Frederick Le Play, the Developmental Paradigm, Reading History Sideways, and Family Myths
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Preliminary Draft1 Frederick Le Play, the Developmental Paradigm, Reading History Sideways, and Family Myths by Arland Thornton Population Studies Center, Survey Research Center, and Department of Sociology The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, MI 48109 December 2005 Working Paper, Population Studies Center, the University of Michigan 1 This paper is a preliminary draft that has not gone through final proofing and verification. Readers who find errors are invited to inform me of the mistakes so that they can be corrected in future revisions. Preliminary Draft Frederick Le Play, the Developmental Paradigm, Reading History Sideways, and Family Myths In 1969 the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure held an international conference on the comparative history of household and family. The major issue of the conference was household and family structure and size in the past. The conference participants considered a substantial body of data casting severe reservations toward the “assumption that in the past the household was universally large and complicated, and that historical progress has always been from big and complex to small and simple”. In fact, the conference apparently manifested “…a certain animus against ‘the myth of the extended family’…” (Laslett, 1974/l972:ix-x). Frederick Le Play was undoubtedly not invited to the Cambridge conference since he had died in 1882. However, his ghost apparently attended the conference since his ideas and legacy dominated the book that reported the conference proceedings. Peter Laslett, editor of the conference volume, asserted that Le Play “…was, and perhaps still is, the strongest single influence on the historical study of the family” (Laslett, 1974/l972:16). In the preface and introduction to the volume, Laslett repeatedly referred to Le Play and his pivotal role in the establishment of the idea of extended families in the past. Laslett also discussed briefly data collected and reported by Le Play in his book The Workers of Europe. An implicit, if not explicit, theme of Laslett’s introductory essay is a sense of bewilderment about how Le Play, given his own data and the data assembled for the Cambridge conference, could have reached his conclusion about the historical transition from extended to nuclear families in Western societies. Writing nearly two decades after this Cambridge Conference, Laslett (l987:271) displayed a sense of frustration about the inability of present-day historians to dispel the myth of extended families in the past. He wrote that it had been “…a relatively straightforward task to 1 Preliminary Draft expose the misconceptions,” yet misinformation about the past continued. “Hard as we have worked on these points in the last fifteen or twenty years,” Laslett complained, “some of the final consequences of Le Play’s having taken the wrong turning in the l850s still remain.” So who was this Frederick Le Play? Who was this man who dominated historical family scholarship for more than a century after his death? What theoretical assumptions and methods caused him to take a wrong turn and become the central architect of the myth that families had been extended in the past and had changed to nuclear as a result of the transition from a rural agricultural to an urban industrial society? In researching Frederick Le Play I discovered one of the giants of social science history. Le Play began his career as a metallurgist and industrial engineer and later became interested in human behavior and family relations.2 In the middle of the nineteenth century he carried out and reported in The Workers of Europe one of the most monumental and successful studies ever conducted in the social sciences. One of Le Play’s contributions in The Workers of Europe was a system for categorizing family types that still informs the work of family scholars today. A more important contribution was his description of the geographical distribution of family types in mid-nineteenth century Europe—a description that has been verified by a large battery of family research conducted in the second half of the twentieth century. As I argue later in this 2 Le Play, who was born in Normandy in 1806 and died in 1882 in Paris, began his very successful career in the physical sciences and engineering. As Kellner (1972) wrote, “his life before 1855 would provide enough achievement to fill four life-long careers”. Among other things, he conducted and published research in mining, metallurgy, the steel industry, and industrial relations. He was a professor at the Ecole des Mines, sat on three governmental commissions, and managed a mining and industrial operation in Russia (Brooke, 1970). From the beginning Le Play displayed a strong interest in the human side of mining and industrial operations (Brooke, 1970) and in human welfare more generally (Le Play, 1937/1879: 365-367). He also traveled extensively in his numerous roles as university professor, engineering researcher, government commissioner, and industrial manager, which undoubtedly increased his interest in the issues of social science. Le Play wrote that his social science apprentice was well advanced by 1843, from 1848 to 1855 his metallurgical career dwindled as he devoted more and more time to his social science work, and after the publication of his book in 1855, he devoted himself entirely to social science (Le Play, 1937/1879: 573-575). 2 Preliminary Draft paper, Le Play went wrong only when he utilized the developmental paradigm and reading history sideways to draw conclusions about social history and processes from his international comparative family data. That is, he used information from societies he believed to be less developed to proxy for the pasts of societies he perceived as more advanced. Studying Families by Direct Observation It is important to note that this metallurgist-turned-sociologist was committed to an empirical approach to the study of human affairs. He strongly believed that social science conclusions should be arrived at inductively through the observation of human experience rather than deductively through reliance on preconceived theoretical orientations. He wrote that: In scientific matters, only direct observation of facts can lead to rigorous conclusions and to their acceptance. This principle is acknowledged today in the physical sciences, but it is still unrecognized in social science. The practitioners of social science are generally inspired by preconceived idea… People imbued with such biases tend to disdain the facts and the conclusions which can be induced from them. Social science thus remains in a situation comparable to that of the physical sciences when they were based on the conceptions of astrology and alchemy; social science will not be established until it is founded on observation” (Le Play, 1982/1862:179). So how did Le Play plan to advance social science beyond astrology and alchemy? It was through the direct observation of individuals and their families. Although Le Play directed a government statistical agency from 1830 to 1848, he was skeptical of the value of statistics in the description and understanding of society (Silver 1982). He believed that statistics were too isolated from the real world and could not provide reliable information concerning people. He wanted detailed and direct observations of individuals and their families rather than the second- hand data of statistics. Because of his distrust of statistics and his reliance on direct observation 3 Preliminary Draft of individuals and families, Le Play, unlike some other researchers in the 1800s, did not appear to use in his research the limited statistical data available (for a discussion of the use of statistics by Malthus and Westermarck, see Thornton 2005b, 2005c). Although Le Play did not use standard sampling techniques, he was aware of the need to choose families carefully in order for them to represent the larger population. As he put it, “we proceed like the zoologist who applies the investigative techniques of anatomy and physiology to a few individuals in order to describe an entire species” (Le Play, 1982/1862:179-180). Families rather than individuals were chosen as the unit of analysis because of Le Play’s conviction that families were the true social building blocks of society. In practice, Le Play followed a purposive strategy to select families—where invidiual families were chosen directly rather than through a random procedure. Le Play believed that he could choose average families in a particular area who could be representative of a larger group of families. As he put it: “In any social class, it is important to select a family native to the area and of nearly average conditions, that is, neither superior nor inferior to others in respect to its material situation or its morality” (Le Play 1982/1862, pages 180-181). Le Play believed that in order for valid information to be collected from the families selected, the investigator needed two essential attributes. The first was “a sincere love of science, which leads one to seek the truth and record the facts with scrupulous accuracy” (Le Play 1982/1862, page 181). He believed that such scrupulous attention to truth and direct recording of observations could overcome any biases a person might bring to a research project. The second essential condition for accurate evaluation was the ability to gain the confidence of the family under observation. This confidence was necessary because Le Play’s method required extensive interaction between the investigator and the family studied. 4 Preliminary Draft Once the families were selected for study they were subjected to an intense and multifaceted data collection effort, what Le Play called the monographic method. Le Play suggested that the field worker should spend from eight days to a month with each family participating in the study (Higgs, 1890:423). During this time the investigator observed the family and the activities of its individual members.