Introduction to Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796–1874

8/9/2019 Introduction to Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796–1874

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INTRODUCTION: TWO AVERAGE MEN

Progression to the Mean

In the last years o his lie, Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874) compiled Sciencesmathématique et physique chez les belges (1866), a book he hoped would explainhow his home country o Belgium had regained its status among the great scien-tic nations o Europe. Quetelet had been born into a diffi cult time in Belgianintellectual lie, and he believed that the sciences in particular had struggledin the eighteenth century, rst under the benevolent stagnation o Hapsburgoversight and then under the ruinous invasion and occupation by French revolu-tionary orces. While Belgian scientic lie remained inert, however, he saw whathe called ‘an intellectual innovation o great importance, an innovation which

perhaps has not been so noticed’. It was an ‘innovation’ Quetelet believed to bethe key to Belgium’s return to scientic prominence:

Te man o talent, in certain cases, ceased to act as an individual and became a rac-tion o the body that attained the most important results.1

Just a page later he reinorced the point that ‘in the sciences o the new era … savantshave ceased to act as individuals’.2 Quetelet was comparing the new orm o scienceto the great ‘geniuses’ who he believed had driven scientic progress in Europe dur-ing the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a period when Belgium ‘did not havethe strength to take part’.3 Te book was intended as a corrective to this glum history,and it contained histories, elogés and recollections o the savants who had managedto elevate Belgian science and industry to the level o the great powers o Europe.4

For the reader who knows Quetelet best rom his theoretical l’homme moyen

(average man), the words above may have some resonance. Te notion o an ‘individual’ as merely a ‘raction’ o a larger body seems quite similar in act to Quetelet’sinamous Average Man, a statistical composite o individual traits that Queteletbelieved would be central to a new science he called physique sociale (social physics).Quetelet had hoped or a quantitative science that would allow researchers to count,measure and predict human actions, and the Average Man was to be the ‘centre ogravity’ against which such predictions could be made. Te beauty o the average

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2 Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science 1796–1874

can be seen (in Figure I.1) as a kind o perect physical and moral being. Quetelethad such high hopes or this imagined man that it led to one o the most seeminglybizarre statements ever made in the history o statistics and the social sciences:

I the average man were perectly determined, one could … consider it as a kind obeauty. All that deviated [ s’éloignerait ] rom what it resembled … would constitute

deormity and disease. Tat which did not resemble it … would be monstrous.5

Contemporary critics derided the idea that deviation rom the average was ‘mon-strous’, and readers both sympathetic and hostile towards social physics havetried to make sense o it ever since. One possible theory is that such excitement

or averages was an extension o an Enlightenment belie in egalitarianism , andindeed much o Quetelet’s social physics picked up where the social mathematicso the ‘last philosophe’ Condorcet lef off. Yet seen in combination with Quete-let’s reections on Belgian men o science, the above quote suggests that the ideao composite averages, o individuals ‘ceasing to exist’ as they become a ‘ractiono the larger body’, was a theme Quetelet returned to ofen, whether it was inthe abstract realm o social physics or the practical realities o making Belgian

savants. As this book demonstrates, in order to make progress in social physics,both the sciences o man and the men o science needed to strive to be average.

Te primary goal o this book then is to present an analysis o Quetelet’s proessional scientic work and thought in the creation o these two kinds oaverage men. Quetelet worked during an era o specialization in the sciences, yet

his interests cannot easily be contained within a ew disciplines. Even avoidinganachronistic labels o Quetelet – o which sociologist, criminologist and cli-mate scientist are all possible – his work covered an enormous range o topics inthe natural sciences and what would become the social sciences. It would be pos-sible to write the lie o Quetelet as the story o a statistician, an astronomer, aninstitution builder, a mathematician, a social theorist, an educator, an economictheorist or even a rustrated poet. All o these narratives would be possible, andindeed some have been realized, but all would be incomplete. 6



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Figure I.1: Average man (detail). Tis image demonstrates the harmony o Quetelet’sideal average man. Although the image depicts only a physically average man, Quete-

let held out equal hopes or establishing an average man o moral and intellectualcharacter. A. Quetelet, ‘Sur le poids de l’homme aux différens ages’, Nouveaux mémoires

de l’Académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles, 7 (1832), pp. 1–44. Insetollowing p. 44. University o Wisconsin Memorial Library.



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Tis book too cannot escape the limitations Quetelet’s long and productive lieimposes on the historical researcher. Te ollowing is in some sense a biography but

will pay almost no attention to Quetelet’s amily lie. It is the story o the ‘ather omodern statistics’ but will contain no equations. It is a history o a man whose most

widely recognized ‘discovery’ today – the body mass index – was at the margin ohis career and not popularized until a century afer his death. It ignores much o hiscollaboration with Victorian statisticians and only briey touches on his many pro-

jects to assemble a ‘Global Physics’, a tantalizing project that anticipated much o what today is grouped under the heading o climate science. For reasons explainedbelow, the ocus o the book will be limited to two interdependent aspects o hismulti-aceted career: his creation o a controversial science o man – physique

sociale – and his extraordinary work to create scientic institutions o observationat the same time.7 Each, it will be argued, is impossible to imagine in isolation.

