French philosopher and economist, Tracy was born into a noble family of the ancien régime at Paris on 20 July 1754 and died in the same city on 10 March 1836. His life spanned the most tumultuous period of French history, from the twilight of the Old Regime to the dawn of capitalism, romanticism and socialism. One of the last philosophes, Tracy began as an eighteenth-century classical metaphysician, preoccupied with the sensationalist doctrine of Locke and Condillac, and ended up, in the words of Auguste Comte, as the philosopher ‘who had come closest to the positive state’. In the interim he knelt at the feet of Voltaire; served alongside Lafayette in the Royal Cavalry, and as deputy to the French Estates General and the Constituent Assembly; was imprisoned during the Reign of Terror; released after Thermidor (escaping the guillotine by a mere 2 days); subsequently helped to establish his country’s first successful national programme of public education; led the opposition to Napoleon from his seat in the French Senate; regained his title under the Bourbon Restoration; counted among his associates the likes of Mirabeau, Condorcet, Cabanis, DuPont de Nemours, Jefferson, Franklin, Lavoisier, Ricardo and Mill; and retained his early sympathies for liberty throughout.

Long before it took on its pejorative sense at the hands of Marx, Tracy coined the term ‘ideology’ (by which he meant the science of ideas) to describe his philosophy, which embraced and intertwined psychological, moral, economic and social phenomena, but which gave primacy to economics because he thought that the purpose of society was to satisfy man’s material needs and multiply his enjoyments. Tracy rejected the Physiocratic notion of value, substituting a labour theory that Ricardo subsequently endorsed in his Principles. Like Say, he denied Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour. But unlike Smith or Say, he reduced all wealth, including land, to labour. On numerous other topics (that is, wages, profits, rents, exchange, price variations, international trade) he was far less thorough and rigorous than either Smith or Say, but his exposition of the capitalization theory of taxation was superior to the rest. In the final analysis, his Traité was not properly a treatise on political economy so much as a part of a general study of the human will. Yet the resulting lack of depth did not impair his remarkable ability to allure great minds. Ricardo found him ‘a very agreeable old gentleman’, and Jefferson was influenced to the point of including ‘ideology’ among the ten projected departments in his plan for the University of Virginia.

Along with Say, Destutt de Tracy was one of the earliest members of the French liberal school. Patrician, philosopher and patriot, caught in the grips of major social and economic upheaval, he denounced the interests of his own class (the rentiérs) and became the spokesman of a nascent capitalism in which he had neither role nor vested interest.

Selected Works

1804–18. Eléments d’idéologie, 5 vols. Paris: Courcier.

1811. A commentary and review of Montesquieu’s spirit of laws. Trans, Philadelphia: William Duane.

1817. A treatise on political economy, ed. T. Jefferson. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970.