Su alcuni aspetti dell’analisi economica di Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754- 1836)

Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy (1754-1836) is the founder of the Idéologues: a group of scholars active in France from the years immediately preceding the Revolution to the beginning of the Restoration age. They were liberals and republicans, affirmed the freedom of thought and the principle of secularism, applied the scientific method to the study of society and believed that the progress of knowledge should be oriented to the progress of humanity. Describing the process of identifying of the person and the emergence of his/her will and the awareness of his/her own needs, Destutt de Tracy arrives, in the fourth volume (1815) of the Éléments d’idéologie, to write a Traité d’économie politique, which he will publish in 1823 as an independent book. Also from this editorial choice, it appears that political economy has its basis in the study of the individual, his/her needs and his/her rationality. Therefore, according to Destutt de Tracy, political economy is a branch of the study of “ideas”, while the historical and social dimension mostly remains in the background of the description of the exchange, which the production process is reduced to. The paper frames the figure of Tracy within the sensist philosophy, from which he inherits some theoretical aporias, and discusses some basic aspects of his economic theory