Initially, this book had been conceived only as an investigation into physique sociale, but afer examining Quetelet’s signicant writings on the practiceo science itsel, it seemed clear that his approach to science was as valuable tounderstanding his career as his writings on social physics. Moreover, in examiningthe historical literature on Quetelet there appeared to be ew efforts to exam-ine physique sociale in connection with his various institutional roles: directoro the Observatoire royal de Bruxelles, editor o the continental journal Corre-

spondance mathématique et physique, permanent secretary o the Académie royaledes science, des lettres et des beaux-arts de Belgique, state-sponsored traveler to

observatories in France and Germany and correspondent to dozens o prominentnineteenth-century men o science. Yet as the sources o these various roles reveal,Quetelet’s pursuit o large-scale projects or scientic investigation was notmerely the means through which he accomplished theoretical research aims but,at times, appeared to unction as ends in themselves. Tough Quetelet did seriousscientic research, it is hard to nd an aspect o his career in which he was moresuccessul, or one to which he was more dedicated, than in creating networks oscientic researchers. Tough social physics is ofen the rst thing mentioned inconnection with Quetelet’s career, this book suggests that even during its crea-tion, it was only a part o his larger administrative concerns in Belgium.

Quetelet’s plans or scientic research were directed rom a number o inu-ential posts in Belgium which connected him to a host o leading scientic gures

throughout Europe. But they also required a particular kind o science worker,one that he admitted in Sciences mathématique et physique was very differentrom the natural philosophers o the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Asseen in his proposals or institutions o observation and research, stated criteriaor membership in a Belgian scientic elite and discussions with other savants,science worked best not in a laboratory or secluded study, but through the accu-mulation o large amounts o data rom numerous observers. Because the new



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Introduction: Two Average Men 5

worker who helped to gather this inormation was expected to be standardized,interchangeable and to exhibit none o the extremes o genius or eccentricity,Quetelet’s ideal social physicist appeared to be another average man called orby physique sociale. As Quetelet readily admitted, and desired, the new man oscience would mark a signicant break with the savants o the past.

An ‘Intellectual Odyssey’ o Nineteenth-Century Europe

Te creation o two average men was the result o one extraordinary lie. Toughthe project to count and analyse all the experiences o human behaviour maymake Quetelet seem a real-lie Gradgrind, dedicated to only ‘acts and calcula-

tions’, he was ar rom the sombre and taciturn parody ound in Dickens.8 Borninto one o the most disastrous periods in the troubled history o the CatholicNetherlands, Quetelet used his enthusiasm and energy to help transorm hiscountry rom a cultural and intellectual hinterland into a signicant industrialand scientic power. Quetelet entered the world just a ew years afer the nadiro Belgian intellectual lie in 1794 – when the occupying French closed the Uni-

versity o Louvain and transported the school’s library to Paris – but lef behind anation that was one o the most advanced in Europe. During his lietime, Quete-let either personally created or helped to build nearly every scientic institutionin Belgium and the United Kingdom o the Netherlands,9 including many o theimportant institutions today. In the process o doing so, he also ound time todevelop the oundations o modern statistics and quantitative sociology, as well

as being among the leading researchers in the new sciences o meteorology andterrestrial magnetism. In the social sciences, Alain Desrosières has written thatQuetelet’s work was among the most important developments o the nineteenthcentury, suggesting that Quetelet’s ‘mode o reasoning … enjoy[ed] a posterityat least as important as that o more amous social thinkers’, including ‘Comte,Marx, Le Play [and] ocqueville’.10 Peter Buck has also claimed that ‘as socialscientists, it is with Adolphe Quetelet, and not seventeenth-century natural phi-losophers, that we share assumptions’.11 It is certainly diffi cult to deny the truth othese statements in light o the current enthusiasm or Big Data and quantica-tion in the social sciences and elsewhere, though Quetelet’s ‘mode o reasoning’should be construed broadly enough to incorporate his administrative work instandardizing scientic researchers alongside the ideas o physique sociale.12

Tere is another compelling reason to ocus on these two aspects o his careerat the expense o his more ormal contributions to various disciplines: Quetelet’ssocial physics and institution building put him at the centre o some o the mostascinating developments o nineteenth-century intellectual history and science.Attention to Quetelet’s work and thought can engage the question o whether therevolutionary philosophies o the eighteenth century were subverted by the very



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mechanism these systems believed would acilitate progress: applying the tools othe natural sciences to the study o mankind. While many Enlightenment writerselt that science would conrm a world ruled by order and harmony and set outthe conditions through which progress towards these goals could be made, by theend o the nineteenth century scientic investigation seemed to reveal chaos atbest and a new orm o progress through savage competition at worst.13 Particu-larly troubling was the turn in the ‘sciences o man’, which by the time o Quetelet’sdeath in 1874 had transormed into nothing short o an apology or Europeanimperialism and retained none o the universalist assumptions that Quetelet hadinherited rom his philosophe heirs. Quetelet was the clear and obvious championo the statistical sciences o man avoured by Condorcet, yet ended up as a prin-cipal inspiration or the eugenicists Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. In Prophetsof Paris Frank Manuel amously called a similar transormation rom egalitarianto competitive progress ‘one o the crucial developments in modern intellectualhistory’, and Quetelet’s story is central to understanding this turn in the nine-teenth century.14 While Manuel did not include the Belgian, ending with Comteas his last prophet, the historian Lawrence Goldman has proposed that ‘Quete-let’s personal intellectual odyssey [was] a model o the early-nineteenth centurydetermination to construct a “natural science o society”’.15 Tis book largely sup-

ports Goldman’s claim, but goes beyond the history o ideas to suggest that it wasin the practice o science itsel where the most important developments occurredin Quetelet’s ‘odyssey’ through the nineteenth-century sciences o man.

