracy’s life and writings: an outline

I. PERSPECTIVES ON TRACY AND THE IDEOLOGUES

Tracy and the idéologues have been forgotten and ‘rediscovered’ several times by historians of ideas. In the period around 1800, securely entrenched in the Institut National, the idéologues enjoyed a reputation, which they took care to encourage, as pioneers in the human sciences. They were then relatively ignored for most of the nineteenth century, until reclaimed by liberal intellectuals of the Third Republic.¹ During the early decades of the twentieth century, the idéologues were again generally ignored, except for the attention of a few specialist historians;² more recently there has been a marked revival of interest in their work. There are several reasons for their fluctuating fortunes.

In the first place, the degree of attention and sympathy for their work has been partly related to changing currents of ideas in academic circles. Different generations of scholars have been more or less drawn towards certain themes in the ideologues writings: for example, their liberal republicanism, their anticlericalism, or their scientific pretensions. This is perhaps clearest during the Third Republic, a period whose debates sometimes echoed those of the 1790s, and again in recent years when the character of the social and political sciences has undergone a close reconsideration. The chequered reputation of the idéologues, then, has partly derived from changing tendencies in intellectual life generally. Secondly, the ‘great figures’ approach to the study of the history of ideas has worked against the idéologues. The hall of fame of the Enlightenment philosophers accommodated many great names, such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot and Condillac. There was less room for minor disciples, continuators and acolytes, and the idéologues tended to be pushed into these categories. They were often regarded as having contributed nothing original beyond what had already been said by their illustrious predecessors. Moreover, the 1790s era has been deemed notable mainly for its men of action – political and military leaders, rather than philosophers.

Thirdly, there was a strong reaction in the early years of the nineteenth century against the philosophy of ideologie and its rationalist scientism and optimism. A highly unflattering portrait of ideologie emerged, which has influenced subsequent interpretations. On the one hand, the idéologues were taken to have posited a highly reductionist and materialist philosophy of sensations, in which human thought and action could hardly be distinguished from those of other animals, and where moral and religious experience were dismissed as illusory.³ There was a movement in philosophical psychology towards a new emphasis on subjective experience (e.g. Maine de Biran), and in literature there was a revival of religious and traditionalist themes (e.g. Chateaubriand). The theory of idéologie was regarded as the last gasp of an intellectually bankrupt sensationalism, a view which still persists.⁴ On the other hand, idéologie was discredited by its association with the political rationalism and faith in human perfectibility which had characterised the spirit of the 1790s. Idéologie was variously charged either with responsibility for the persecutions and turmoil of the Revolutionary period, or simply with a shallow and naive optimism which stemmed from its intellectual abstractionism and esprit de système. As if these charges were not enough to destroy the reputation of the idéologues, it has also been suggested that their social and political theory was largely mechanistic, whereas later thinkers increasingly tended to recognize the need to adopt organic models and show more concern for social processes in explaining historical change and continuity. Furthermore, it has been argued by Foucault that the models put forward by Tracy and others for both linguistic and economic analysis, were pre-scientific; in other words, that there was a clear disjunction between the structure of the ideologues’ thought in these fields, and the structure of modern philosophy and economic science.⁵

For these reasons, it has become arguable that, at least in some fields, the work of Tracy and the idéologues “left no intellectual traces” and that it was destroyed not so much by Napoleon’s persecution as by its own “irrelevance” for the new generations of social and political thinkers.⁶ In terms of Kuhn’s terminology,⁷ idéologie had occupied the position of ‘normal’ science in the 1790s (though it had always been strongly contested, especially outside its institutional stronghold in the Institut National). However, the ideological paradigm was largely abandoned when it was found unable to satisfy the intellectual demands of philosophical and social analysts in the early nineteenth century. The words of Whitehead might be borrowed to describe aptly this perspective:

Systems, scientific and philosophic, come and go. Each method of limited understanding is at length exhausted. In its prime each system is a triumphant success: in its decay it is an obstructive nuisance.⁸

