Brian Head - Politics and Philosophy in the Thought of Destutt De Tracy

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ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS:
POLITICAL THOUGHT AND
POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Volume 29

POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY
IN THE THOUGHT OF
DESTUTT DE TRACY

POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY
IN THE THOUGHT OF
DESTUTT DE TRACY

BRIAN W. HEAD

First published in 1987 by Garland Publishing, Inc.

This edition first published in 2020
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

1987 Brian Head

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-367-21961-1 (Set)
ISBN: 978-0-429-35434-2 (Set) (ebk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-22601-5 (Volume 29) (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27588-3 (Volume 29) (ebk)

Publishers Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY
IN THE THOUGHT OF
DESTUTT DE TRACY

Brian W. Head

Copyright 1987 by Brian Head
All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Head, Brian.
Politics and philosophy in the thought of Destutt de Tracy.

(Political theory and political philosophy)
Originally presented as the authors thesis
Bibliography: p.
1. Destutt de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude, comte,
17541836contributions in political science. I. Title.
II. Series.
JC179.D432H43 1987 320.01 86-26980
ISBN 0-8240-0819-7

All volumes in this series are printed
on acid-free, 250-year-life paper.

Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Destutt de Tracys long life (17541836) spanned several generations of French intellectual life, from the age of Voltaire to the July Monarchy. This study closely follows the text of my doctoral dissertation, entitled The Political and Philosophical Thought of Destutt de Tracy, submitted to the London School of Economics and Political Science in December 1979, There has been no attempt to revise the arguments in the light of scholarship which became available since 1978; some acknowledgement of later discussion may be found in articles which have already appeared, and in two books which I expect to publish in due course one on Tracys notions of ideology and social science, and a second work on the social and political thought of the wider circle of idologues . In this preface, I make some brief comments on the scope of the present study, and acknowledge the assistance I received during its years of preparation.

The term politics and philosophy are intended to signify the breadth of Tracys intellectual interests, and to hint at the close connections he saw between understanding human activity and attempting to influence the proper direction of public policy in all spheres of social life. Politics was a central component of Tracys work. He was a politican during two periods of his life (178891 and after 1799); he wrote a treatise on political theory (his Commentaire on Montesquieu); and his writings on law, education, economics and even on language contained important political implications. The term philosophy points to Tracys preoccupation with issues of epistemology and methodology. At the core of his system of ideas is the notion of idologie a philosophical methodology of scientific enquiry which he claimed would provide a guarantee for precise knowledge in the human sciences.

This study is primarily concerned to describe and analyse the published writings of Destutt de Tracy; it is not an intellectual biography based on private papers and archival materials, nor a sociology of ideas account of the emergence of French liberalism. Historical and biographical details have been included only to the extent I have judged necessary for a proper understanding of Tracys writings, or where I have reported material which had not previously been used to illuminate his thought.

I have concentrated on the three decades from the calling of the Etats-gnraux to the early years of the Restoration the period of Tracys entire literary production, and the period of his greatest influence and reputation. The early decades of his life, before about 1788, remain of little interest for the historian of ideas, and the motives for his change of direction from a military career towards politics and philosophy remain partly obscure. In the same way, the long years of virtual retirement and ill-health before his death in 1836 are of little philosophical or political interest except for the historian concerned with Tracys influence on younger generations of writers.

I have omitted from consideration some standard topics such as Tracys relations with Henri Beyle (Stendhal) and with Maine de Biran -topics which fortunately have been treated in depth by numerous historians. Nor have I here attempted a rounded picture of the idologues , whose activities and whose stormy relationship with Bonaparte have been well document elsewhere.

I have translated into English all the longer quotations from the original French texts, occasionally inserting the original terms where appropriate. Footnotes have been grouped separately at the end of each chapter.

I wish to thank Professor Ken Minogue, who supervised the dissertation from its beginnings in 1973. I also benefited from discussions with Professor Maurice Cranston and Dr John Hooper. My research in Paris was aided by a grant from the Central Research Fund of the University of London. I am indebted to the librarians of the Bibliothque Nationale, the Bodleian Library, the British (Museum) Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science, and the inter-library loan services of several Australian university libraries. My thanks are also due to Annette Ritchie who typed the drafts in 197879.

July 1985

Brian Head
School of Humanities
Griffith University
Brisbane

Notes

B.W. Head, The Origin of Ideologue and Idologie, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , vol. 183 (1980), pp. 257264; The Origins of la science sociale in France 17701800, Australian Journal of French Studies, vol. 19 (1982) pp. 115132; The Idologues Revisited, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory , vol. 8 (1984) pp. 163178.

For the most detailed account, see R. Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of Ideology (Philadelphia 1978)

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