Attention to the relationship between Quetelet’s own science o man and his proposals or scientic practice can also help illuminate the dramatic changesin research practice during the century. Most importantly perhaps is how theboundary between science and other orms o intellectual activity inuencedthe production o scientic knowledge.16 Certainly, once science had reed itselrom intellectual (i not political) constraints, the increase in scientic knowl-edge was extraordinary as the nineteenth century saw tremendous advances inthe understanding o heat transer, electricity, magnetism, optics and evolution-ary biology.17 Was the owering o the sciences directly due to the developmento proessional organizations, or was it because o what those organizationsisolated scientists rom, i.e., the moral constraints and concerns o writers, intel-lectuals, theologians and social theorists? Conversely, what was the consequence

or theorists in the tradition o the Enlightenment who wanted to merge values,literature and science? Such questions can be addressed by studying a man whobegan work in the eclectic tradition o the French Enlightenment and ended upas one o the most successul scientic administrators in Europe.

I Quetelet is so important in two o the crucial issues o nineteenth-centuryhistoriography – the turn in the sciences o man and the institutionalizationo science – why then is he relatively unknown today in spite o the tremen-



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dous growth o interest in the history o science in the past fy years? Queteletdeveloped a massive network o correspondents throughout Europe including

Villermé, Esquirol, Goethe, Humboldt, Laplace, Poisson, Gauss, Fourier, Arago,Bouvard, Malthus, Babbage, Herschel, Faraday, Maxwell, Forbes, Nightingale and

Whewell. In America he was a regular correspondent with A. D. Bache and mem-bers o the American Philosophical Society; James Gareld praised his work onthe oor o the United States House o Representatives. He was a member o over100 proessional organizations throughout Europe and the Americas and wasresponsible or ounding not only the Brussels Observatory and countless otherBelgian institutions but also the International Statistical Congress, which exists tothis day. Yet outside o Belgium today his name is as rare as it was ubiquitous in

the mid-nineteenth century, a time when his most popular work Sur l’homme washailed ‘as orming an epoch in the literary history o civilization’.18 Why, despite aclaim by George Sarton, the ounder o the discipline o history o science, that Surl’homme was ‘one o the greatest books o the nineteenth century’, has there notbeen a substantive work dedicated to Quetelet’s lie and thought since the early1900s?19 One possible answer is that Quetelet’s long and successul career as a net-

work and institution builder made him unsuitable to the two dominant trends oresearch in the history o science during the twentieth century: the old heroic nar-ratives o the rst hal o the century and the post-war studies that sought either tocomplicate these narratives or create new heroes o unknown gures.20

Fortunately however, the discipline o the history o science has in recent dec-ades begun to embrace scientic praxis as much as scientic ideas, and Quetelet has

a claim as one o the more important enablers o scientic practice o the nineteenthcentury.21 He played a crucial role in two o the century’s most important scienticdevelopments, both o which have somewhat conusingly been reerred to as the‘second Scientic Revolution’.22 Coined by Tomas Kuhn, the phrase was originallymeant to encompass a series o changes o which ‘one acet’ was the vast increasein quantication. In the move towards quantication in the sciences, Quetelet wasa participant at the end o a revolution, extending statistical techniques that hadsucceeded in other sciences into edgling disciplines like meteorology and what

would be known as the social sciences, including most notably his application oGaussian distribution in astronomy to the study o social phenomena. At the sametime, he and others helped create many o the statistical concepts that would eed

James Clerk Maxwell’s ideas on the development o molecular physics . Te move-

ment towards measuring with numbers began at the turn o the century with themathematicians Laplace, Poisson and Fourier, three o the most important ‘quanti-ers’ in Kuhn’s story. Quetelet had in act met all three o the quantiers and it was

just as Quetelet was creating physique socialethat Kuhn argued that the move rom‘ scientic law to scientic measurement ’ was made.23 As both theoretician and prop-

agandiste Quetelet was one o the most prominent nineteenth-century savants inthe move towards quantitative measurement.



