DESTUTT de TRACY, ANTOINE-LOUIS-CLAUDE. - Politician and philosopher, b. in Paris on 10 June 1754, d. there on 10 March 1836. He joined the first movements of the French Revolution: in the Constituent Assembly he sat on the left. He was imprisoned under the Terror. He belongs to the anthropocentric current of the French sensationalist school of the 18th century.
Ideology (Éléments d'idéologie, Paris 1801–15, 2nd ed. there 1824–25) is the history of the human intellect considered in relation to its means of knowing; it maintains that there are four distinct modes of sensibility into which every psychic fact of ours is resolved: sensibility properly so called, memory, judgment, and will. Another important work: Commentaire sur l'esprit des lois de Montesquieu (there 1819).