Article ID: CBB000773910

From Human Nature to Normal Humanity: Joseph de Maistre, Rousseau, and the Origins of Moral Statistics (2007)

unapi

In 1798 the French Directory began to collect moral statistics systematically for the first time in history. The bureaucratic and scientific developments that preceded this policy are well known. Yet the reasons for its abrupt adoption, and the intellectual origins of moral statistics (as distinguished from the topographical statistics previously practiced), have until now remained obscure. This paper contends that, in the aftermath of the Terror, Joseph de Maistre sketched philosophical tools and made political observations that aided the rise of the new state science. In particular, Maistre's anti-Rousseauian essay On the State of Nature (composed 1794-1796), a critique of Rousseau's second Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), outlined theoretical concepts crucial to moral statistics. Maistre's widely read Considerations on France (1797) later made these concepts available to the French public in an accessible and memorable style. In On the State of Nature Maistre set down his ideas on reason, human nature, human perfectibility, justice, conscience, Providence and chance. These ideas presented the agency of the moral in an innovative way that not only suggested immediate systematic applications, but also helped prepare the French sociological project. Indeed if any text made the theoretical shift away from the model of human nature to the paradigm of normal people with laws of dispersion that Ian Hacking claims set French sociology apart, it is On the State of Nature. Moreover, Maistre's realist critique of Rousseau's imagination augured the notion of the social fact that Comte transformed, and Durkheim defined.

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Authors & Contributors
Koganzon, Rita
Wacjman, Claude
Vila, Anne C.
Sorenson, Leonard R.
Sonenscher, Michael
Simon, Julia
Concepts
Vital statistics
Sociology
Philosophy and politics
Medicine
Social sciences
Science and politics
Time Periods
18th century
19th century
Early modern
Enlightenment
20th century, early
17th century
Places
France
England
Great Britain
Institutions
Académie de Médecine, Paris
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