Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

32

New Ideas About Human Order: the Origins of Social Science and Statistics

Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born in Saintes in the west of France on 28 May 1738, the ninth of twelve children. By a curious irony his birth was premature, precipitated by his mother’s chance witnessing of a distressing public execution. Perhaps because of this, as Joseph-Ignace grew up, he was always aware that in France, as elsewhere, execution techniques varied widely according to the social standing of the condemned criminal. In general, members of the aristocracy suffered a quick death, while for those lower down the scale it was often protracted and agonising. In France in the eighteenth century there were more than one hundred offences that carried the death penalty, the most grotesque of which was reserved for François Damiens (1714–1757), the unfortunate who attacked Louis XV with a penknife and succeeded in scratching the royal arm. Damiens’ flesh was torn from his breast, arms and thighs with red-hot pincers, his right hand – which had held the penknife – was burned in sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil were poured on the exposed flesh where the skin had been torn away and then his body was quartered by four horses pulling in four directions. The executioner showed his sympathy for his victim by loosening the sinews of the man’s joints with a sharp knife so that he could be more easily torn apart.

By the time of the revolution, Joseph-Ignace was a substantial figure, a distinguished doctor, a professor of anatomy and Doctor-Governor of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. He became a representative in the National Assembly. He was also a pacifist and, motivated by humanitarian concerns, in December 1789 he introduced into the Assembly six propositions aimed at creating a new and more humane penal code, one which treated all men the same and did not distinguish, in the penalties imposed, between different ranks. The second article of this new code recommended that capital punishment should henceforth consist of decapitation by means of a new and simple mechanism. The Assembly spent time examining Dr Guillotin’s recommendations, before adopting them, and during the debates a journalist asked – sarcastically and rhetorically, for the new mechanism had not yet been designed, let alone built – ‘Should this device bear the name of Guillotin or Mirabeau?’

Guillotin did not either design or build the instrument that did, indeed, come to bear his name. The designer was another doctor, Antoine Louis (at one stage the plan was to call the new device a ‘Louisette’), while the man who actually constructed the execution machine was a Monsieur Guedon or Guidon, the carpenter who normally provided the state with scaffolds. The new contraption was tested on 17 April 1792 (using straw, sheep and several corpses). When a corpse with a particularly thick neck was not decapitated after three attempts, Dr Louis raised the height of the drop and changed the shape of the blade from a convex curve to a straight blade angled at 45°. A banquet was held to celebrate ‘Dr Guillotin’s daughter’, with toasts to a ‘most distinguished project for equality’.

The guillotine was first used ‘in anger’, so to speak, a week later, on 25 April 1792, when the thief and assassin Jacques Nicholas Pelletier met his end.¹ Thousands flocked to see the new instrument but many were disappointed – the execution was over so quickly.

Neither Dr Guillotin or Dr Louis could have foreseen how often their new, improved instrument was to be used in the years ahead, or at how efficiently it struck at all ranks equally. The French Revolution of 1789 is remembered first and foremost for what Hegel called its ‘shrieking aftermath’, five years of bloody terror, lynchings and massacres, and for years of tumultuous political upheaval, culminating eventually in the dictatorship of Napoleon Bonaparte and unleashing twenty years of war. The roll call of people sent to the guillotine, often for the flimsiest of reasons, still has the power to shock: Antoine Lavoisier, the chemist, because he was a former tax-gatherer; André Chénier, the poet, because of an editorial someone didn’t like; Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, denounced by Robespierre; Robespierre himself, along with 2,500 others. Robespierre’s loyal follower Philippe Le Blas blew his brains out but even so was taken to the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde) and beheaded all the same. People spoke of ‘guillotinemania’ and of ‘the red mass’ being celebrated by ‘worshippers of the scaffold’.²

How many lessons may be learned from this mayhem? The historian Jacques Barzun argues that many of the ‘revolutionaries’ who wanted the monarchy, nobility and clergy brought to heel, under the banner of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, were ordinary but articulate people – lawyers, artisans, local officials or landowners – who for the most part lacked political and administrative experience. Such individuals, even though many were educated, could behave as a mob at times, and this helps to account for the vicious switchback of fortunes that the aftermath became. Abroad, in Britain especially, the French Revolution was regarded with horror.³

But its legacy was much more complex – and in a score of ways more positive – than that. One indication of the seriousness with which many regarded those events may be had from the statistic that Rousseau’s Social Contract (see here) was reprinted on average every four months in the decade that followed 1789.⁴ And a whole system of reforms was introduced, some of which didn’t last, but many of which did. The universities and grandes écoles were reshaped, reducing the powers of the church, the royal library was reorganised as the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Conservatoire established, where musicians could be trained at public expense.

