Antoine Destutt de Tracy

Biography[edit]

The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born in Paris. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France in 1420 and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army and when the French Revolution broke out he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais. Elected a deputy of the nobility to the Estates General, he sat alongside his friend, the Marquis de La Fayette. In the spring of 1792, he received the rank of maréchal de camp in command of the cavalry in the army of the north, but the influence of the extremists becoming predominant he took indefinite leave of absence and settled at Auteuil, where with Condorcet and Cabanis he devoted himself to scientific studies.^[1] Under the Reign of Terror, he was arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studied Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and John Locke and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy.^[1]


In 1795, he was named associate of the Institut de France when it was first established.^[2] On the motion of Cabanis, he was named in the class of the moral and political sciences. He soon began to attract attention by the memoires which he read before his colleagues—papers which formed the first draft of his comprehensive work on ideology, named Eléments d'idéologie. He conceived of ideology as the "science of ideas". The society of "ideologists" at Auteuil embraced, besides Cabanis and Tracy, Constantin-François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney and Dominique Joseph Garat, professor in the National Institute.^[1] Along with some of these colleagues, he was a member of the cultural society Les Neuf Sœurs. In 1806, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.^[3]


Under the Empire, Tracy was a member of the senate, but he took little part in its deliberations. Under the Restoration, he became a peer of France, but protested against the reactionary split of the government and remained in opposition. In 1808, he was elected a member of the Académie française in place of Cabanis and in 1832 was also named a member of the Academy of Moral Sciences on its reorganization. He appeared only once at its conferences, owing to his age and to disappointment at the comparative failure of his work. Destutt de Tracy was one of the principal advocates of liberalism during and after the Revolution. He died in Paris.^[1]