Claude Adrien Helvetius 1715 – 1771

Claude Adrien Helvetius was a French Enlightenment philosopher, tax-farmer, and patron of the philosophes. His treatise On the Mind, published in 1758, applied Locke's empiricism to a sweeping theory of human nature according to which all our thought is derived from sensation and all our action from self-interest. The book was condemned by the Sorbonne, the Pope, and the French parlement and became one of the most discussed works of the high Enlightenment. His posthumous A Treatise on Man developed his thesis that education rather than nature is the source of the differences between human beings.

Claude-Adrien Helvetius was born in 1715 in Paris, the son of the chief physician to Queen Marie Leszczynska. Through court connections he was made a Fermier general at twenty-three and accumulated an enormous fortune in tax-farming before retiring in 1751 to his estate at Vore in Normandy and to a hospitable house in the rue Sainte-Anne in Paris that became one of the principal salons of the philosophes.

His De l'esprit (1758) — On the Mind — argued that all human faculties are forms of physical sensibility, that minds differ from one another not by innate endowment but by the contingencies of education and experience, and that interest properly understood is the principle of moral and political life. The book was condemned by the Sorbonne and burned by order of the parlement of Paris; the censure backfired, making De l'esprit one of the most discussed works of its decade. The longer De l'homme appeared posthumously in 1773.

Helvetius's psychological egalitarianism and his emphasis on the formative power of legislation and education provided one of the principal philosophical sources of Bentham and the early utilitarian tradition. His arguments that public happiness depends on the rational alignment of interests and rewards anticipated modern incentive design. He died at Vore in December 1771.