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Quetelet’s role was even more noticeable in a different ‘second ScienticRevolution’, however, the one denoting the increasing proessionalization oscientic practice.24 Tough considerable differences exist as to what proes-sionalization was there is a general consensus that all sciences at the time wereinvolved in developing orms o institutionalization to delineate their activitiesrom other scientic and non-scientic activities.25 As part o this programme, it

was necessary to train and educate what Quetelet called a ‘new class o men’ to perorm the duties o large scientic organizations.26 As Quetelet claimed in twolarge volumes he published on the history o the sciences in Belgium, the trans-ormation in the means o scientic production had proound consequences orthe scientic worker.27 Te model man o science was no longer Voltaire’s imageo a solitary Newton divining the laws o the heavens, but rather the mass expedi-tions organized by the Académie rançaise to determine the proper length o themetre. Quetelet believed that he had come o age at the end o an era o sciencedriven by isolated geniuses and that uture great discoveries would not be the

work not o individual greatness, but o large-scale projects that would employhundreds, i not thousands, o researchers. Quetelet’s history and philosophyo science was not mere speculation, as he spent decades building institutionsto conduct large research projects and a lietime in Brussels teaching and train-ing the men to ll the ranks o these groups. Tough a movement o this sizecertainly had many participants, it would be diffi cult to nd a more energeticand successul programme to organize European science along bureaucratic lines

than what Quetelet conducted in Belgium between 1822 and 1835.28

Tough Quetelet’s embrace o what might be called bureaucratic sciencemay not have the dramatic lure o Weber’s ‘disenchantment’, Marx’s dialectic oclass struggle or Comte’s grand stadialist account o historical development, thisstudy o Quetelet’s lie and work takes seriously Desrosières’s and Buck’s sugges-tions above that Quetelet’s ideas were among the most durable and lasting othe nineteenth century and that they may have more to tell us about the struc-ture and organization o twenty-rst century lie and thought than much o thecanon o nineteenth-century social thought. Yet it is only by seeing Quetelet’sideas, however inconsistent, alongside his practical vision o how large-scaleinstitutions o science operated, that this importance can become apparent.

Afer Bieleeld Tis change in ocus represents one o several contributions this book hopes tomake to recent studies o Quetelet. Tis current body o literature is a ragmentedgroup that owes much o its conusion to two biographies written shortly aferthe turn o the last century.29 Both books were concerned with placing Quetelet

within a previously established narrative: or Frank Hankins it was the develop-



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ment o statistical techniques; or Joseph Lottin, the development o social theory.Both would now be considered unashamedly internal histories, an approach thathad both its advantages and disadvantages. While each study situated Queteletrmly within the connes o disciplinary history, they obscured the diversity ohis thought and avoided what was most interesting about his career: the over-lap in his thought and science that developed as he created both a quantitativescience o human behaviour and the institutions to count these actions. ell-ingly, both authors made only passing mention o Correspondance mathématique et physique and treated his administrative career in biographical gloss. Matters

were not helped when Maurice Halbwachs, an important disciple o Durkheim,argued just a ew years afer Lottin and Hankins that there was no sense o unityin Quetelet’s ideas. Just a generation afer Quetelet’s death, the noted sociologist

wrote that ‘the different parts that we distinguish in Quetelet’s work are not con-nected, and … each must be the object o independent discussion’. 30

In the century since Hankins, Lottin and Halbwachs, however, there hasnot been a single-author monograph dedicated to Quetelet, a surprising omis-sion considering the excellent work that has been accomplished in the history ostatistics in the past thirty years. Te impetus behind the explosion o works onstatistics itsel was a conerence held in 1982 at the University o Bieleeld in Ger-many and the resulting two-volume study.31 Aside rom the impressive collectiono papers presented during this conerence, many o the participants went on to

write ground-breaking studies o statistical development.32 In the years between

the early biographies and the Bieleeld conerence, there were also occasional jour-nal articles that sought to situate Quetelet in various disciplinary histories, the very eclecticism o which practically begged or clarity.33 While these works var-ied drastically in terms o methodology and argument, they shared two commoncharacteristics. Te rst was that the portrayal o Quetelet was limited by the rela-tive lack o attention given to Quetelet’s powerul position in Belgian institutions.At the least there was a lack o integration between his ideas and the institutionshe served. Te second eature o this literature was that, paradoxically, given thediversity o the works, they all relied almost solely on the biographies o Lottinand Hankins in presenting Quetelet’s thought and career. While some attention

was given to a ew o Quetelet’s most prominent works (mostly Sur l’homme), theinterpretation offered by Lottin and Hankins was rarely expanded upon and the

ull range and impact o Quetelet’s career was ofen missed. Collectively, these papers brought needed attention to the importance o understanding the his-tory o quantitative thought, not only as a crucial development in thinking aboutnumbers, but also the role the quantiers had in the development o the ‘hard’sciences themselves. Yet while all o this literature acknowledged the importanceo Quetelet’s ideas or understanding larger issues in probability and statistics, the



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understanding o the ideas themselves had hardly changed since the days o hisrst two biographies, published just our decades afer Quetelet’s death.

Te ailure o a ragmented approach was made clear in the publication oa series o talks during a colloquium held in Brussels on the bicentennial oQuetelet’s birth.34 Tough the attention to discrete spheres o Quetelet’s workdid much to highlight knowledge in particular elds, the nature o the researchmade it diffi cult to say anything new about the man himsel. Tough each work

provided a ne summary o one particular aspect o his career, there was no sig-nicant attempt at synthesis. Even when Quetelet’s role as institution builder

was recognized, there was no connection to social physics or any o Quetelet’sother ideas.35 Tere is o course nothing wrong with the approach o these essaysi the goal was to understand the history o statistics, social theory or the crea-tion o the Brussels Observatory, but they had the unortunate side effect oorcing ragmentation on an interesting proessional lie.36

It might be said airly that this book, through largely ignoring Quetelet’s personal lie, as well as his technical contributions to statistics and mathematics,similarly obscures the entirety o his work. It is also true that Quetelet’s vast numbero interests, writings and correspondents would make any one-volume biographynecessarily incomplete. Yet in narrowing the ocus to the relationship betweenQuetelet’s physique sociale and his attempts to create institutions o science, it maybe possible to recapture most clearly the attributes and ideas that made Queteletsuch a gure o ascination and controversy in the nineteenth century. By doing

so, it also may be possible to rethink some elements o nineteenth-century sci-ence and social thought. As should be obvious in the notes, but merits mentioningnonetheless, the task o providing this analysis has been made much easier becauseo the superlative work that has been done on Quetelet in the past three decades.

