Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, Comte de Tracy, 1754-1836
The liberal French nobleman Destutt de Tracy was one the leading idéologues
that sought to extend Enlightenment liberalism to
post-Revolutionary France. He was, together with Say,
the founder of the French
Liberal School.
Destutt de Tracy's main work was the series Eléments d'idéologie (1801-1815)
which followed up on the philosophy, psychology and economics of Condillac.
Like Condillac, Destutt de Tracy sought to ground value in
psychology, particularly utility. He explicitly repudiated Adam Smith's
cost theory of value (although he was sympathetic with much of the rest of his
analysis). Tracy's insistence that value must be measured in invariable units inspired Ricardo's
search.
Destutt de Tracy's support for laissez-faire doctrines invoked the
wrath of Napoleon Bonaparte. Prevented from printing his Commentaires
in 1806, Destutt de Tracy had to resort to asking the American president, Thomas
Jefferson, to publish an English language version. It was only
published in France in 1819. Jefferson also supervised the translation of
Tracy's main economics treatise, the Traité de la volonté (Vol. 4 of the Eléments)
into
English in 1818, under the title Treatise on Political Economy. It
was reprinted in French in 1823 as Traité
d'économie politique.
It was Tracy who originally coined the term "ideology", but he used it
to denote the "science of ideas" in the sensorialist sense. The
term was given its negative slant by Napoleon and, later, Marx
and Engels.
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Major Works of A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy
- M.
de Tracy à M. Burke, 1791
- Quels
sont les moyens de fonder la morale chez un peuple ?, 1797
- Sur un système méthodique de bibliographie, 1798
- Mémoire sur la faculté de penser, 1798
- Dissertation sur quelques questions d' idéologie, 1799
- Réflexions sur les projets de pasigraphie, 1800
- Dissertation sur l' existence, 1800
- Projet
d’éléments d’idéologie à l’usage des écoles centrales de la
République française, 1800-1
- De la métaphysique de Kant, 1801
- Éléments
d’idéologie I - l'Ideologie proprement dit, 1801
- Éléments
d’idéologie II - Grammaire, 1803
- Analyse
raisonnée de l’"Origine de tous les cultes ou religion universelle",
1804
- Éléments
d’idéologie III - Logique, 1805
- Lettres de Descartes, 1806
- Éléments
d’idéologie IV & V: Traité de la volonté et de ses effets, 1815.
- Principes
logiques, ou recueil de faits relatifs à l’intelligence humaine, 1817
- Treatise on Political Economy, 1818 (transl. of 1815)
- Commentaire
sur "L'esprit des lois" de Montesquieu, 1819
- Traité
d'économie politique, 1823 (reprint of 1815)
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Resources on A.L.C. Destutt de Tracy
- "Tracy,
Destutt de" in C. Coquelin and G.U. Guillaumin, editors, 1852,
Dictionnaire de l'économie politique [1864 ed.]
- "Tracy,
Destutt de" in L.
Say
and J. Chailley-Bert, editors, 1892, Nouveau Dictionnaire de l'économie
politique
- "Tracy,
Destutt de" in R.H. Inglis Palgrave, editor,
1894-1899, Dictionary of Political Economy
[1901 ed.]
- "Tracy,
Destutt de" in J. Conrad et al, (1891-94)
Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften [2nd ed, 1898-1901]
- "Tracy,
Destutt de" 1911, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- "The Economics of
Desttut de Tracy" by Timothy Terrell [mis]
- "Destutt de Tracy et l'institution heuristique des sciences humaines"
by Michel Leter, 1997 [online]
- The
Thomas
Jefferson Papers at Library of Congress (search for "Destutt de
Tracy" so see his correspondence with Jefferson).
-
Destutt de Tracy entry at Britannica
-
Wikipedia
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All rights reserved, Gonçalo L. Fonseca