One of the most enduring and influential innovations was the metre. Under the old system, there were in France an incredible 250,000 different units of weights and measures, though the most widely used unit of length was the pied, held to be equal to the length of the king’s foot, and this had other uses – for example, the ‘point’ in printing, which was 1/144 of a foot. Perhaps nothing could have been more incendiary than this in a revolutionary context, even though, in this instance, the events of 1789 only precipitated reform that had been talked about since 1775, when the chief minister, Turgot, had asked Condorcet to draw up a plan for a scientific system of weights and measures based on the one-second pendulum. This went back to Galileo, the idea being that the basic unit of length should be the distance a pendulum swung when beating for one second (this was Talleyrand’s idea). But there were too many problems associated with this, mainly having to do with the fact that the earth is not a perfect sphere, being flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator. Even Newton had been aware that gravity varies slightly with latitude, and not consistently, so that the swing of a pendulum is more erratic than one might think. The next proposal was to base the unit on something from nature, and a commission appointed by the French opted for a measure of the circumference of the earth, in which everyone had a stake. The commission calculated that a measure equal to the circumference divided by 40 million would give a value very near the aune of Paris, a familiar three-foot length comfortably on the human scale.⁵ This proved popular, the more so as it could be seen as the basis for a far more rational system of measures: a gram would be one cubic centimetre of rain water weighed in a vacuum at the temperature of maximum density (4° C); a franc would be 0.1 grams of gold, divisible into 100 centimes. All this came to pass, save for the decimalisation of time: the new calendar which named twelve months of thirty days – again after nature – never caught on (Brumaire, the month of fog, Thermidor, the month of heat, Ventôse, the month of wind), nor the practice of dividing days into ten hours and hours into a hundred minutes. People never got used to the idea that five o’clock was mid-day, or that ten o’clock was midnight, and the system was ignored.

But the metre was important for more than itself. It occasioned a celebrated experiment, or seven-year survey, when two men, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-François-André Méchain, mapped the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona (passing through Paris), which determined the exact length of the circumference of the earth, on which the metre measure was based. The survey led to the first international scientific conference, in 1799, to consider collaboratively the evidence produced by Delambre and Méchain and to decide on the definitive length. Ironically, the survey produced a set of errors which, because of their importance, formed an important stage on the way to the invention of sophisticated statistics, which are discussed later in this chapter.⁶ The length the two men calculated for the circumference of the earth differs from modern-day satellite surveys by less than eight pages of this book.

But the most shattering aspect of the aftermath of the events of 1789 was of course the Terror, followed by the Directorate and the Consulate. This suggested to many that the old oppression had merely been replaced by a new kind. For still others, the aftermath merely reinforced the view that man’s true nature was as savage as it was wicked, vengeful as it was baleful, justifying the need for absolute authority in both the temporal and spiritual realms.⁷ A third reaction was different again. This view held that the revolution had got out of hand because while some people had been eager to put liberty before order, for others the priority was the other way round, order before liberty. What was the best form of order to maximise liberty? This was one of the founding sentiments which gave rise to the idea of sociology.

Roger Smith notes that it was the French revolutionaries who described change as l’art social, and that one of the first references to la science sociale came in a tract by the abbé Sieyès, What is the Third Estate?, which tried to identify what, exactly, was ‘the commons’ in France, in contrast to the monarchy, or the nobility, or the church. La science social was, in the mind of Sieyès and others who came after him, in effect a new stage in thought, a step on from the idea of a secular world, because men were now considering social organisation, social order, without resort to political grouping.⁸ Condorcet, who among other things was the permanent secretary of the Académie des Sciences (and had been in hiding, under threat of the guillotine), took up Sieyès’ phrase on the founding of the Société de 1789, the specific aim of which was the social reconstruction of France using les sciences morales et politiques. Although the Société did not outlast Condorcet’s death, in prison, the ideal of a science of society lived on and, following the reform of the universities and grandes écoles in 1795, the Classe des sciences morales et politiques at the new Institut National had a department named Science sociale, et législation.⁹

It was not at all surprising that la science sociale should prove popular in France. After the Revolution, the French nation was no longer composed of ‘subjects’ but of ‘citizens’, which, it was felt, meant learning a new way of living together. This was made all the more pressing because citizens of both the left and the right (terms which were first used to reflect the seating plan in the French Constituent Assembly after 1789) felt the need for something new.¹⁰