Te ‘Actualizer’: Network Fields, Interaction Rituals and Friends

Because this book tries to situate Quetelet’s project or social physics and insti-tution building within the intellectual contexts o his time, a ew words arenecessary on the intellectual context in which this book has been written. It hasbeen composed ortunately in the wake o a signicant change in how the historyo science has been written; ortunate, because it need not be consigned to catego-ries o ‘internal’ or ‘external’ history, a dichotomy that many historians now ndmore problematic than useul in understanding the activities o the past.37 Likeanyone else, Quetelet drew inspiration, inuence and ideas rom both proximateand distal sources, and like anyone else, had his work both limited and expandedby riends, amily, national sel-conceptions and prevailing culturally and intel-lectually dominant trends. He was, to apply a designation that would have meantnothing to Quetelet but one he helped to make possible, highly socialized. So,



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however, were many other people in the same situation, none o whom ended upas the ather o a science o man and the virtual creator o a national scienticidentity. Tereore, the particulars o Quetelet’s lie and work must be treated withequal measure to the various contexts in which he lived and worked. Te ollowing

paragraphs contain a review o some o the ideas that have led to this approach. In navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis and o text and context , Quen-

tin Skinner provided an early articulation o a third way o approaching the ideaso the past.38 Tough primarily concerned with the treatment o political ideas,Skinner’s complaint that ‘the writers o the past are simply praised or blamedaccording to how ar they may seem to have aspired to the condition o being our-selves’ seemed an apt description o how scientists and natural philosophers weretreated or most o the twentieth century.39 Even more so than in Skinner’s worldo political philosophy, early historians o science ofen ‘oreshortened’ the past, sothat only those ideas that remained o contemporary importance were recognized.Furthermore, an excessive ocus on the context in which the works were produced(whether they be national, institutional or cultural), Skinner argued, turned the

writer himsel into merely a mouthpiece or his age, reducing original and provoca-tive thinkers to spokesmen or whichever important Zeitgeist the historian wishedto investigate.40 Skinner’s solution – a complete historicization in which texts andcontexts are only read with regard to what they meant at the time – might impingeupon the historian’s raison d’être, but it remained a needed corrective nonetheless.

Tough Skinner provided a way in which historians could reconstruct intel-

lectual ideas through a close attention to textual meaning ,41

he did not offer aully articulated structure o how ideas were actually transmitted across time andspace. Nor is it obvious that men o science operated in the same way as politi-cal philosophers. Tis project, however, was adopted by sociologists in recentdecades who have built up (it must be admitted) a rather rigid set o socialcauses or the production o scientic ideas. Foremost among them has beenPierre Bourdieu, who greatly expanded the Foucauldian project to recognizethe importance o intellectual ‘elds’ in creating ideas.42 Such elds consistednot only o the content o a particular discipline, but the relationship betweenthe content and the way it was transmitted, debated and received by memberso a given community. For example, the intellectual content o physics is theexplanation o motion, but an articulation o the ‘eld’ o physics is impossi-

ble without examining the particular world – the university, the corporateresearch and development laboratory, the conerence in Las Vegas – in which

physicists worked and the means through which they articulated their ideas.Tough Bourdieu denied the sharp ruptures that marked Foucault’s épistèmes,he retained the notion that it was impossible to examine a given idea withoutrecognizing the interconnected set o social relations and material concerns

within which that given idea was ormulated. Tere could be no ‘ree-oating’



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ideas. Seeking his own reconciliation between the extremes o internal ‘abso-lutist realism’ and external ‘historical relativism’, Bourdieu posited a structurethrough which ‘science’ emerges through the competition o scientic workersover various proessional and social resources.43 Rather than ideas being derivedrom constant comparison o autonomous thoughts with an objective reality,success in science or Bourdieu depended primarily on how well individuals wereable to exercise authority over a host o non-scientic actors.44 Because no seto objective experiments could ever test the innite number o possible scientictheories or a given phenomenon, consensus relied on bounding the possible.In an extension o Kuhn’s articulation o paradigm resolution, Bourdieu arguedthat the ways in which boundaries are drawn must come rom somewhere out-side o the set o techniques considered as legitimate science. Science in this viewbecame not the output o ‘pure creators’, but o ‘actualizers who translate intoaction socially instituted potentialities’.45 In evaluating Quetelet’s contributionsto the sciences, he might be best described as such an ‘actualizer’ rather than‘pure creator’. Tough Quetelet was a gifed mathematician, his great successes(and ailures) came about ofen through his ability to institutionalize ideas.

