Pierre Guilleaume Fréderic Le Play

Frédéric Le Play in the Jardin du Luxembourg . Paris

Pierre Guilleaume Fréderic Le Play , called Frédéric Le Play, (born April 11, 1806 in La Rivière-Saint-Sauveur , Département Calvados ; † April 5, 1882 in Paris ) was an engineer, geologist, economist, sociologist and social reformer . Le Play is considered an important French social theorist of the 19th century .

biography

After the untimely death of his father, a customs officer, Le Play moved to Paris with an uncle's family at the age of five. Friends of the house introduced him to the subjects of literature, politics and philosophy in the middle-class environment. After his uncle's death in 1815, he returned to his mother's home in the modest, rural-conservative conditions of Normandy . From 1818 to 1822 he attended a college in Le Havre , which he graduated with a baccalaureate . After working for an engineer for two years, he decided to take up this profession as well and attended the École polytechnique from 1825 to 1827 and then the École des Mines in Paris until 1829 .

In 1829, with his philosophical teacher Jean Reynaud, he went on a first trip to the German Rhine provinces , to Hanover , Braunschweig , Prussia and Belgium , mostly on foot . He studied mining, first in the Harz ( Clausthal ), and the social conditions and customs related to it.

“In the face of the bloodbath of the July Revolution, I dedicated my life to restoring social peace in my country. I have never forgotten this oath, and I am now offering the public studies that I began half a century ago in Lower Saxony and in the Harz mountains. "

- Le Play

He was editor of the " Annales des mines " and the " Statistique de l'industrie minérale ", and also professor of metallurgy at a mining school (1840). He traveled six months a year, studying domestic and foreign mining and the related problems of trade, workers, mine owners and farmers. After the French July Revolution of 1830 , he was primarily concerned with the question of social peace and the task of empirically verifying Saint-Simonist views of industrial society and, if necessary, refuting them with the help of facts.

His first research trip convinced him of the importance of the primary collection of data on social conditions. Le Play mistrusted social statistics, which drew their abstract databases from administrative sources, which set him apart from contemporaries such as Adolphe Quételet . Partly due to the influence of Catholic social doctrine, but partly also due to his precise observations and case studies of the economic conditions in the working class, Le Play came to the conclusion that the survey unit should not be the individual, but the family. In this sense, he then carried out his later Europe-wide studies.

He visited Spain in 1833, Belgium again in 1835 and 1846, and Great Britain in 1836 and 1842 ; Russia in 1837 and 1844 , Denmark , Sweden and Norway in 1845, Germany again in 1844 and 1845 , Austria , Hungary and Northern Italy in 1846 .

The unrest of 1848 confirmed Le Play's thirst for research, he subsequently toured Switzerland , the Ottoman Empire, again Great Britain (1851), Germany and Austria (1853). His investigations also took him to Russia again, and now he has already advised Tsar Nicholas I on questions of mining and social reform.

Le Play was in contact with politicians and theorists such as Alexis de Tocqueville , Alphonse de Lamartine , Adolphe Thiers , Sadi Carnot and Louis Blanc . He was active in political advice, especially under Napoléon III. who also appointed him to the Senate. In 1855, in his main work “ Ouvriers européens ” , Le Play developed his ideas of an ideal social order and the necessary social reforms using the monographic representation of 36 working-class families. Methodologically, Le Play developed a form of “ participatory observation ” at an early stage .

In 1855, Le Play was appointed to the State Council due to the success of the Paris World Exhibition , of which he had been General Commissioner. A year later he gave up his chair to devote himself entirely to his studies and the social reform project . In 1857 he founded the “ Societé internationale des hautes études d'économie sociale ”, of which he was general secretary until his death. On the one hand, the society published monographs, on the other hand it intervened in discussions about socially relevant topics such as apprenticeship training or women's work. Le Play also represented the ideal of a paternalistic society in his works , the nuclear family appeared to him as a problematic product of decay. Similarly to the householder , the employer would also have to look after the welfare of his workers; Le Play tended to reject state intervention, and the English model of subsidiary self-organization was more in keeping with his ideal. In 1862 he again headed the French department of the World's Fair in London , and in 1867 as Commissioner General in Paris. The collapse of 1870/71 seemed to confirm his warnings and his influence in conservative circles grew. In 1881 he founded the magazine “ La réforme sociale ” (forerunner of the “ Etudes sociales ”). For many years of his life he was also concerned with combating the division of inheritance introduced by Napoléon Bonaparte , albeit without success.

Le Play had a considerable influence on French social research and social theory, the historian Taine praised his work, some North American social statisticians took it up, and Le Play was remembered by the well-known sociologist Pitirim Sorokin . Emmanuel Todd derives his system of relating political and religious ideas with systems of kinship from Le Play's studies.

Quote

“ Statisticians have been even less happy with such studies which refer specifically to the inner nature of man, to the appraisal of social conditions, to the comparison of moral and intellectual properties, and, more generally, to the elements to be considered if you want to find out the situation of the working population. The causes of this inability are clear: the official results, which cover the entirety of a country, relate to certain points which interest the state authority as such, but abstract from all points which only touch this question; they take into account neither the particular nature of the individual nor the milieu in which it lives; the official data therefore neglect the essential facts that science must consider when it comes to conclusions concerning the individual existences or the different categories ... in summary, the method of statisticians is not that of the observation of direct facts; it is that of the more or less plausible summary and interpretation of facts that have been compiled from different angles, most of which have nothing to do with scientific interests. "

- Le Play

Le Play and the geology

In 1837 Frédéric Le Play accompanied Count Anatole Demidoff di San Donato on a trip through southern Russia and the Crimea. In the fourth volume of "Voyage dans la Russie méridionale et la Crimée", edited by Demidoff, Le Play published a paper on the geology of the Caucasus foreland. In it he introduced the name Pontium , which is still used today as a regional, chronostratigraphic stage of the Upper Miocene ( Neogene ) in the central Paratethys area. It remained his only major work in geology .

Honors

In 1856 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

literature

• Adolph von Wenckstern : Le Play. Berlin: Preuss 1893 (diss.)

Web links

• Biography in the Bibliothèque historique (in French)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Emmanuel Todd: La troisième planète. Structures familiales et systèmes idéologiques . éditions du seuil, Paris 1983.
2. ↑ Member entry of Pierre Le Play at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 14, 2016.