If Sieyès and Condorcet were the first to coin the term ‘social science’, the first social scientist worth the name, at least in France, was Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825). He had fought for the Americans in the War of Independence, and was therefore well aware of how the young republic was using Enlightenment ideas, where appropriate, to bring about democracy, science and progress, and, like many Frenchmen of his generation, he was much taken with the recent advances in mathematics and the natural sciences. The contrast that he saw about him between their steady advance and the mayhem and aimlessness of political manoeuvring pushed him in the direction of la science sociale. This progress of the sciences, and the general optimism which they brought with them, caused him to introduce the term ‘positive’ to describe those activities of man that had finally eliminated any reliance on metaphysical explanations. Following the Revolution he thought that the science of man would become more and more positive, especially if physiology continued the progress it appeared to be making. He believed there were regularities, patterns, to be found within ‘the concrete conditions of social life such as climate, health, diet and labour’. He became convinced that there was organisation in life that had nothing to do with politics (or theology, come to that). For Saint-Simon, medicine was a better metaphor for this organisation of society, and physiology in particular. He began to ask whether there might be laws governing social conduct, of which we are unaware, just as at one time the principle of the circulation of the blood was unknown.¹¹

But if the social sciences, as a new way of thinking, a new theory of human order, emerged first in France, it was rapid industrialisation, in particular the wholesale migration from the countryside to the towns in England, that threw up the obvious practical need for this new approach. Between 1801 and 1851 the population of England and Wales more or less doubled, from 10.5 million to 20.8 million, but in the cities the increase was out of all proportion. Birmingham went from 71,000 to 233,000, up by 328 per cent, Glasgow jumped from 84,000 to 329,000 (392 per cent), and Manchester/Salford from 95,000 to 401,000, a staggering rise of 422 per cent.¹² Such massive increases could not but have enormous consequences, the worst of which were the bad housing, the overcrowded factories, the vicious cruelty of child labour, primitive and inadequate sanitation and its associated diseases. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of workers lived in cramped and crowded homes, in buildings that were disfigured by soot and smoke from blast furnaces and lacked even the most basic amenities. Conditions were so bad that an entire region, between Birmingham and Stoke, became known as ‘the Black Country’.¹³

John Marks has collected several accounts of the horrors of child labour and disease. ‘Large numbers of poor children were handed over to employers from the age of seven, to work for over twelve hours a day, Saturdays included, under the control of overseers who often used the whip on them. Sometimes children worked for fourteen or fifteen hours a day for six days a week, with meal times being given up to clean machinery . . . Here is part of the evidence given to the government Committee on Factory Children’s Labour in 1831–32: “At what time in the morning, in the brisk time, did those girls go to the mills?” “In the brisk time, for about six weeks, they have gone at 3 o’clock in the morning, and ended at ten, or nearly half past, at night.” “What intervals were allowed for rest or refreshment during those nineteen hours of labour?” “Breakfast, a quarter of an hour, and dinner, half an hour, and drinking, a quarter of an hour.” “Was any of that time taken up in cleaning the machinery?” “They generally had to do what they call dry down; sometimes this took the whole of the time at breakfast or drinking, and they were to get their dinner or breakfast as best they could; if not, it was brought home.” ’¹⁴ Beginning in 1819, Acts of Parliament were passed to limit such excesses but they didn’t go anywhere near far enough and conditions remained pitiable.

Under this system, children became so washed out that they often needed to be shaken awake in the mornings, and had to be dressed by the adult overseers. ‘In some of the mines conditions were even harsher – children might be taken as early as age four, to perform the function of opening and closing the ventilation traps. They had to sit for hours in small niches cut into the coal where, in the words of one Commissioner, their work “was solitary confinement of the worst order”.’¹⁵ Not surprisingly, the death rates arising from these arrangements were alarming, not least from children falling asleep on the job and sliding into machinery. That at least had the merit of being a quick death. But there were many diseases that thrived amid the squalid sanitation, most especially the unholy trinity of tuberculosis, cholera and typhoid.¹⁶

Dickens and other writers produced their ‘industrial novels’, Robert Owen and others campaigned for a change in the law, but the first person who thought industrialisation was a problem that could be studied systematically was the Frenchman Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte, notable physically for his unusually short legs, had an exceptional upbringing in that he was raised in a family made up entirely of women, and this seems to have had a permanent effect: he always had a problem with women and was always interested in those less well-off than himself. The son of a civil servant, he entered the École Polytechnique in Paris, then well-known for its courses in science and engineering, and concentrated on the study of the French and industrial revolutions. It was at the Polytechnique that Comte discovered his lifetime aim, to ‘apply the methods of the physical sciences to society’.¹⁷ Comte understood that society around him was changing in a fundamental sense: what he called ‘theological’ and ‘military’ values were giving way to ‘scientific’ and ‘industrial’ ones. In such a world, he said, industrialists replaced warriors, and scientists replaced priests. The social scientists, ‘because they managed human harmony, essentially fulfilled the role of high priest in the new social order’.¹⁸

