Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Enlightenment and doubt
- 2 History resolved by mind
- 3 History resolved by men
- 4 History resolved by laws I
- 5 History resolved by laws II
- 6 History resolved by laws III
- 7 History resolved by will
- 8 History doubted
- 9 History ignored
- 10 History unresolved
- Conclusion
- Bibliographies
- Index
4 - History resolved by laws I
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Enlightenment and doubt
- 2 History resolved by mind
- 3 History resolved by men
- 4 History resolved by laws I
- 5 History resolved by laws II
- 6 History resolved by laws III
- 7 History resolved by will
- 8 History doubted
- 9 History ignored
- 10 History unresolved
- Conclusion
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
‘in germany’, announced Destutt de Tracy to a meeting of the Institute in Paris on 7 floréal in year X, ‘one is a Kantian as one was a Christian, a Mohammedan, a Brahmin, as one was a Platonist, a Stoic, an Academician, and as one was later a Scotist or a Thomist, and as finally in the seventeenth century we were all Cartesians’. In France, on the other hand, ‘in the ideological, moral and political sciences there is no head of a sect. One does not follow anybody's banner. Each one has his personal and completely independent opinions; and if there is agreement on several points, it always takes place without people making a plan for agreement, often without knowing it’. But, he continued, the French did have a method. ‘It consists in scrupulously observing the facts, in deducing consequences when they are completely certain, in not giving to simple suppositions the quality of facts, in trying to bind together only such truths as are linked naturally with one another and without lacunae, in admitting ignorance and always preferring it to any assertion which lacks verisimilitude’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Enlightenment and DespairA History of Social Theory, pp. 66 - 89Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1987