Since Bourdieu, the most extensive attempt to articulate a sociological theoryo intellectual change has come rom Randall Collins, who ventured to explainthe history o thought since antiquity as the perormance o the same scene overand over again on different historical stages.46 It is a powerul argument with muchexplanatory potential but one that requires signicant qualication i applied to

the history o science, where his ideas have not had nearly the level o inuence asBourdieu’s. In Collins’s view, new ideas were almost exclusively the product o small,tightly knit and socially powerul intellectual networks. While it might make senseto see these groups as the ad hoc accumulations o inuential and original thinkers,Collins seemingly put the cart beore the horse, arguing that the social networksthemselves produced individual genius: ‘it is not individuals … that produce ideas,but the ow o networks through individuals’.47 Conversely, external (i.e., histori-cal) explanations or new ideas were signicantly underdetermined, since many

people experience similar conditions yet ew produce works o creative genius.48 In place o text and context, Collins inserted a series o local ‘interaction rituals’

through which certain groups gain inuence in various societies. An impor-tant component in this view was personal contact, and Collins argued that the

ace-to-ace exchange o social and cultural ‘capital’ was essential or intellectualtransmission. In Quetelet’s case, such direct encounters are crucial in understand-ing his work, as direct meetings with gures like Arago, Bouvard, Laplace, Gauss,Goethe and Humboldt, as well as less amous thinkers in Ghent and Brussels,

played a proound role not only in introducing the young Belgian to new ideas butalso to securing social capital in Quetelet’s quest to convince governments to undhis many projects. In act Quetelet relied as much on personal contacts as on sci-



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entic justications to argue or new Belgian institutions. Collins’s networks wereall between ve and seven actors – what he called ‘Te Law o Small Numbers’ –so that capital could not be dispersed too broadly among a number o gures, andthe expansion and contraction o such networks was, or Collins, what producedthought. In Quetelet’s lie, such numbers would vary drastically, but as he movedthroughout various circles in Ghent, Brussels, Paris and the many observatories inGermany, he ound himsel ofen in such small and inuential groups.

Tough there is much to dislike about the idea o some sort o Hegelianaccordion producing the most important ideas in Western thought, the theoryo ‘network ideas’ owing through an individual seems a remarkably apt descrip-tion o Quetelet’s intellectual and scientic lie. Perhaps it would be incorrect to

characterize many instances o scientic activity in these terms, but or Quetelet,an appreciation o his immediate intellectual context seems warranted. As a gre-garious, motivated and charming person, Quetelet strived throughout his lie to

join and establish various networks o scientic thinkers; correspondence and personal meetings were in act his chie modes o scientic activity. While it isthe argument o this book that Quetelet himsel was important in nineteenth-century thought, it was not necessarily in his creativity but in the orce andsuccess with which he ‘actualized’ the ideas around him.

While Collins’s ideas were intended to explain only philosophies, StephanFuchs subsequently adapted the theory to scientic thought. Tough the ‘Lawo Small Numbers’ would not appear to apply to most scientic work since themid-nineteenth century, historians o science have documented numerous cases

where scientic ideas had come about in conjunction with the pursuit o socialand cultural capital.49 Furthermore, an explanation o nineteenth-century sci-ence as the product o social competition would seem at this point ar morecompelling than a story o individual genius or socially determined automatons.Indeed, Collins’s theory even allowed or a bit o history! Tough he specicallydenied any ‘external’ account’, he did allow that ‘large-scale political and eco-nomic changes indirectly set off periods o intellectual change’.50 Tough Collinshid his allowance o outside orces behind the term ‘indirectly’, in this contextthe term was meaningless. Either history intruded on the autonomy o the ‘net-

work’ or it did not; whether it was direct or indirect is a semantic game. While the many ideas proposed by sociologists o science and thought are com-

pelling, this book is intended as more than a case study on one particular theory

o transhistorical action. As such, the motley jargon – elds, ritual networks, etc. – will be dropped in the body o the text.51 However, Quetelet’s story was largely thestory o a succession o groups, and whether one calls these groups ‘ritual networks’or ‘riends’, they were a vital element o the story. In all his dealings with riends,colleagues, administrators, amous scientists, observatory directors or journal con-tributors, Quetelet always displayed a great spirit and optimism, and there is littlequestion that these social talents were among his greatest scientic talents.



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Quetelet’s personality matters not just as colourul detail but because it wascrucial to the development o his average men. Bourdieu, Collins and Fuchsdrew attention to how individual disposition to scientic practice could deter-mine scientic production and thereore personality might make a better labelthan habitus. In other words, the particular talents o the leader o a scientic

project – whether in conducting experiments, ormulating new hypotheses,deducing laws or (in Quetelet’s case) organizing large groups o observers – ofenindicated the parts o nature which the leader ound valuable, and hence, struc-tured his description o reality. Tis can easily be seen in gifed experimentalistslike Galileo or Boyle, whose talents were in creating novel experiments and who,unsurprisingly, ocused on experiment as the dening eature o science. Teoverlap o interest and discovery can be also be ound in the case o Einstein,a deep thinker who was gifed neither in traditional mathematics nor in con-ducting experiments, but who believed science was best practised as a orm o

philosophy and whose conclusions ofen shocked the talented mathematiciansand experimentalists o his day.52 Much like the artist who argues or the innatesuperiority o the medium in which she most excels, the ‘scientic method’ ofenends up reecting the practice in which the scientic researcher eels most at ease.