Between 1817 and 1824, after his time at the École Polytechnique, Comte became Saint-Simon’s secretary. After they fell out (because Comte felt that Saint-Simon had not given him enough credit on a paper he published), the secretary set off on his own. He was a great believer in phases and it was in his book Cours de Philosophie Positive (Course of Positive Philosophy) that he argued that both humanity and science had passed through three stages.¹⁹ There was first the theological stage in which people attribute phenomena to a deity; in the second, metaphysical stage, humans attribute causes to abstract forces or forms; in the third, what he called the positive stage, science ‘abandons the search for ultimate causes’ and looks instead for regularities and predictable sequences in ‘observable phenomena’. He believed that humanity had made systematic progress in the main sciences: the physical sciences in the seventeenth century, and the life sciences in the eighteenth century and his own time, the early nineteenth century. From now on, he said, science – and in particular life science – would be at the centre of progressive civilisation.²⁰ In his own mind the life sciences were called ‘organic physics’ and were divided into physiology and social physics, what he later came to call sociology, a neologism he coined. Social physics, he said, is essentially divided from physiology, ‘it has its own subject matter, the regularities of the social world, which cannot be translated into the laws of another science’.²¹ Comte was specifically and deliberately seeking to replace political philosophy with sociology – he said it was ‘inevitable’ – as a less partisan basis for social harmony and, indeed, morality. Social phenomena, he said, are like all other phenomena in that they have their own invariable natural laws. But he did distinguish two forms of sociology. One, the ‘static’ form, governed the organisation of society, producing order and morality, whereas the ‘dynamic’ form governed the laws of change.²²

Comte then rather lost his way. His obsession with social order, combined with his scornful view of organised religion (not to mention a passionate love affair), led him to attempt his own form of social order, in a new religion, the aim of which was ‘to live in love on the basis of positive knowledge’. Comte loved religious ritual – he thought it helped bring about social harmony – but there was little that was ‘positive’ about these institutions that were founded in his name. In fact, more than anything else, they paralleled the Catholic Church, except that the love of humanity was the object of worship.²³ Comte’s considerable creative energies were thus deflected and dissipated. This hindered the maturation of his system of social physics, which ultimately fell down on two accounts. There was no allowance in his system for psychology, for individual motivation. And he was so obsessed with order, and how to achieve it, that he neglected the role of conflict in society, the crude reality of power. This left a gap for Marx to fill.²⁴

Comte had an English counterpart in Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who, like the Frenchman, was much influenced by hard science and engineering. In Spencer’s case this had much to do with the fact that he was brought up in Derby, a railway town in the British midlands, where Spencer’s first employment was for a railway company. But he differed from Comte in one fundamental way: whereas the Frenchman’s aim, ultimately, was for sociology to influence government policy, Spencer was always anxious to have sociology show that government ‘should interfere as little as possible in human affairs’. He was an admirer of both Adam Smith and Charles Darwin and he adapted their ideas to produce a picture of society that he viewed as increasingly complex and therefore needing, as in a factory, both structural differentiation and the specialisation of functions. This was necessary, he said, because such a structure made societies more adaptable in a Darwinian sense. He insisted that evolution occurs among societies at every level, resulting in ‘the survival of the fittest’ (the phrase is his, though he only partially assimilated the theory of natural selection). This process, he said, would ‘weed out’ less adaptable peoples, an approach that became known as social Darwinism.²⁵

Spencer was more popular than Comte, certainly in Britain and America, where his most famous book, The Study of Sociology (1873), was published both between hard covers and as a series in the press. One reason for his popularity was that he told the Victorian middle classes what they wanted to hear: that individual moral effort is the motor of change, and that therefore sociology supported ideas of laissez-faire economics and minimum government intervention in industry, health and welfare.

During the course of the nineteenth century, German sociology caught up with and then overtook its French and English counterparts. Following the horrors of Stalinism and the grim conditions in many Eastern European countries during the Cold War (not to mention China), the name of Karl Marx (1818–1883) carries much baggage. His political theories were discussed earlier, in Chapter 27. For many people, however, he has always been regarded as much as a sociologist as a political theorist. His sociological ideas revolve around his concepts of alienation and ideology – these too were discussed earlier, but a brief recapitulation will help.²⁶ Alienation refers to the extent to which people’s lives and self-image are determined and often damaged by their material working conditions. ‘People working in factories,’ Marx said, ‘become factory workers,’ by which he meant that they come to feel they have no control over their lives and frequently are made to operate far below their capabilities. By ‘ideology’ he meant prevailing world views, unconsciously represented in a society, which make people think that, for example, nothing can be done about their state of affairs, nothing can be improved because the way things are is ‘natural’. Marx’s other sociological idea was that of the ‘base’ and ‘superstructure’ in society. For him, the conditions of production comprise the base, the fundamental reality of society, whereas social institutions – the law, say, the civil service, or the church – make up the superstructure. For Marx, economics is the fundamental human science, not psychology, and in saying this he created a new way of looking at human affairs – the relation between belief or knowledge, or social institutions, and the operation of power. ‘Whereas Enlightenment writers or nineteenth-century liberals started their thinking from claims about human nature, Marx reversed the equation and sought to explain human nature via historical and economic factors.’²⁷

