Antoine Destutt de Tracy
French philosopher
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(Suggest an Edit or Addition)According to Wikipedia, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology". Biography The son of a distinguished soldier, Claude Destutt, he was born in Paris. His family was of Scottish descent, tracing its origin to Walter Stutt, who had accompanied the Earls of Buchan and Douglas to the court of France in 1420 and whose family afterwards rose to be counts of Tracy. He was educated at home and at the University of Strasbourg, where he was noted for his athletic skill. He went into the army and when the French Revolution broke out he took an active part in the provincial assembly of Bourbonnais. Elected a deputy of the nobility to the Estates General, he sat alongside his friend, the Marquis de La Fayette. In the spring of 1792, he received the rank of maréchal de camp in command of the cavalry in the army of the north, but the influence of the extremists becoming predominant he took indefinite leave of absence and settled at Auteuil, where with Condorcet and Cabanis he devoted himself to scientific studies. Under the Reign of Terror, he was arrested and imprisoned for nearly a year, during which he studied Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and John Locke and abandoned the natural sciences for philosophy.
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