French aristocrat and Enlightenment thinker who coined the term "ideology". He concieved of it as the "science of ideas." Destutt de Tracy was one of the principal advocates of liberalism during and after the Revolution and wrote Elements d'ideologie. His advocacy of reason in philosophy and laissez-faire economics lost him favor with Napoleon.
DestuttdeTracy was born in Paris on July 20, 1754 and died in Paris on March 10, 1836.
For Tracy, "Ideology" was a liberal social and economic philosophy which provided the basis for a strong defense of private property, individual liberty, the free market, and constitutional limits to the power of the state (preferably in a republican form modeled on that of the USA).
One of Tracy's key social and economic ideas was that "society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges" and his broader social theory is based upon working out the implications of this notion of free exchange.
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