Quetelet’s talents did not include conducting novel experiments or, to besure, deep philosophical thinking, but in using his charm and enthusiasm tobring together large groups o data and people in order to determine trends andlaws in social behaviour. It should not be surprising afer all that a man who

excelled at directing large research operations suggested that science operatedbest through the accumulation o large amounts o data. Yet this connectionbetween thought and practice has not been suffi ciently made in any histor y oQuetelet. In act Bourdieu, in a hypothetical description o one o his scienticactors, provides perhaps the best analysis o Quetelet’s practice and thought:

Tose who come to head the large scientic organizations are obliged to impose adenition o research implying that the correct way to do science necessitates the useo the services o a large scientic bureaucracy – endowed with unds, advanced tech-nical equipment, abundant personnel – and to institute as the universal and eternalmethodology the survey o large random samples, the statistical analysis o data, andormalization o the results – in short, to set up the standard most avorable to their

personal and institutional capacities as … the yardstick o all scientic practice.53

As we will see, Quetelet did indeed insist on an ‘eternal methodology’ as well as‘abundant personnel’, and his appreciation o ‘large random samples’ did relate tothe kind o science in which he just happened to excel.

Tough the book rejects the notion that the history o thought (scienticor otherwise) is the same perormance o ‘network actors’ on different historicalstages, it takes seriously the suggestion that the composition o a network, the com-



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petition that takes place within a given group and competition between groups, are vital parts o the story. In Quetelet’s case we can see a succession o interactions with various networks, each o which would reect and reinorce his evolving ideas. Anexcessive ocus on outside ‘orces’ can simply be another orm o historical deter-minism, however, so an attempt will be made to pursue three narrative strands: thehistorical conditions under which Quetelet worked, the composition o his imme-diate set o proessional peers and the development o ideas in Quetelet’s work.

An Overview

Te multi-layered approach suggested above will be achieved through adjusting the

level o abstraction throughout the book. Te story o Quetelet’s creation o twoaverage men begins during a period described as ‘Te War o the Arts and Sciences’(Chapter One) when Quetelet was a young student deciding between careers inmaths or literature. Belgian education was divided particularly by the new bounda-ries that were being created between science and art, and this chapter describes howQuetelet responded to the demands o his time. It is no secret that the creator o astatistical science o man read Condorcet and Laplace, but more surprising may bethe young Belgian’s appreciation or Romantic heroes like Chateaubriand and Ger-maine de Staël. Such a broad appreciation o art and science would not have beennotable a century beorehand, but as this chapter demonstrates, the intellectual con-text in which Quetelet grew up was not well suited to continue such a broad courseo study. o demonstrate the diffi culties aced in the Low Countries in particular,

the chapter concludes with the eeting enthusiasm in the region or eclecticism andthe possibilities offered by Victor Cousin’s unique meld o art and science.

In Chapter wo, the ocus moves in rom the larger intellectual context toQuetelet and his close circle o riends in Ghent. Quetelet composed a largeamount o poetry while simultaneously writing his dissertation in maths andofen drew on his colleagues or support in the two projects. Yet not all oQuetelet’s riends ared as successully as he did, with several complaining aboutthe conditions o employment in Belgian science. Te eventual dissolution othe Ghent ‘network’ demonstrates that ‘Te War o the Arts and Sciences’ wasnot simply about ideas debated by elites but an intellectual quarrel that had realconsequences or young men interested in both mathematics and literature. Tischapter nds evidence in Quetelet’s poetry and opera librettos as well as in thetroublesome outcomes or many o his riends or an increasing recognition othe strains in Belgian intellectual lie brought about by the ‘war’.

By 1819, when Quetelet lef Ghent to take up a teaching position at the Athé-née de Bruxelles, he had largely abandoned his plans to become a writer and hadredirected his efforts towards making a career in the sciences. At age twenty-three,he had written next to nothing on statistics or probability, let alone the larger



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ideas o social physics that would be his most lasting legacy. As Chapter Treeshows, Quetelet’s new interests were sparked by new networks and institutionsin which he could become an ‘actualizer’ o scientic ideas. wo institutions in

particular helped in the creation o social physics and the average man o science:the Académie royale des sciences, des lettres, et des beaux-arts de Belgique andthe Observatoire royal de Bruxelles. Quetelet was responsible or the creation othe latter and the complete reormation o the ormer. Based on his correspond-ence with colleagues, éloges (eulogies) or academy members and his lectures atthe athénée, this chapter explores how Quetelet began to conceptualize the newscience workers or his institutions at the same time he also imagined the bestmeans to convince state administrators o the importance o these institutions.

