Front Page Groups & Collections Antoine Louis Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy

Antoine Louis Claude, Comte Destutt de Tracy

1754 - 1836

About the Author

Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836) was a philosophe and one of the founders in the 1790s of the classical liberal republican group known as the Idéologues (which included Cabanis, Condorcet, Constant, Daunou, Say, Madame de Staël), a politician under several regimes spanning the Revolution and the Restoration, and an influential author. His writings particularly impressed Thomas Jefferson, who translated an published 2 of them in America. While a member of the Senate, he opposed Napoleon, and also spoke out against the subsequent constitutional monarchy, and in support of American-style laissez-faire republicanism. He coined the term “ideology” while he was at the Institut National.

In The Library:

• author: Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu (1817)
• author: A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s ’Spirit of Laws’ (1811)
• author: A Treatise on Political Economy (1817)

Quotations:

• Destutt de Tracy on the damage which government debt and the class which lives off loans to the state cause the industrious classes (1817) (21 January, 2013)