The Class of Moral and Political Sciences, 1795-1803

Bibliographic Data

ID8940686
AuthorsMartin S Staum (corresponding author)
Year1980
Volume11
Issue3
Pages371-371
Publication date1980-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueFrench Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0016-1071 • E-ISSN: 1527-5493
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/286394
OpenAlexW2334314662
LanguageEN
Citations received13

In 1795 the Thermidorian Convention created the Class of Moral and Political Sciences as a branch of the new National Institute. This attempt to fulfill Enlightenment aspirations for sciences of man and society was in practice the first effort to institutionalize several modern social sciences.1 The official image of the Class was a republican gallery of talents purged of the taint of aristocracy and of royalism fatal to the ancien regime academies.2 Yet the social composition and the political opinions of the Class have never been systematically examined to show how much continuity and how much change it represented from ancien regime cultural elites. A collective biography of the Class reveals a significant number of members of the former privileged orders and a surprising diversity of political views within the parameters of moderation tolerated by the Directory. Moreover, scholars have generally assumed that the group of physicians and philosophers known as Ideologues, proponents of empiricist epistemology, monist metaphysics, and liberal politics, dominated the Class and rankled First Consul Bonaparte sufficiently to provoke dissolution of the Class in 1803.3 A study of the pub

Class (philosophy · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · European Political History Analysis · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Law · Philosophy

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