Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

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