Te pursuit o an observatory led Quetelet to a world o nineteenth-centuryscience ar removed rom his small group o riends. As seen in Chapter Four, in

just over a decade Quetelet went rom sharing a small house lled with poets andartists to meeting some o the most amous men o science o the era. In 1823he travelled to Paris to begin research in the city’s amous observatory, meetingLaplace and Poisson, but also the co-directors o the observatory, Arago andBouvard. In 1829 he toured observatories throughout Germany, meeting Gauss,Goethe and Humboldt. In between the two trips, he helped ound a continental

journal called the Correspondance mathématique et physique that accumulated sta-tistical accounts and other scientic notices rom a wide variety o administratorsand researchers. Again, his great talent or organization and enthusiasm servedhim well, as he made contacts throughout Europe that he used to support his pro-

jects back home. More importantly, however, this chapter shows that Queteletspent as much time learning how to administer and direct large-scale institutionsas he did learning about the particulars o the sciences o astronomy or statistics .

In Chapter Five, the narrative breaks to examine the creation o l’hommemoyen and social physics between the years o 1827 and 1835, an intense

period o time in which Quetelet did the vast majority o his work on statistics.Tough the work was inspired in part by a genuine interest in reorming stateinstitutions, this chapter demonstrates that physique social would not have been

possible without both the cultural context o the ‘war’ and the immediate con-cerns o Belgium and the United Kingdom o the Netherlands discussed in the

previous chapters. Te Belgian Revolution o 1830 and the related delays in the

construction o the observatory played a part, but so too did the numbers them-selves. By this point Quetelet had already begun to ormulate the real averagemen that he needed to staff the institutions o Belgian sciences, but the delay inconstructing the observatory orced him to look elsewhere or data. He oundthem in the letters to the Correspondance which included tables on births, mar-riages, criminal behaviour, heights and weights. Tough the orm o l’hommemoyen and physique sociale certainly had an intellectual lineage tracing back to



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Condorcet and other enlightened ideas or a science o man, the chapter dem-onstrates that Quetelet’s original conception o social physics was driven by thecontributions o his network o associates built up over the previous decade.

In spite o the act that physique sociale was created during a relatively brie period o time and that Quetelet quickly returned to large-scale data collectiono natural, rather than social, phenomena afer the observatory was completed,the tendency in the early biographies o Quetelet was to view social physicsthough the lens o ideas rather than practice. Quetelet was immediately criti-cized because o the determinist implications o social physics, and much o thesubsequent discussion o the project has concerned the implications on ree willor those who are the subjects o social physics. Tere is no doubt good od-der or such discussions: Quetelet was notoriously loose with his descriptionso how his various ‘constant’ and ‘perturbing’ orces acted, and his regular cita-tions o Laplace did little to quell concerns that social physics was ‘atalist’. Yet asseen in Chapter Six, the ocus on ree will distracted many contemporaries romthe more practical consequences or the actual practitioners o social physics,including their modern heirs in the quantitative natural and human sciences.Tereore, this chapter examines how Quetelet’s social physics was rst receivedand explains why this early criticism endured into the twentieth century. It con-cludes with a reconstruction o a debate organized by Quetelet in 1848 overthe deterministic implications o social physics, a debate where one commenter– the uture prime minister o Belgium Pierre de Decker – tried to deend hisriend Quetelet. In doing so he rst articulated the sense that there was another average man to be ound in Quetelet’s plans or a social physics.

Te Conclusion returns to the particular Belgian context or the creation othe average men o social physics and Quetelet’s history o Belgian science. Sci-ences mathématique et physique chez les belges admitted that the Low Countriescould not keep up in the era when science was dened by ‘men o genius’, but

provided a template or how the country could excel in an international worldo scientic institutions. Te new orm o science would require savants spreadout over the world, and Quetelet called the men o science who would ll these

positions ‘the New Argonauts’. Quetelet’s dreams o a physique sociale were neverully realized in Belgium, but many o his collaborative ideas ound ull ruitionin elds like terrestrial magnetism and meteorology, and Belgium took up animportant place in European science and politics. In just one example, Quetelet’s1853 International Maritime Conerence in Brussels is generally considered tobe the rst meeting where global temperatures and meteorological data werecompared, an acknowledged orerunner o the Intergovernmental Panel on Cli-mate Change.54 In a brie epilogue it is suggested that the average men o theseinstitutions may even offer a new way o understanding the legacy o the move-ment that Quetelet so believed he was ollowing: the Enlightenment project tocreate a science o man as predictable as physics and astronomy.



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Figure I.2: Quetelet statue and Académie royale. Quetelet’s statue stands outside othe Académie royale de Belgique in Brussels, one o the many institutions o science

he reormed or created in the 1820s. Much o his writing, rom his poetry in the 1810suntil his grand histories o Belgian science rom the 1860s, is archived inside. One hun-

dred yards to his lef is the Palais Royale, where the kings and queens o Belgium still

reside. Photo courtesy o the author.

Tough the temptation exists to connect these New Argonauts to the modernbureaucrats ound in Brussels, those housed in imposing modern steel and glass

just a ew Métro stops rom Quetelet’s statue on the lawn o the neo-classicalAcadémie royale (see Figure I.2), such a connection would require a ar differ-ent book rom the one that ollows. Quetelet’s story told here – a young poetrom Ghent who helped build the modern institutions o Belgian science, cor-responded with the great scientists o Europe, created the rst statistical scienceo man and envisioned a new o man o science – is, I hope, interesting enough.


Documents

Introduction to Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796–1874