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V

It is a curious fact that the French scholars of the time of which we are speaking should have been divided into two ``distinct societies which had only one single trait in common, the celebrity of their names.''11.39 The first were the professors and examiners at the Ecole polytechnique which we already know and those at the Collège de France. The second was the group of physiologists, biologists, and psychologists, mostly connected with the Ecole de médecine and known as the ideologues.

Not all of the great biologists of which France could boast at the time belonged to this second group. At the Collège de France, Cuvier, the founder of comparative anatomy and probably the most famous of them, stood close to the pure scientists. The advances of the biological sciences as expounded by him contributed perhaps as much as anything else to create the belief in the omnipotence of the methods of pure science. More and more problems that had seemed to evade the powers of exact treatment were shown to be conquerable by the same methods.11.40 The two other biologists whose names are now even better known than his, Lamarck and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, remained at the periphery of the ideologist group and did not concern themselves much with the study of man as a thinking being. But Cabanis and Main de Biran, with their friends Destutt de Tracy and Degérando, made the latter the central problem of their labors.

Ideology,11.41 in the sense in which the term was used by that group, meant simply the analysis of human ideas and of human action, including the relation between man's physical and mental constitution.11.42 The inspiration of the group came mainly from Condillac and the field of their studies was outlined by Cabanis, one of the founders of physiological psychology, in his Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme (1802). And although there was much talk among them about applying the methods of natural science to man, this meant no more than that they proposed to study man without prejudices and without nebulous speculations about his end and destiny. But this prevented neither Cabanis nor his friends from devoting a large part of their life work to that analysis of human ideas which gave ideology its name. Nor did it occur to them to doubt the legitimacy of introspection. If the second head of the group, Destutt de Tracy, proposed to regard the whole of ideology as part of zoology,11.43 this did not preclude his confining himself entirely to that part of it which he called idéologie rationelle, in contrast to the idéologie physiologique, and which consisted of logic, grammar and economics.11.44

It cannot be denied that in all this, out of their enthusiasm for the pure sciences, they used many misleading expressions which were grossly misunderstood by Saint-Simon and Comte. Cabanis in particular stressed repeatedly that physics must be the basis of the moral sciences;11.45 but with him too this meant no more than that account must be taken of the physiological bases of mental activities, and he always recognized the three separate parts of the ``science de l'homme'': physiology, analysis of ideas, and morals.11.46 But, insofar as the problems of society are concerned, while Cabanis' work remained mainly programmatic in character, Destutt de Tracy made very important contributions. We need mention here only one: his analysis of value and its relation to utility, where, proceeding from the foundations laid by Condillac, he went very far in providing what classical English political economy lacked and what might have saved it from the impasse into which it got--a correct theory of value. Destutt de Tracy (and Louis Say, who later continued his work) may indeed be said to have anticipated by more than half a century what was to become one of the most important advances of social theory, the subjective (or marginal utility) theory of value.11.47

It is true that others outside their circle went much further in the application of the technique of the natural sciences to social phenomena, particularly the Société des observateurs de l'homme, which, largely under Cuvier's influence, went some way in confining social study to a mere recording of observations reminiscent of similar organizations of our own day. 11.48 But on the whole there can be no doubt that the ideologues preserved the best tradition of the eighteenth-century philosophes. And while their colleagues at the Ecole polytechnique became the admirers and friends of Napoleon and received from him all possible support, the ideologues remained staunch defenders of individual freedom and consequently incurred the wrath of the despot.


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