It may seem surprising now but, to begin with, Marx’s ideas were not really assimilated in western Europe till the end of the century (Harold Perkins says Marxism was ‘hardly known’ in England before the 1880s). To begin with, there was far more interest in him in Russia, which was then a very retarded country, politically and socially, and where people had begun to wonder whether such a backward state could ‘leap-frog’ forward or whether it needed to go through the different reforms, revolutions and renaissances that the West had already experienced. Marx came to the attention of the West only later, as events in Russia turned violent and appeared to ratify his arguments.

The other German sociologists who helped shape both the discipline of sociology and the twentieth century were Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies and Georg Simmel. Like Marx, Weber’s theories were predominantly economic but he also owed something to Comte and was probably the first German to call himself a sociologist. (Reference to society, as ‘society’, was not common before the end of the nineteenth century. People referred to ‘political society’, ‘savage society’, etc. but not to anything more abstract.²⁸)

The main concern among German sociologists was ‘modernity’, how modern life differed in a social, political, psychological, economic and moral sense from what had gone before. This idea was particularly prominent in Germany because of the country’s formal unification on 1 January 1871. All of Max Weber’s work was aimed at identifying what made modern, Western civilisation distinctive but, as Roger Smith has characterised it, all the early sociologists were interested in how modernity came about. Here is Smith’s table:

Herbert Spencer: modernity involved a change from a predominantly militant [military] society to an industrial one;

Karl Marx: the change was from feudalism to capitalism;

Henry Maine (the British sociologist/anthropologist, whose most famous work was Ancient Law, which took an evolutionary approach): status → contract;

Max Weber: traditional authority → rational-legal authority;

Ferdinand Tönnies: Gemeinschaft (community) → Gesellschaft (association).²⁹

Weber thought that social science should be developed to help the newly unified German state by analysing and clarifying just what, exactly, were the ‘inescapable modern social and economic conditions’. He was part of a group of scholars – predominantly economic historians – who in 1872 founded the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Society for Social Policy) whose aim was just this, to research the links between social conditions and industrialisation.³⁰ As they saw it, members of the Verein thought that Germany was faced with a dilemma. They agreed that the Second Reich, in which they lived and worked, had no option but to accept industrialisation, but at the same time did not believe that the economy satisfied everyone equally. They therefore recommended that the government develop policies which reflected this reality, such as a system of national insurance, to alleviate working-class poverty.³¹

Within sociology, Weber was a polymath. To begin with he wrote economic history, then made a survey of the agricultural depression in Prussia in the 1880s, before turning to a different aspect of history, the ancient religions of Israel, India and China, which provided him with a comparative perspective for (modern) Western economic development.³² This gave an added authority to his best-known work, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which appeared in 1904. In this work he sought to explain that ‘the crucial economic development in the modern world, capitalism, was first and foremost an exercise carried out by Protestants – even in Catholic countries’.³³ Moreover, these Protestants were not necessarily concerned with wealth creation, as such, for the luxuries money could buy, but far more by work as a form of moral obligation, a calling (Beruf), as the best way to fulfil one’s duty to God. In effect, whereas for Catholics the highest ideal was purification of one’s own soul by withdrawal from the world and by contemplation (as with monks in a retreat), for Protestants the virtual opposite was true: fulfilment arises from helping others.³⁴

Though a passionately political man, Weber was just as eager as Comte was for sociology to produce ‘value-free facts’ about society – that is, facts free from the personal or collective values of the scientists carrying out the research. At the same time, Weber was at pains to point out that science could not provide values or tell us how to live; it could only provide new facts which might help us in our decisions about how to live. He thought that the most salient fact about the modern world is that it brings disenchantment. It is a world in which, he said, ‘the gods neither have nor can have a home’.³⁵ Modernity, for Weber, meant rationality, the organisation of affairs based on the trinity of efficiency, order and material satisfaction. This for him was achieved by means of legal, commercial and bureaucratic institutions that increasingly govern our relations with one another. The problem, as he saw it, was that commercial and industrial society, whatever freedoms and other benefits it has, brings disenchantment into our lives, eliminates any ‘spiritual purpose’ for mankind.³⁶ He didn’t think there was anything to be done about this; disenchantment was here to stay and had to be lived with.

