Idéologues

A loose-knit group of philosophers, scientists, littérateurs, and political reformists under the intellectual leadership of Destutt de Tracy and Cabanis. Much influenced by the epistemology of Condillac and the ethical utilitarianism of Helvétius, they developed 18th-c. sensationalism into the early years of the 19th c. After the fall of Robespierre in 1794, Ideology became the quasi-official philosophy of the Republic, institutionalized in the Class of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institut and propagated in the pages of La Décade philosophique. The Idéologues proved particularly influential for a time in educational reform, pioneering the experiment of the écoles centrales (1795-1802) and exerting a powerful influence upon one of their most celebrated pupils, Stendhal.

Meaning literally the ‘science of ideas’, Ideology sought to provide a methodology for the study of all mental operations, classified by Tracy as sensation, memory, judgement, and will. Since ideas were, as Condillac had argued, compounds of sensation, they were held by the Idéologues to be resolvable, through analysis, into the sense-data from which they arose. For them, the analysis of ideas was the primary philosophical discipline. If ideas could be verified at each stage of their development, from the simplest apprehension to the most complex intellectual concept, errors of cognition and reasoning would be eradicated and knowledge would be founded on a sure empirical basis, free of all religious and metaphysical speculation.

Though disciples of Condillac, the Idéologues went beyond his abstractive epistemology, placing their ‘science of ideas’ within the ambit of ‘zoology’. Since all thought derives from experience as mediated through the senses, there can be no meaningful distinction between the ‘physical’ and the ‘moral’ realms. Physiology, the analysis of ideas, and moral philosophy were, as Cabanis asserted, ‘les trois branches d'une seule et même science, qui peut s'appeler, à juste titre, la science de l'homme’.

As a philosophical programme aimed at practical reform, Ideology was encyclopaedic in its range. With its insistence on the need for a tightly defined language as the vital instrument of analysis, it boasted a methodology applicable not only to scientific enquiry but to ethics, politics, history, legislation, and even the arts. The writings of the Idéologues are suffused with a belief in the perfectibility of humankind through education. When their humanitarian and liberal-republican sympathies came into conflict with Napoleon's imperial ambitions, their role as institutional reformers was abruptly curtailed. Though their influence was felt among later Positivists [see Comte], their philosophy was denounced as atheistic and eclipsed by the revival of religion and metaphysical idealism in the early 19th c.

[James Shields]

Bibliography

• G. Gusdorf, La Conscience révolutionnaire: les Idéologues (1978)
• E. Kennedy, A ‘Philosophe’ in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of ‘Ideology’ (1978)