Compared to the term “physiocracy”, “sensationist political economy”1 is a recent appellation (Faccarello 1990, 1992).
“Sensationism” refers to the empirical philosophy of John Locke, presented in his 1689 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and his statement that there are no innate ideas: in a nutshell, our ideas and knowledge come from our senses in contact with the external world (experience) and by reflection (the operations of our mind, a kind of internal sense).
This approach was well known in France in the eighteenth century2 and, in a sense, its acceptance had already been prepared by the Essay de logique (1678) of the physicist and philosopher Edme Mariotte (1620-1684). The first part of this Essay is composed of 100 propositions called “the first principles of Sciences”.3 There, Mariotte insists on the role of the senses in the elaboration of knowledge - “nothing is more certain than the knowledge based on our senses” (§ XV) - and of the sensations of pleasure and pain (or good and evil) in moral philosophy (§§ LIII-LVI). He finally lists a series of “first moral truths” or “maxims of politics”, a kind of accountancy of goods and evils showing how to maximise goods (or pleasures) and minimise evils (or pains) (§§ LXXXIII-C).Locke’s Essay, translated by Pierre Coste as early as 1700, had many editions, and its fundamental ideas were developed not only by one of the major French philosophers of the time, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-1780) in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines, 1746 and Traite des senta- tions, 1754 but also, in various directions, by scientists like Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis (1698-1759) in his Essai dephilosophie morale (1749) and Lettres sur divers sujets (1753) or Charles Bonnet (1720-1793) in his Essai de psychologie (1755) and Essai analytique sur les facultes de l’ame (1760).
1 The present chapter deals with some of the main themes addressed by sensationist authors: additional developments will be found in Chapter 8, “The spirit of geometry. Quantification and formalisation”.
2 See, for example, Yolton (1991), Hutchison (1991) and Schosler (1997, 2001).
3 Locke knew the French publications and controversies well - he even started to translate into English some of Pierre Nicole’s texts from his Essais de morale. He travelled extensively in France, where he bought Mariotte’s Essay de logique in 1678 (Lough 1953; Harrison and Laslett 1965).
DOI: 10.4324/9780429202414-6
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