A final point of Weber’s was that the new human sciences, of which sociology was one, were fundamentally different from the natural sciences. While we can ‘explain’ natural occurrences in terms of the application of causal laws, human conduct is ‘intrinsically meaningful’, and has to be ‘interpreted’ or ‘understood’ in a way which has no counterpart in nature.³⁷ This Weberian dichotomy has remained vivid and pertinent down to our own day.

Hardly less influential than this dichotomy, at the time anyway, was the distinction made by Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1936). In 1887 he characterised pre-modern societies as based on Gemeinschaft (community), whereas modern societies he said were based on Gesellschaft (association). Communities in the traditional sense grow organically and have ‘sacred’ values which are shared by everyone, most of which are unquestioned. Societies in the modern world, on the other hand, are planned along rational, scientific lines and are maintained by bureaucracies. It follows, Tönnies said, that there is inevitably something artificial and arbitrary about modern societies, with no guarantee that the people we associate with will share our own values. This view was often expressed by the arts of modernism (Chapter 36).

The fourth of the great nineteenth-century German sociologists was Georg Simmel, who in 1903 published an essay, ‘The metropolis and mental life’. He explained there that ‘The psychological foundation, upon which metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli.’³⁸ For Simmel, who taught both Karl Mannheim and Georg Lukács, the vast new cities of the nineteenth century (metropolises, not medieval university towns) were a new type of space, with important implications for human interaction, ‘a space that both excites and alienates . . . a place that leads to the atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture . . .’³⁹ If the first phrase sounds like the city the impressionists were trying to portray, that explains why Simmel was known as ‘the Manet of philosophy’ in Berlin. His other influential point was his distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ culture. Objective culture for Simmel was what we would call ‘high culture’, what Matthew Arnold described as the best that has been thought, written, composed, and painted. This culture was objective in that it was ‘out there’, in concrete form, for everyone to see, hear, or read, and Simmel thought that how people related to this ‘canon’ of works was the best way in which to define a society or culture. On the other hand, in ‘subjective culture’, said Simmel, an individual seeks ‘self-fulfilment and self-realisation’ not in relation to any culture ‘out there’ but through his or her own resources. Nothing – or very little – is shared in subjective culture. Simmel thought that the classic example of subjective culture was the business culture; everyone was turned in on his or her own particular project. In such a world everyone could be more or less satisfied with their lot yet be unaware of the collective dissatisfaction, manifested as alienation. In 1894 Simmel became the first person to teach a course specifically called sociology.⁴⁰

Simmel leads us back to France again, for his opposite number there was Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). The son of a rabbi from Lorraine, a Jew and a provincial, Durkheim was doubly marginal, which perhaps gave an edge to his observations. France had been through some regular periods of turbulence since 1789 – the revolution of 1848, the Franco-Prussian War and siege of Paris, 1870–1871 – and this gave Durkheim an abiding interest in the conditions of social stability, what determines and what destroys it, and which factors give individuals a sense of purpose, keep them honest and optimistic.⁴¹

In a career sense, Durkheim was a beneficiary of a raft of changes then overtaking higher education in France. Following the siege, and the Commune, the French republicans and Catholic monarchists had fought for control, especially in education, with the republicans eventually emerging victorious. Among their priorities was the reform of the universities, where departments of scientific research were established, on the German model. Durkheim was caught up in these changes: by 1887 he was on the faculty at Bordeaux University, where he offered a new course: ‘social science’.⁴² And so, when the authorities restructured Bordeaux, along with the other universities, Durkheim was perfectly positioned to take advantage and invent (at least in France) the brand-new discipline of sociology. Sensing his moment, he moved quickly, to produce a textbook on the subject and two, narrower, more polemical works, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), and Suicide (1897). A year later, he also established a journal, L’année sociologique. In 1902 he was promoted to the Sorbonne.

Suicide is his best-known book. On the face of it, as Roger Smith says, this does not appear to be a sociological topic.⁴³ It is nothing if not intimate, private, subjective (Gide was later to argue that suicide is in principle inexplicable). But that was Durkheim’s point: to show that psychology had a sociological dimension. In the first part of his book, he used statistics to show that suicide rates varied, for example, according to whether someone was Protestant or Catholic, whether they lived in the countryside or in the town. This had never been done before and people were shocked by his findings. But Durkheim himself was not satisfied with these more obvious variables. He also thought that less tangible social features were just as important, and he divided suicides into egoistic, altruistic, anomic and fatalistic. ‘Egoism’ he described as ‘a measure of a society’s failure to become the focus of the individual’s sentiments’.⁴⁴ In a society where such failures show themselves, a high proportion of people are aimless and ‘unintegrated’. ‘Anomie’ he defined as a general measure of a society’s lack of norms, which mean that many people lead unregulated lives, with numerous side-effects such as high crime. Durkheim was arguing, therefore, that there is such a thing as society, that there are social phenomena – egoism, anomie – that in a sense exist outside individuals and cannot be reduced to biology or psychology.⁴⁵

