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“THE MOMENT OF SOCIAL SCIENCE”: THE DECADE PHILOSOPHIQUE AND LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRENCH THOUGHT

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Boulad-AyoubJosiane and NadeauMartin, eds., La Décade philosophique comme système, 9 vols (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2003)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2009

MICHAEL SONENSCHER
MICHAEL SONENSCHER*
Affiliation:
King's College, Cambridge, UK
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Extract

The first issue of the Décade philosophique appeared on 29 April 1794. In all, fifty-four volumes of the journal were published between that date and 1807, when, on Napoleon's orders, it was forced to merge with the Mercure français. The Décade was published three times a month (taking its name from its appearance on the tenth day of each month of the French republican calendar) and the periodical soon became one of the intellectual powerhouses of the French republic after Robespierre. But quite what, in this particular setting, an intellectual powerhouse might have been is still an open question. Alongside Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham, and their vast and varied intellectual legacies, the significance of the dozens of writers, including Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours and Jean-Baptiste Say, who contributed to the Décade, is now more difficult to specify. There have, of course, been several fine studies of the Décade and its contributors, notably by Joanna Kitchen and Marc Régaldo, and more broadly by Sergio Moravia, Martin Staum and Cheryl Welch. But it is still somewhat easier to associate the periodical with a number of keywords, such as idéologie and science sociale, than with anything comparable to those more comprehensively articulated bodies of thought that came to be labelled “idealism” or “utilitarianism”. “Ideologism” never seems to have existed, and certainly never caught on. But this very indeterminacy may still be an advantage. It may help to open up, both historically and analytically, rather more of the intellectual space once covered by the broad range of subjects and arguments that first helped to shape—and then came to be buried by—idealism and utilitarianism.

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Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , April 2009 , pp. 121 - 146
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 Kitchen, Joanna, Un Journal “philosophique”: La Décade (1794–1807) (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1965)Google Scholar; Régaldo, Marc, Un Milieu intellectuel: La Décade philosophique (1794–1807), 5 vols. (Lille: Atelier de reproduction des thèses, 1976)Google Scholar; Welch, Cheryl B., Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Moravia, Sergio, Il tramonto dell'illuminismo. Filosofia e politica nella società francese (1770–1810) (Bari: Laterza, 1968)Google Scholar; idem, Il pensiero degli Ideologues. Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780–1815) (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974); Staum, Martin S., Minerva's Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

2 On the eighteenth-century concept of civilization see most recently Binoche, Bertrand, ed., Les Equivoques de la civilisation (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2005)Google Scholar, and the further bibliographical guidance supplied there.

3 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, “Du Développement, des progrès, et des bornes de la raison,” in Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Oeuvres (1797), 15 vols. (Ahlen: Scientia Verlag, 1986), 15: 42, 26.

4 Gabriel Bonnet de Mably, “Des Talents,” in idem, Oeuvres, 14: 88.

5 For an inspired guess that this was the case see Derrida, Jacques, L'Archéologie du frivole (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1973), 104Google Scholar, n. 1, translated by John P. Leavey Jr as The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980), 120, n. 24; and, for corroboration, see Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Les Monades, ed. Laurence L. Bongie, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 187 (1980).

6 For a recent examination of Leibniz's ontology and subsequent discussions of the problems it raised, which also makes it easier to see why Leibniz's ontology lent itself to the more strongly monistic renditions of the second half of the eighteenth century, see Watkins, Eric, “On the Necessity and Nature of Simples: Leibniz, Wolff, Baumgarten, and the Pre-critical Kant”, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 3 (2006), 261–314Google Scholar. On the resonance of this type of vitalist natural philosophy in late eighteenth-century France see Sonenscher, Michael, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 34–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 42–4, 119–25.

7 On Kant in France see Azouvi, François and Bourel, Dominique, De Königsberg à Paris. La Réception de Kant en France (1788–1804) (Paris: Vrin, 1991)Google Scholar.

