Works
His chief works are the five-volume Eléments d'idéologie (1817–1818), the first volume of which was presented as "Ideology Strictly Defined," and which completed the arguments made in earlier completed monographs; Commentaire sur l'esprit des lois de Montesquieu (1806), and Essai sur le génie, et les ouvrages de Montesquieu (1808). The fourth volume of the Eléments d'idéologie the author regarded as the introduction to a second section of the planned nine-part work, which he titled Traité de la volonté (Treatise on the Will and Its Effects). When translated into English, editor Thomas Jefferson retitled the volume A Treatise on Political Economy, which obscured the aspects of Tracy's concern not with politics, but with far more basic questions of will, and the possibility of understanding the conditions of its determinations.
Read more about this topic: Destutt De Tracy
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“I know no subject more elevating, more amazing, more ready to the poetical enthusiasm, the philosophical reflection, and the moral sentiment than the works of nature. Where can we meet such variety, such beauty, such magnificence?”
—James Thomson (17001748)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The appetite of workers works for them; their hunger urges them on.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Proverbs 16:26.