ABSTRACT
Like other conservatives Louis de Bonald assailed the Enlightenment at its strategic weakness; in many ways we find a duplication of Maistre, although Bonald is more systematic. Bonald reduced human beings to subservient instruments of society. Bonald's theory about language fitted into his conviction about the absolute domination of tradition; in contrast, Condorcet thought the meaning of tradition lay in its dissolution. As similar in many ways as Bonald was to the other theorists of the Reaction, he had a different orientation to method. Burke was the orator of conservatism, Maistre the poet, and Bonald the social scientist. Bonald searched for universal laws, and he repudiated Montesquieu for his relativism. Bonald was involved in a search for universality, but he was looking for empirical laws that had been eliminated by the "science" of the Enlightenment. He attempted to discover empirical uniformities in actual social systems to undermine the universal laws advanced by the Enlightenment.