Another of Durkheim’s achievements, in making the case for a sociological approach to human behaviour, was that he also laid the groundwork for sociological medicine, what we now call epidemiology. He wasn’t the only one of course – the German states, Austria and Sweden had all begun to collect data for this purpose in the eighteenth century. But social medicine, epidemiology, was also born in the great industrial cities as people struggled to cope with unprecedented problems and experiences, not least in regard to hygiene. One of the first in Britain, who scored a notable early success, and acted as a model for others, was Sir John Snow, who took a statistical/sociological approach to cholera. In 1854, there was in London a terrible outbreak of cholera which had caused over five hundred deaths in fewer than ten days. In going through the lists of deceased and afflicted persons, Snow noted that most cases had occurred in the neighbourhood of Broad Street. ‘Upon interviewing members of the families of the deceased, Snow was able to isolate a single common factor, namely the Broad Street [water] pump, from which victims had drunk in every case. Corroborating evidence was made from the observation that in the local workhouse, also in the Broad Street area, only a few inmates had contracted cholera and that in every case they had contracted it before being admitted to the workhouse. Snow hypothesised (and found) that the workhouse drew water from a separate well . . . The pay-off for Snow’s careful investigation occurred when, finally convinced that impure water from the Broad Street pump was the cause of the cholera, Snow appealed to the authorities to have the pump closed.’ This brought the outbreak to an end. Though it had little immediate effect, the episode subsequently became a legend. What makes the investigation doubly unusual is the fact that the cholera bacillus was not discovered, by Robert Koch, until some twenty-eight years after Snow’s investigation.⁴⁶

The germ theory of disease did not emerge fully until the 1880s. At much the same time that Snow made his deductions, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian, observed that cases of childbed fever could be reduced by having surgeons wash their hands between deliveries. Joseph Lister went further in 1865, advocating the use of carbolic acid (phenol) on patients’ wounds during surgery. But it was not until Louis Pasteur noticed that weakened bacteria could be used to provide immunity from diseases they provoked at full strength, that the idea of vaccination was conceived and quickly used for a widening number of ailments which proliferated in cities – tuberculosis, diptheria, cholera.⁴⁷

The problems of urbanisation also prompted the British to establish a decennial census, beginning in 1851. The aim here was to provide a simple but empirical basis for the social dimensions of modern Britain. In turn, the census stimulated the first systematic attempts to assess the dimensions of poverty and of the housing problem. This, says Roger Smith, ‘transformed the political and moral consciousness of the country’.⁴⁸

The census reflected a growth of interest in statistics. The British Association for the Advancement of Science, itself a new organisation, founded in 1831, established a statistical section in the same year. The Manchester Statistical Society was founded two years later, and the London Society a year after that. It was by now taken as read that collecting figures on morbidity, say, or the incidence of crime or insanity, or the facts of nutrition, would comprise the empirical basis both for social policy on the part of government, and for social science in the universities. All of a sudden, then, or so it seemed, a mass of data became available, describing life in Britain and elsewhere. It was the sheer volume of this detail that provoked more sophisticated statistical analysis, rather than simple counting. The first two types of statistical approach concentrated on the distribution of measurements of any particular aspect of life, while the second looked at the correlation between measurements. Besides having policy implications, these techniques had two further effects. They showed how certain different phenomena tended to go together, throwing up fresh questions, and they revealed the extent to which correlations were invariably less than perfect. Because measurements varied (along a distribution) questions began to be asked about the indeterminacy of the world, a preoccupation which loomed large in the twentieth century, even in hard sciences, like physics.⁴⁹

More formal statistics began with the Belgian astronomer L.-A.-J. Quetelet (1796–1874). He went to Paris in 1823 to study astronomy and while there he encountered the theories of probability conceived by Pierre-Simon Laplace, then in his seventies (he died in 1827). And this is where we come back to the survey by Delambre and Méchain, in developing an accurate measure for the metre. Ken Alder, in his book on the survey, notes that the two men were very different in their working methods. Delambre wrote everything down in ink, in notebooks with numbered pages: any errors he made were there for all to see. Méchain, on the other hand, used separate sheets, often just scraps of paper, and wrote in pencil, which might fade or could be rubbed out or lost. Whether these working techniques were symptomatic, it certainly became clear to Delambre, when the two men came to compare notes, that his colleague had fudged a lot of his data, mainly to conform to expectations. One of the reasons these ‘discrepancies’ arose was because, in fact, the earth is a more irregular body than Méchain believed, meaning that meridians vary slightly, and so gravity varies slightly too at certain points, affecting the plumb lines they were using. But Méchain thought he had obtained anomalous results because he had miscalculated his readings of the stars in his triangulation exercises. Now, by then the exact position of the stars had become almost a classical problem, in both astronomy and mathematics. On the face of it, determining the exact location of a star (and its apparent motion) seems simple, but in fact it isn’t simple at all. By the time of the metre survey it was well known that, even with the latest telescopes, the exact location of distant stars was difficult to pin down. Observations tended to produce a range of results. To begin with, the arithmetic mean of these observations was taken as the ‘true’ answer. Then it emerged that people differed systematically in their readings and so teams of researchers were used to eliminate this bias. But many mathematicians still weren’t satisfied: they felt that observations nearer the mean should have more validity, more weight, than observations further away. This gave rise to two important developments. First, Adrien-Marie Legendre devised the method of least squares to do just this. Under this method, the best fit of any set of observations was held to be that ‘which minimised the square of the value of the departure of each data point from the curve’.⁵⁰ From our point of view, the important point is that Legendre came up with his theory and first worked it out on Delambre and Méchain’s data.

