Ideas

by Peter Watson

  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, ev
en 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.

  33

  The Uses and Abuses of Nationalism and Imperialism

  To Chapter 33 Notes and References

  In 1648, more than 150 years after the discovery of the Indies, and of America, the Treaty of Westphalia was finally concluded. This brought to an end the Thirty Years War, when Protestant and Catholic nations had fought themselves to a standstill over how to interpret God’s intentions. They agreed that, from now on, each state would be left free to pursue its own inclination. So much blood had been shed, for ideas that could never be settled one way or the other, that a ‘toleration of exhaustion’ seemed the only way forward.1 However, it was impossible to avoid the fact that there were several uncomfortable consequences which followed from this new state of affairs. For one, the papacy was sidelined; Spain and Portugal lost power, and the centre of gravity of Europe moved north, to France, England and the newly independent United Netherlands.2 But by now it had become clear that the globe was bigger, more varied and more recalcitrant than the first explorers had anticipated and this brought about a change in sensitivity in the northern nations, whose very existence had been confirmed by the outcome of the Thirty Years War. Instead of the outright conquest of other peoples, which had brought Spain such vilification for its treatment of the American ‘Indians’, the northern nations were more interested in trade and commerce. (Only around a quarter of the Spanish and Portuguese migrants to pre-independence Latin America were women, whereas British settlers in North America were encouraged to bring their wives and children. As a result, far fewer British migrants took sexual partners from the indigenous population.) This change in feeling, between the early ‘Catholic’ attitude and the later ‘Protestant’ one, had a great deal to do with the fact that new mercantile classes were replacing the traditional military and landowning aristocracies as the main political force. There was thus an intellectual and moral basis in this development: commerce was believed to be a civilising and humanising force, for both parties. ‘Commerce was not simply the exchange of goods, it involved contact and tolerance.’3

  Crucial here were the Protestant countries, Britain and Holland. Each had a strong tradition of trading and, as countries which had achieved religious tolerance at some cost, they had no wish to inflict the same sin on the populations they found in distant lands. If they could, they would rescue these ‘primitives’ from paganism, as a subsidiary aim of trading, but they would not use force.4

  If anything, Britain was now more important in this regard than Holland. Britain had her American colonies and, after the Seven Years War with France, she had emerged as the most powerful of the maritime nations. But the seven-year campaign had driven her into massive de
bt and it was her attempt to make good her financial losses, through taxation of the American colonies, combined with the government’s flat refusal to allow these colonies any direct representation in Parliament, that finally brought on the War of Independence (though the levels of taxation in the American colonies were quite low compared with those in Britain).5 This was not a foregone conclusion but, at the same time, for many people, in Britain and elsewhere, it was only too clear that colonisation could never work in the long run. Experience was to show that either the colonies became dependent, and then a drain, on the metropolitan countries or, once they showed signs of becoming economically self-sufficient, they wanted to go their own way. One of Adam Smith’s most pertinent predictions was that free Americans would prove better trading partners than as colonised subjects. Niall Ferguson says that there is good reason to believe that by 1770 New Englanders were ‘about the wealthiest people in the world’.

  Historians now call America Britain’s ‘first empire’, to distinguish it from the second–in Asia, Africa and the Pacific–where settlement policies were very different. While there was always a military presence in the second empire, outright conquest was never a desirable (or achievable) aim.6 As epitomised by the very name of the East India Company, and the Dutch East India Company, which became dominant features of this phase of empire, the watchword was trade, protected trade. The colonies of the East comprised in the main what the Portuguese called feitorias, factories, self-governing independent enclaves, as often as not acquired by treaty, the intention being to make them international entrepôts for both European and Asian merchants. Necessarily fortified, they nevertheless had no real military strength–in India, for instance, they could never have posed a threat to the Mughal forces. Nine hundred British civil servants and 70,000 British soldiers managed to govern upwards of 250 million Indians. (How they did it is a question for a separate book.)7