DESTUTT de TRACY, Antoine-Louis-Claude. — A political figure and philosopher, born in Paris on 10 June 1754, died there on 10 March 1836. He adhered to the early movements of the French Revolution: in the Constituent Assembly he sat on the left. He was imprisoned during the Terror. He belongs to the anthropocentric current of the French sensist school of the 18th century.
Ideology (*Eléments d’idéologie*, Paris 1801–15, 2nd ed., 1824–25) is the history of the human intellect considered in relation to its means of knowing; it affirms that there are four distinct modes of sensibility into which every psychic fact resolves itself: sensibility properly so called, memory, judgment, and will. Another important work: *Commentaire sur l’esprit des lois* of Montesquieu (ibid. 1819).