Benthamism meaning
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Claude Adrien Helvétius
French philosopher (1715–1771)
For other uses, see Helvetius (disambiguation).
Claude Adrien Helvétius (;[1]French:[klodadʁijɛ̃ɛlvesjys]; 26 January 1715[2] – 26 December 1771) was a French philosopher, freemason[3] and littérateur.
Life
Claude Adrien Helvétius was born in Paris, France, and was descended from a family of physicians, originally surnamed Schweitzer (meaning "Swiss" in German; Latinized as Helvétius). His great-grandfather Johann Friedrich Schweitzer known as "Helvetius", was a Dutch physician and alchemist, of German extraction. His grandfather Adriaan Helvetius introduced the use of ipecacuanha;[4] his father Jean Claude Adrien Helvétius was first physician to Marie Leszczyńska, queen of France. Claude Adrien was trained for a financial career, apprenticed to his maternal uncle in Caen,[5] but he occupied his spare time with poetry. Aged twenty-three, at the queen's request, he was appointed as a farmer-general, a tax-collecting post worth 100,000 crowns a yea
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The Aviary of Madame Helvetius is a mawkishly sentimental little fable published in 1809 as part of a set of "Instructional narratives" for little girls, by Jean-Nicolas Bouilly (1763-1842), who is remembered today chiefly as the librettist of Beethoven's Fidelio. In the story, a tame pigeon is sent to Madame bearing an anonymous begging letter; she trustingly obliges and has her money returned in due course, to outpourings of uplifting emotion, by a pretty member of the "deserving poor" . As far as I know Bouilly had no personal connection and is merely echoing Madame H's well-known kindness and fondness for birds.
According to Antoine Guillois, the tale is particularly fitting since Madame Helvétius was as fond of children as she was of animals. Her entourage included his grandmother Eulalie Roucher, Ambroise Firmin-Didot, Amithe Cabalis and Elisa de Condorcet, as well as the two daughters of her faithful servant Marin. The children were allowed into her room and aviaries as w
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The word “intelligentsia” entered the English vocabulary in the 1920s from the Russian. The Russians, in turn, adopted it from France and Germany, where “intelligence” and “Intelligenz” had gained currency in the 1830s and 1840s to designate educated and “progressive” citizens. It soon went out of fashion in the West, but in Russia it acquired great popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century to describe not so much the educated elite as those who spoke and acted on behalf of the country’s silent majority—a counterpart of the patrimonial establishment (bureaucracy, police, the military, the gentry, and the clergy). In a country in which “society” was given no political outlets, the emergence of such a group was in- evitable. The term was never precisely defined, and pre-revolutionary literature is filled with disputes over what it meant and to whom it applied. Although in fact most of those regarded as intelligenty had a superior education, education in itself was not a criteri
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