The first issue of the Décade philosophique appeared on 29 April 1794. In all, fifty-four volumes of the journal were published between that date and 1807, when, on Napoleon's orders, it was forced to merge with the Mercure français. The Décade was published three times a month and the periodical soon became one of the intellectual powerhouses of the French republic after Robespierre. But quite what, in this particular setting, an intellectual powerhouse might have been is still an open question. (...) Alongside Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham, and their vast and varied intellectual legacies, the significance of the dozens of writers, including Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, Pierre-Samuel Dupont de Nemours and Jean-Baptiste Say, who contributed to the Décade, is now more difficult to specify. There have, of course, been several fine studies of the Décade and its contributors, notably by Joanna Kitchen and Marc Régaldo, and more broadly by Sergio Moravia, Martin Staum and Cheryl Welch. But it is still somewhat easier to associate the periodical with a number of keywords, such as idéologie and science sociale, than with anything comparable to those more comprehensively articulated bodies of thought that came to be labelled “idealism” or “utilitarianism”. “Ideologism” never seems to have existed, and certainly never caught on. But this very indeterminacy may still be an advantage. It may help to open up, both historically and analytically, rather more of the intellectual space once covered by the broad range of subjects and arguments that first helped to shape—and then came to be buried by—idealism and utilitarianism. (shrink)

This essay is about the relationship between the moral and political thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the related concepts of autonomy, social science and industrialism. Its aim is to show why these three concepts throw more light both on Rousseau's theory of the relationship between democratic sovereignty and representative government, and on his explanation of the sharply counterintuitive historical trajectory followed by democracy in its passage from ancient to modern times.