Taine, Hippolyte

(1828-1893)

   literary critic, philosopher, historian

   One of the leading exponents of positivism, Hippolyte Taine was born in Vouziers, Ardennes, and was educated in Paris at the Collège Bourbon and the École normale. In one of his first works, Les Philosophes français du xixe siècle (1857), he questioned the eclectic approach of victor cousin and proposed instead the application of scientific methodology to the study of history and human nature. Taine's works have a coherent unity based on rigorous and systematic research, in which he sought to uncover in human groups, milieus (geographic and social), and time (historical evolution), the most important factors in explaining literary and artistic expression, As a literary critic and philosopher, he wrote La Fontaine et ses faibles (1853-1861), Essais de critique et d'histoire (1858), and Histoire de la littérature anglaise (1864), in which he applied his theories to the psychological and physical factors affecting the development of English literature. Taine's lectures on aesthetics and art history, collected in Philosophie de l'art (1882), applied the same methodology. Influenced by étienne condillac, J. S. Mill, and A. Bain, he presented in De l'intelligence (1870) a sensualist and associationalist theory. Finally, in Les Origines de la France contemporaine (1876-93), he attempted, in the aftermath of the franco-prussian war and the Paris commune, to discover the causation for those events and for the extreme centralization of political power in France, which he believed to be the cause of its modern political instability. Taine was elected to the Académie Française in 1878.