 Individualism, a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. 25. From a Treatise on Political Economy, Antoine Distuté de Tracey A Treatise on Political Economy, translated by Thomas Jefferson, Georgetown, D.C., W.A. Reind and Company, 1817 Antoine Distuté de Tracey, 1754 to 1836, was a French philosopher who coined the word ideology, a discipline devoted to tracing our ideas to their origins in sense experience. An important critic of Napoleon, Tracey developed an economic and social theory of individualism in considerable detail. Tracey's book, A Treatise on Political Economy, was translated into English with the assistance of Thomas Jefferson, after which it became a popular textbook on free market economics in southern universities. In the following passage we see a brief but insightful analysis of the nature of society. Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement, the most unformed, to its greatest perfection, and this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction in which the two contracting parties always both gain. Consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members. An exchange is a transaction in which the two contracting parties both gain. Whenever I make an exchange freely and without constraint, it is because I desire the thing I receive more than that I give, and on the contrary, he with whom I bargain, desires what I offer more than that which he renders me. When I give my labour for wages, it is because I esteem the wages more than what I should have been able to produce by labouring for myself, and he who pays me prizes more the services I render him than what he gives me in return. When I give a measure of wheat for a measure of wine, it is because I have a superabundance of food and nothing to drink, and he with whom I treat is in the contrary case. When several of us agree to execute any labour whatsoever in common, whether to defend ourselves against an enemy, to destroy noxious animals, to preserve ourselves from the ravages of the sea of an inundation of a contagion, or even to make a bridge or a road, it is because each of us prefers the particular utility which will result to him from it, to what he would have been able to do for himself during the same time. We are all satisfied in these species of exchanges. Everyone finds his advantage in the arrangement proposed. This has been Individualism a Reader, edited by George H. Smith and Marilyn Moore, narrated by James Foster. Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute. Production Copyright 2015 by the Cato Institute.