8 Fuller descriptions of both individuals' interest in this type of natural philosophy are set out in Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes, 35, 123–5. For a further example, by another former mesmerist, see Salaville, Jean-Baptiste, De la Perfectibilité (Paris, 1801), 28–39Google Scholar.

9 Magasin Encyclopédique (1802), issue 2, 79–80, cited by Hofer, Hermann, “Mercier admirateur de l'Allemagne et ses reflets dans le préclassicisme et le classicisme allemands”, in Hofer, Hermann, ed., Louis-Sébastien Mercier précurseur et sa fortune (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1977), 73–116Google Scholar, 105 (emphasis in original).

10 Antoine Destutt de Tracy, Projet d'éléments d'idéologie (Paris, an IX/1801), 2.

11 For examples of this scepticism see Destutt de Tracy, Projet, 3, 117–18, 136, 198–9, 341–2, 355.

12 On this episode see Azouvi and Bourel, De Königsberg à Paris, 105–12.

13 On this argument see Schinz, Albert, “La Profession du foi du vicaire Savoyard et le livre De l'esprit”, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 17 (1910), 225–61Google Scholar; Masson, Pierre-Maurice, “Rousseau contre Helvétius”, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France 18 (1911), 103–24Google Scholar; and the further account in Sonenscher, Michael, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 267–80Google Scholar.

14 Destutt de Tracy, Projet, 10.

15 Ibid., 244–5.

16 Ibid., 217.

17 Ibid., 243, and n. 1.

18 Ibid., 244.

19 On the early history of “social science” see Baker, Keith M., “The Early History of the Term ‘Social Science’”, Annals of Science 20 (1964), 211–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brian W. Head, “The Origins of ‘la Science Sociale’ in France, 1770–1800, Australian Journal of French Studies 19 (1982), 115–32; Staum, Martin S., Minerva's Message: Stabilizing the French Revolution (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), 19–32Google Scholar; Wokler, Robert, “Saint-Simon and the Passage from Political to Social Science”, in Pagden, Anthony, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 325–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and idem, “Ideology and the Origins of Social Science”, in Goldie, Mark and Wokler, Robert, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 688–710CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, What is the Third Estate? (1789), in Sieyès, Political Writings, ed. Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 115–16 (the italics in the first cited passage are in the original; I have, however, modified my own translation of the second cited passage).

21 L'Historien 19 (19 Frimaire an IV/10 December 1795) (emphasis in original).

22 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Emile, or On Education (1762), ed. and trans. Bloom, Alan (Basic Books: New York, 1979), book 5, 458Google Scholar.

23 Pierre-Louis Roederer, Cours d'organisation sociale, in idem, Oeuvres, ed. A.-M. Roederer, 8 vols. (Paris, 1853–9), 8. On this lecture course see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 322–34, and the further literature cited there.

24 Dominique Joseph Garat, membre de l'assemblée constituante, à M. Condorcet, membre de l'assemblée nationale, seconde législature (Paris, 1791), 25–6.

25 Ibid., 26.

26 Ibid., 27.

27 Ibid., 81–2.

28 Ibid., 83–4.

29 de Caritat, Antoine, marquis de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, ed. Hampshire, Stuart (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), 112Google Scholar. For the original passage see Condorcet, A, Tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain. Projets, Esquisse, Fragments et Notes (1772–1794), ed. Schandeler, Jean-Pierre and Crépel, Pierre (Paris: Institut National d'Etudes Démographiques, 2004), 357Google Scholar.

30 British Library, F1107 (1), F. P. B***, De l'Equilibre des trois pouvoirs politiques, ou lettres au représentant du peuple Lanjuinais (Paris, an III/1795), 7 (see ibid., 13, for a parallel remark that Plato, More and Hobbes were all advocates of equality).