The degree of attention and sympathy paid to Tracy’s work has reflected the fluctuating judgements passed upon the writings of “ces méconnus, les idéologues”.⁹ F.-A.-M. Mignet, one of the secrétaires perpétuels of the Académie des Sciences morales et politiques, wrote a study of Tracy in his series of éloges on the ideologues during the 1840s.¹⁰ Mignet had met Tracy and was well acquainted with the family of Tracy’s son Victor, and he was able to report a number of family stories about Tracy’s beliefs and temperament. Victor’s wife, Mme Sarah Newton Destutt de Tracy, wrote a longer essay on the ideas of the old idéologue; this was published privately a few years after Mignet’s éloge.¹¹ These two essays long provided the main source of reference upon Tracy’s life and ideas although showing a distinct lack of warmth for Tracy’s sensationalist doctrines. Their value lay in their ‘inside’ knowledge of the subject and their use of some unpublished notes and papers of the late philosopher. The next landmark was Picavet’s large volume on les Idéologues in 1891, which included a very long and generous summary of Tracy’s writings, and urged a more sympathetic reconsideration of the idéologues’ work in relation to their influence upon nineteenth-century philosophical and social thought. Picavet’s work remained the major secondary source on Tracy for many decades. A short and very uncritical study of Tracy’s writings as a whole by Jean Cruet appeared in 1909; Tracy’s close links with the liberal and humanitarian currents of Enlightenment thought were emphasized, but the analysis remained superficial.¹²

Tracy’s life and thought continued to be neglected in most works on French history and the history of philosophy. When mentioned, Tracy was introduced as a minor figure in the Assemblée Nationale Constituante of 1789–91 and in Napoleon’s Senate, or simply as the inventor of the term ‘idéologie’ and one of a group of sensationalist philosophers and liberal intellectuals known as the ‘ideologues’.

However, studies of particular aspects of Tracy’s thought began to appear: for example, on his psychological and logical writings,¹³ his economic thought,¹⁴ and his political theory.¹⁵ His ideas were also discussed briefly by those historians mainly concerned with the idéologues as a group,¹⁶ including their links with the United States,¹⁷ and their work for the journal la Décade philosophique.¹⁸ Few of the idéologues have been the subject of a thorough intellectual biography: excellent studies on the work of Cabanis, Volney, and Sieyès,¹⁹ have not been matched by works of comparable depth on Daunou, Garat, Ginguené, M.-J. Chénier, Andrieux, or J.-B. Say.²⁰ Research in the general field of French liberalism in the period after 1780 has been growing, partly owing to a new interest in the early development of the social and political sciences and the origins of the theory of industrial society.²¹ There have been valuable studies of some influential (and younger) contemporaries of the idéologues such as Benjamin Constant, Mme de Staël, Saint-Simon and Maine de Biran;²² together with excellent works on important predecessors of the ideologues, including Condillac and Condorcet.²³

Interest in Tracy’s work began to increase in the 1960s and has continued since then. Some of his books were reprinted²⁴ for the first time since the 1820s, although there was no genuinely critical edition of his writings to complement that devoted to his close friend Cabanis.²⁵

The leading commentator on the idéologues, Sergio Moravia, has published several studies which deal with the political and intellectual activities of Tracy’s colleagues. His most recent volume, on the thought of the idéologues,²⁶ includes a substantial discussion of Tracy’s ‘idéologie’ from the viewpoint of the materialistic anthropology of Cabanis and contemporary debates on language and sensationalism. But Moravia has nowhere presented a picture of Tracy’s theories as a whole, and has instead taken up selected themes, treated with great erudition. All students of Tracy have explicated the concept of ‘idéologie’ at greater or lesser length; but few have attempted to discuss Tracy’s work in terms of what I regard as the other central themes: namely, social science and liberalism.²⁷ The approach of my study is to bring together these t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1. Introduction: the Intellectual and Political Background.
• Chapter 2. Idéologie and the Pursuit of Certainty
• Chapter 3. From Individual Desires to Social Morality
• Chapter 4. The Science of Social Organization
• Chapter 5. Economics: the Science of “industrie”
• Chapter 6. Politics: the Science of “happiness”
• Chapter 7. Public Instruction and idéologie
• Appendices:
• Bibliography: A. Published Writings of Destutt de Tracy