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Sociologists of knowledge interested in the relationship of human knowledge to material circumstances now believe that the study of "ideology," or political creeds expressing a group's socio-economic interests, is central to the historical and social understanding of groups. Marx and Engels, neglecting the fact that their own creed was ideological, called ideology "empty talk about consciousness." Engels identified ideology with "false consciousness." Ideologie was, or so many communists believed, nothing but a vain vindication of bourgeois laissez-faire economic theory.

Napoleon Bonaparte, a "Burkean" conservative albeit Burke's arch enemy, contemptuously dubbed the original Ideologists Ideologues after they served his purpose then abandoned him because of his tyranical methods. He dismissed their ideologie as "idealistic trash" and blamed them for everything that went wrong with his France including the Russian disaster. Therefore the foremost Ideologists, Destutt de Tracy and Pierre Cabanis, looked to the new United States of America as the proper crib for ideologie. Thomas Jefferson, an American son of the French Enlightenment, translated French ideologie into English ideology and had it published. Furthermore, he dropped theology from the curriculum at his university in favor of ideology.

The phrase, "the pursuit of happiness," drafted by Thomas Jefferson into the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was certainly a more sophisticated statement than would have been "the pursuit of property." But the French utilitarians were gauche enough to broach the term 'property' instead of 'happiness' in their own liberal declaration, the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man - perhaps they deemed 'happiness' to be an inutile metaphysical term:

"The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression."

After all, property is the basis of all physical and spiritual wealth, is it not? The feeling of natural properties, from which the willful human derives the notion of personal property, is the origin of self-development. The necessarily individual, privately owned sensation of nature, an ownership depending on the human will, is the natural source of human personality and other derived or 'artificial' institutions including the institution of private property.

We might even hold that the 'person' is a property of the individual will in its unique relation to objective social circumstances, which it introjects and ejects to suit itself. The 'self' might be construe d more broadly than 'person', but a discussion of the difference would lead us astray here - the ideologists failed to realize their prime objective: dispense with vague definitions and metaphysical terms by resort to more precise signs.

Tracy proposed that willing is a way of feeling: "The faculty of willing is but a mode of the faculty of feeling," he stated. For him, the 'self' is the sensibility of personal organization which is felt to possess that sensibility. We interpret this to mean that the self splits and feels itself - other-feeling is at the same time self-feeling. The self, he says, is the moral person, something that might be construe d to be either an abstract existence, called 'sensibility,' or a little subtle body. Again, to feel something is self-feeling. Separated from objects, such self-feeling is infinite, unbounded, hence differs from ordinary concepts of knowledge. The self is not something in opposition to something, but simply constitutes our existence:

"I feel because I exist." My existence and my sensibility are one and the same thing. Willing is part of feeling, the ability to react to pain and pleasure felt.

"The self," declared Destutt de Tracy, "of every one of us is for him his own sensibility. Thus sensibility alone gives to a certain point, the idea of personality. But the mode of sensibility, called the will or willing faculty, can alone render this idea of personality complete; it is only then that it can produce the idea of property as we have it. The idea of property arises solely from the faculty of will; and moreover it arises necessarily from it, for we cannot have an idea of self without having that of the property in the faculties of self and their effects. If it was not this, if there was not amongst us a natural and necessary property, there never would have been a conventional or artificial property. This truth is the foundation of all economy, and of all morality; which are in their principles but one and the same science."

Now the idea of property arises from inevitable individuality, from the individual will (cause) for property (effect). That is, the willing individual always has some property, for individuality in itself is the inalienable and inevitable property of sensible being. But the individual must want something:

"We should not have the property of any of our goods whatsoever," claimed Tracy, "if we had not that of our wants, which is nothing but that of our sentiments; and all these properties are inevitably derived from the sentiment of personality, from the consciousness of our self."

"If it were not in nature," further translated Jefferson, "that every solid body sustained above our heads necessarily sheltered us we would never have had houses made for shelter. In the same manner, if there never had been natural and inevitable property there never would have been any artificial or conventional."

Tracy dismissed thinkers who held that property was merely a human invention, perhaps an excuse for the theft of man's common-wealth or natural treasury in the earth, an invention that could or should be disposed with:

"It seems were we to listen to certain philosophers and legislators that at a precise instant people have taken into their heads spontaneously, and without cause, to say thine and mine, and that they could and even should have dispensed with it. But the thine and the mine were never invented."

The feeling of property, Tracy reiterated at length, arises from the recognition of other willing, resisting beings, to which a personality has to be accorded. Personalities are, of course, personal properties of the individuals concerned.

"There is a property," quoth Tracy, "fundamental, anterior and superior to every institution, from which will arise all the sentiments and dis-sentiments which are derived from all the others; for there is property, if not every where there is an individual sentiment, at least every where that there is an individual willing and acting in consequence of his will."

Of course we must work for our property, including the self with which properties are associated:

"The same intellectual acts emanating from our faculty of will, which cause us to acquire a distinct and complete idea of self, and of exclusive property in all its modes, are also those which render us susceptible of wants, and are the source of all our means of providing those wants.... Labour, the employment of our force, constitutes our only treasure and our only power.... It is the faculty of will which renders us proprietors of wants and means, of passion and action, of pain and power. Thence arise the ideas of justice and deprivation."

Mind you that, at least as far as the original ideology goes, that whatever satisfies wants is good. To have goods, says Tracy, is to be rich. We get rich by exercising our sole power, by working. Good have two values: their cost, and their benefit. Hence labor has the same values. Cost is "natural and necessary," said Tracy, and benefit is "eventual and variable."

Now the primary good of all goods is our liberty. What is liberty?

"Liberty is the power of executing our will. It is our first good. It includes them all.... All constraint is sufferance; all liberty is enjoyment.... Our sole duty is to augment our liberty and its value. The object of society is solely the fulfillment of this duty."

Are we perfectly clear now about the nature of Ideological Property? Have we learned anything useful, or have we been spinning the wheels and begging the questions?