ABSTRACT
Idéologie drew its inspiration from two distinct lineages: (1) the empirical philosophers, including Francis Bacon, John Locke, George Berkeley, and their Continental counterparts such as Pierre Bayle and Etienne-Bonnot de Condi l lac, whose parentage they celebrated, and (2) the rat ional ist philosophers, who were descendants of René Descartes and Leibniz and whose ancestry they were less pleased to claim. The idéologues, however, were engaged in what Bacon, and later Newton, called ‘experimental philosophy’. They drew
inspiration from both rationalism and empiricism, but in the end were strictly aligned with neither. More to the point, idéologie shared what has long been recognised as perhaps the fundamental characteristic of Enlightenment philosophy (see Coleman 1996:208): its leading scholars constantly repeated the doctrine that the senses, through observation and experience, are the source of all true knowledge, and yet the actual method of the period was more often theoretical than empirical. This chapter begins with an exercise in iconology. By the end of the
eighteenth century, at least insofar as the idéologues were concerned, Bacon and Descartes were far more important as symbols of particular sets of social attitudes than they were sources of true philosophical inspiration. Descartes and Cartesian rationalism had been captured by the Church and were being used to shore up the divine rights of monarchs, the power of the Church and the defence of privilege of all sorts, whereas the empiricists who claimed allegiance to Baconian principles often saw their epistemologies as preludes to moral treatises that supported social and political reforms. Next, we take a brief detour and examine the importance of the materialist philosophers LaMettrie and Holbach for idéologie. Again, these philosophers had a greater symbolic than real import for Condillac and his heirs because the critics of idéologie often used the extreme and naive writing of LaMettrie and Holbach as straw men in their rhetoric, attacking in the same breath Condillac’s ‘statue’ and LaMettrie’s ‘manmachine’. Then, we look at the sensationalist philosophy of John Locke and Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, which was the principal inspiration for Tracy’s idéologie, the subject of the final section.
