A Treatise on Political Economy. Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy

in Paris, he joined the elegant and influential Société de 1789, and it was here that he was to meet many of the great minds of his generation and many of those with whom he was to work closely in later years. In 1792Destutt de Tracy moved his household to what was then the small village of Auteuil, on the western outskirts of Paris. The philosopher Condorcet likewise moved there in September 1792, and it was here that the widow of Helvétius held her famous literary and philosophical salon. At the home of Madame Helvétius, the spirit of the philosophes and of enlightenment still reigned supreme, and it was here that Destutt de Tracy began to absorb the sensationalist psychology of Condillac and the precepts of Helvétius’s morality of self-interest. He also became close friends with the physiologist Cabanis, from whom he learnt that human nature was the proper object of study for both doctors and moralists. Together both might improve the nature of the human species.

      Destutt de Tracy, therefore, became one of a group of intellectuals—later to be known by the collective name of the Idéologues —who sought to formulate a philosophical response to the violence and frenzied rhetoric of the Terror.² To explain the Terror, they believed, the springs of human action had to be fully explored and the workings of our intellectual faculties soundly analyzed. Only then could the questions that had so divided opinion during the Revolution be settled. Philosophy would put an end to revolutionary barbarism and provide a solid foundation upon which the Republic could be established.

      With a new constitution and the establishment of the Directory in 1795, it appeared that the Idéologues would have the opportunity to turn their ideas into practice. That same year saw the foundation of the Institut National, within which was to be housed a Class of Moral and Political Sciences. This itself was to contain the Section of the Analysis of Sensations and Ideas, and it was to this body that Destutt de Tracy was elected in February 1796. Now, for the first time, he came to formulate the goals and methods of “ideology,” or the “science of thought.” Upon the achievements of this new discipline, he believed, rested the possibility of all human advance. At a minimum it entailed an almost limitless enthusiasm for the possibilities of conceptual reform, a characterization of religious belief and speculative metaphysics as obsolete sources of wisdom, and the search for means of perfecting our intellectual capacities. The intellectual possibilities and practical applications of this new science appeared unbounded. Beginning with an analysis of the self, it would explore grammar (the science of communicating ideas) and logic (the science of discovering new truths) before moving on to investigate education, morality, and, ultimately, politics. Ideology, not religion or the discredited prejudices of the past, was to be our infallible guide.

      The political thrust of this message was not unduly difficult to discern. Destutt de Tracy, like his fellow Idéologues, was against monarchy and the Church; he was for a secular morality and moderate republican institutions; he believed in progress through the diffusion of knowledge and educational reform. In brief, he defended the bourgeois republic established after the Thermidorian Reaction of 1795.

      How, then, did he respond to the rise of Napoléon Bonaparte and the establishment, first, of the Consulate and then the Empire in 1804 ? Initially the Idéologues and Napoléon seemed to see each other as natural allies, but the emperor soon concluded that they were a disruptive and unwelcome presence. He came to see them as metaphysicians, prone to idle speculation and eager to meddle in the affairs of government. Moreover, in the interests of stability and order, Napoléon was prepared to reach a compromise with the Roman Catholic Church. Accordingly, Napoléon closed down the Class of Moral and Political Sciences, thereby indicating that political theory would not be tolerated, and promoted the condemnation of the Idéologues as conspirators and atheists.

      Faced with this new and hostile climate, Destutt de Tracy and his colleagues retired from public life and comforted themselves with their scientific and philosophical investigations. In Destutt de Tracy’s particular case, this encouraged his resolve to complete his monumental inquiry into the component parts that, in his view, made up the various elements of ideology. Fortunately the investigation began at a level of abstraction that would ensure that all matters of practical application could be safely left aside for some time to come, as questions relating to politics and political economy could be answered only when the arduous philosophical groundwork of attaining “a complete knowledge of our intellectual faculties” (A Treatise on Political Economy, 9) had been finished.³

      It is this that explains why A Treatise on Political Economy appears as the fourth part of the Elements of Ideology and why, on several occasions in the text, Destutt de Tracy insists that his is “not properly a treatise on political economy” but the “first part of a treatise on the will,” which itself is “but the sequel of a treatise on the understanding” (TPE, 252). For us better to understand our text, therefore, we might briefly pause to consider the content of the first three parts of the Elements of Ideology. The first part appeared initially in 1801 and was subsequently republished in 1804 under the title Idéologie proprement dite. Destutt de Tracy here sought to establish, following Condillac, that the source of all knowledge lay in our sense impressions. From this he went on to analyze the four mental faculties of simple sensation, memory, judgment and will. The second part of the Elements of Ideology appeared in 1803 and was entitled Grammaire. According to Destutt de Tracy, grammar was not only the science of signs but also a continuation of the science of ideas. Accepting that it would not be possible to create a perfect language that would always accurately reflect reality, the ambition was a more modest one of correcting and improving our present vulgar language in order that we might more clearly and correctly express our ideas. Destutt de Tracy was here partly inspired by a reaction against what he saw as the verbal excesses of the French Revolution. The third part of the Elements of Ideology, entitled Logique, was published in 1805. At this point Destutt de Tracy’s purpose was nothing less than to establish a universal principle of certitude. Put simply, he did this by arguing that sense experience was free of error. As he explained in the “Supplement to the First Section of the Elements of Ideology” found in the present volume, he had reduced the whole science of logic to two facts: “we are perfectly, completely, and necessarily sure of all that we actually feel” and “none of our judgments, taken separately, can be erroneous” (32).

      Thus it was that Destutt de Tracy began his examination of political economy by restating the previously established philosophical premises upon which this investigation was to be built. The first part of his argument was therefore as follows: Our needs and means, rights and duties, derived from the faculty of the will. Since to want something was to possess something, it followed that the idea of property and our conception of the self and of personality arose naturally. Thus, the concepts yours and mine were derived directly from the faculty of the will and the injunction to love thy neighbor as thyself was “inexecutable” (64). Our desires were the source of our needs, and from this derived our ideas of riches and poverty, for “to be rich is to possess the means of supplying our wants, and to be poor is to be deprived of these means” (72). Liberty was understood as the power to execute our will, to act according to our desires, and therefore was “the remedy of all our ills, the accomplishment of all our desires, the satisfaction of all our wants” (78). Constraint was the opposite of liberty and was “the cause of all our sufferings” (78). As such, liberty was to be equated with happiness and was “our only good” (80). It was our duty to satisfy our needs “without any foreign consideration” (87). The goal of the “true society,” accordingly, was “always to augment the power of every one, by making that of others concur with it, and by preventing them from reciprocally hurting one other” (90). Only when these points had been established did Destutt de Tracy feel that he could move on to an analysis of the mechanisms of production and distribution.

      Destutt de Tracy, like Thomas Jefferson, saw the difficulties that this approach might pose to his readers, fearing that they “will be impatient at being detained so long in generalities” and that his treatment of the subject might appear “too abstract” (10). He was, on the other hand, unrepentant. He would be very sorry, he avowed in the “Advertisement,” if anyone “should be able to accuse me of having passed over some links in the chain of ideas” (11).

      However, life in Napoleonic France for a dissident philosopher was never without its