31 Cabanis, in a memorandum to the institute of 7 Thermidor Year IV, singled out this aspect of Sieyès's draft declaration of rights, describing the whole work as “l'un des meilleurs morceaux d'analyse qui existent dans aucune langue”: Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, “Histoire physiologique des sensations”, Mémoires de l'Institut National des Sciences et Arts pour l'An IV de la République (Paris, an VI/1798), 98–154, 105, n. 1). Sieyès, it may be worth noting, reproduced a large passage from his draft declaration of rights highlighting the relationship between needs, means and liberty in an article entitled “Des Intérêts de la liberté dans l'état social et dans le système représentatif”, that was published in the Journal d'instruction sociale 2 (8 June 1793), 33–48 (40–42 for the passage in question), and, in substance, was an attack on the Jacobin idea of liberty as nondependence. On Sieyès's conception of the representative system and the idea of “graduated promotion” see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 67–94.

32 Décade philosophique 24 (Dec. 1799–Feb. 1800), 9–17 (Boulad-Ayoub, 6: 138–43). For the work reviewed see Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Quelques Considérations sur l'organisation sociale en général et particulièrement sur la nouvelle constitution (1799), in Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Claude Lehec and Jean Cazeneuve, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1956), 2: 460–90. For Garat's speech of 23 Frimaire an VIII/14 Dec. 1799 see Moniteur, issue 86 of the Year VIII (26 Frimaire an VIII), 341.

33 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, An Expostulatory Letter from J. J. Rousseau, Citizen of Geneva, to Christopher de Beaumont, Archbishop of Paris (London, 1763), 51Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 53–9.

35 Ibid., 51, 52.

36 Ibid., 51.

37 Ibid., 51. For helpful insights into this aspect of Rousseau's thought see Henrich, Dieter, Aesthetic Judgement and the Moral Image of the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 12–16Google Scholar.

38 Rousseau, Letter, 52.

39 Ibid., 52–3.

40 Ibid., 53.

41 Ibid., 53.

42 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Lettres écrites de la montagne (1764), ed. Alfred Dufour (Lausanne: L'Age d'homme, 2007), 257. I have used the translation given in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Letters Written from the Mountains, published in The Miscellaneous Works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 5 vols. (London, 1767), 4: 315–16. On the identity of “the beneficent philosopher” see the same text in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Pléiade, 1959–95), 3: 881, n. 3.

43 Garat, A M. Condorcet, 55–6, 63–6.

44 Dominique-Joseph Garat, Speech of 23 Frimaire an VIII/14 December 1799, Moniteur, issue 86 of the Year VIII (26 Frimaire an VIII), 341.

45 Jean-Jacques-Régis Cambacérès, “Discours sur la science sociale” (7 Ventôse an 6), in Mémoires de l'Institut national des sciences et arts. Sciences morales et politiques, 3 (Paris, an IX/1801), 1–14.

46 “Son mémoire est destiné à prouver que le véritable objet de cette science est le perfectionnement de la civilisation”. Décade 17 (1798), 129–37 (Boulad-Ayoub, 3: 467).

47 Cambacérès, “Discours”, 1–2, 3, 7.

48 Ibid., 10–11, 13.

49 [Charles-Jean-Baptiste Bonnin], De la Révolution européenne (Paris, 1815), 195.

50 [Charles-Jean-Baptiste Bonnin], Lettres sur l'éducation écrites en octobre et en décembre 1823, dans sa prison, par le publiciste C.-J.-B. Bonnin, sur l'éducation de sa fille (Paris, 1825), 42–3.

51 Ibid., 50.

52 Ibid., 195–9, 281–305, 329.

53 For examples of this version of social science and the strong emphasis on the concept of civilization on which it was predicated see the Fourierist journal La Phalange. Journal de la science sociale (Paris, 1836–43); Hepp, Georges Philippe, Essai sur la théorie de la vie sociale et du gouvernement représentatif, pour servir d'introduction à l'étude de la science sociale ou du droit et des sciences politiques (Paris, 1833)Google Scholar; and Rey, Joseph-Auguste, Théorie et pratique de la science sociale, 3 vols. (Paris, 1843)Google Scholar.