A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of "Ideology" (review)

512 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY have some intellectual defenses against the onslaughts that Philo brings against it; and what (and where) are they? Yet the bewildering feature of Philo's speeches in Part 1~ of the Dialogues is that although Hume has supplied no defenses against those attacks, Philo himself makes it clear that the belief survives them. It is in this respect that this belief/s like the paradigmatic natural beliefs: it is a commitment which the weapons of careless skepticism cannot undermine. (It is noteworthy here that Hume is at least hesitant about denying its universality, as when he says in the Natural History that it has "neither perhaps been so universal as to admit of no exception"; and that he pays at least lip service to the usefulness of "true religion," whose content seems to reduce to attenuated deism if it can be discerned at all [see Gaskin, pp. 146-47]). Reading it in this way-integrates it at least as well into Hume's philosophical system as a whole, since a dominant theme of that system is that our natures protect us against philosophical criticism. That Philo recommends a "plain philosophical assent" (my italics) to God's existence has to be read, I think, as a reminder of the caveats and restrictions with which the man of letters must surround it to prevent its leading to superstition or metaphysics, not of the presence of grounds which justify it. I have taken the liberty of arguing with this aspect of Gaskin's work because it is a crucial part of his general statement of Hume's position, and it seems to me questionable . But there is no doubt that Hume's selfw~onfessed artfulness makes assurance impossible here. Certainly Gaskin's interpretation is one which can subsume all the details of Hume's arguments under it; and in developing it he has produced what will undoubtedly be the standard work on Hume's philosophy of religion. TERENCE PENELHUM University of Calgary Emmet Kennedy. A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of "Ideology." Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978. Pp. xiii + 382. ~12.OO. Ideologic, the "science of ideas" based on the analysis of sensation, ruled over French thought from about 18oo to 1815 in defiance of the Kantian reform. It sought to perfect the empiricism of Locke, Condillac, and Helvedus into a rigorous, universal epistemology with which one could, in any scientific field, distinguish the knowable from the unknowable and know whatever may be known. The ideologues, in effect, substituted what they assumed to be constants of pure experience for those of pure reason. Although ideologic was not of much use in the natural sciences, it found wide application, as a conceptual framework and investigative method, in the still emerging disciplines of psychology, anthropology, linguistics, politics, sociology, economics--in which Destutt de Tracy and his colleagues often made pioneering contributions. Of late, the eighteenth century has been interpreted mainly as an age which, because it wished to regenerate society by the instrument of rational knowledge, also created, necessarily, the social sciences, ld~ologie, seen in this perspective, becomes the true BOOK REVIEWS 5t3 culmination of the Enlightenment. The IdOologueshave therefore, in recent years, been rehabilitated as a group, particularly by Sergio Moravia. It is now time to treat in depth at least the most important among them. This is what Kennedy has done--and done wellJfor Tracy, who, with Cabanis, was the guiding force of id~ologie,a term which he popularized in the title of the fundamental text of the movement, his Elements d'id~ologie. From innumerable sources, including family and other archives, Kennedy has pieced together a coherent, well-documented biographical narrative that is unrivalled on its subject. It is also an intellectual biography that attends closely to the many ties between the history of Tracy's mind and French political history. As an enlightened aristocrat, Tracy at first welcomed and served the Revolution of 1789, but, like Condorcet, another such aristocrat, he was disillusioned by its increasingly radical tone and eventually withdrew from public life. It was in jail waiting to be guillotined that, perhaps not inappropriately, he discovered...