This work by Laplace, Quetelet and Legendre was built on by Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who made the second advance. Essentially, the astronomical techniques had shown that when observations by different astronomers were plotted on a graph, they were found to be, in the formal phrase, ‘regularly distributed’. This regular distribution was found to apply to a number of other phenomena and so the phrase was changed to ‘standard distribution’ (about a mean). The idea was further refined in the 1890s by the English mathematician Karl Pearson (1857–1936), who introduced the term ‘normal distribution curve’, what became known as the bell(-shaped) curve. And this was, perhaps, the most influential idea of all, at least at that time, because the bell-shaped curve was used by Quetelet to produce what he called l’homme moyen, the average man.⁵¹ It was this notion which caught the imagination of many and before long it was made wide use of – for example, by writers, marketing people, and manufacturers. In addition to that, however, there were questions raised by this discovery that seemed to pose more fundamental issues regarding human nature. Was the average man the ideal? Or was he the most mediocre? Were people at the edges of the distribution exotic or degenerate? Did l’homme moyen represent what was essential about man?⁵²

People came to realise that there was something basic – even mysterious – about statistics. The very notion of a normal distribution, of the average man, meant that men and women behaved, to an extent, according to the logic of numbers. For example, although any individual murder was unpredictable, crime statistics revealed a regularity, even a stability – from year to year – in how many murders were committed and, more or less, where. Durkheim had observed the same thing with suicide. What did this say about the complexities of modern life, that such patterns should lie hidden? ‘Statistics therefore appeared to be the means by which the study of social facts is made as objective and as precise as the study of physical facts, and the means by which social science, like physical science, uncovers general laws.’ Such ideas provided hope for those who believed that ‘the competitive system . . . must be reconstructed for the general welfare’, that there should be state intervention to cushion at least some of the damage inflicted by raw industrialism.⁵³ This was one of the core beliefs of the Fabian Society, founded in London in 1883–1884, and of the London School of Economics and Political Science, where sociology was taught from 1903.⁵⁴

But, as we saw in Chapter 17, the development of measurement, the increase in accuracy, and the rise of quantitative thought, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, was one of the factors that led to the modern West, and a further leap forward in this regard took place in Victorian times. A final influence here came in the form of Edwin Chadwick, who insisted that one particular question, ‘cause of death’, be included in government surveys.⁵⁵ Chadwick was the researcher, the ‘commissioner for fact’, on two royal commissions (on the Poor Law, and on the sanitary conditions of labour) and, thanks to him, the Victorian mania for counting was consolidated (the statistics collected for the Poor Law Commission filled fifteen volumes). Chadwick’s most shocking figure was that, out of 77,000 paupers studied, no fewer than 14,000 had been made poor by catching fever.⁵⁶ This correlation thus identified a problem that no one had imagined existed before and which, to an extent, is still with us. Chadwick identified, and published, such damning figures as the increasing death rate in industrial towns, which had doubled in ten years, and showed that, in poor areas, there was a ‘usually inaccessible privy’ for an average of 120 – yes, 120 – people.⁵⁷

These figures outraged many among the Victorian middle classes, playing a part in the development of modern politics (the establishment of the Labour Party, for example). At the same time, still other Victorians thought that the urge to count and measure was a form of control. The historian G. M. Young wrote ‘It has been suggested to me that the Railway timetable did much to discipline the people at large.’⁵⁸ But in a mass society, statistics were a necessity and, far from being a controlling factor, proved for many people to be a form of freedom. To the Victorians, statistics were exciting, both philosophically, for what they revealed about determinacy and indeterminacy in collective life, and practically, for the help they gave government in the new – and often grim – metropolises. Nowadays, for most people, statistics have become dry and have completely lost the exciting ring that they once had. Even so, modern society, not least the idea of the welfare state, is unthinkable without them.