Frédéric le Play | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play (1806-04-11)11 April 1806 |
| Died | 5 April 1882(1882-04-05) (aged 75) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | École Polytechnique,École des Mines |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Economics,political economy, sociology,epistemology, engineering |
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play (French:[pjɛʁɡijomfʁedeʁikləplɛ]; April 11, 1806 – April 5, 1882) was a French engineer,sociologist and economist.
The son of a custom-house official, Le Play was educated at theÉcole Polytechnique and theÉcole des Mines. He took an interest in sociological questions even as a young man at the École des Mines, befriending a follower of the socialist thinkerSaint-Simon. In the late 1820s, Le Play undertook an immense walking tour of Germany investigating its mines. In 1830, a laboratory accident seriously damaged Le Play's left hand and left him disabled for life. While he was recovering in Paris, he was a witness to the events of theJuly Revolution, and thereafter resolved himself to studying the issues that plagued French society.
In 1834, he was appointed chairman of the permanent committee of mining statistics. He spent the remainder of the 1830s traveling the backroads of Europe as a mining expert, and conducting empirical studies on the state of mines and their workers. In 1840, he became engineer-in-chief and professor ofmetallurgy at the École des Mines, and was made inspector in 1848. In the 1840s he also became the manager of a mining company in theUral Mountains. During this time he also met with many of France's leading thinkers and politicians, includingFélix Dupanloup,Alphonse de Lamartine,Charles Montalembert,Adolphe Thiers, andAlexis de Tocqueville, to discuss social issues.[1]
For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play travelled around Europe, collecting a vast amount of material bearing on the social and economic condition of the working classes. In 1855, he publishedLes Ouvriers Européens (The European Workers), a series of 36 monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from a wide range of industries. This work was crowned with theMontyon prize conferred by the Académie des Sciences. In 1856, Le Play founded theSociété internationale des études pratiques d'économie sociale (International Society for Practical Studies of Social Economy), which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society,La Réforme Sociale, founded in 1881, is published fortnightly.
Emperor Napoleon III, who had met Le Play in Russia during his travels across Europe in the 1840s and held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of theExhibition of 1855. The following year Napoleon III appointed Le Play to the Council of State, the legislative assembly of theSecond French Empire, where his official duties included overseeing numerous industries. He was made commissioner general of theExhibition of 1867, senator of the empire andGrand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.
At the prompting of the Emperor, Le Play published his recommendations for improving French society in his workSocial Reform in France (1864). Initially an atheist, Le Play gradually became convinced of the need for religion. In the essay he defended Christianity againstDarwinism,scepticism, andracialism.[1][2]
After theFranco-Prussian War and the fall of the Second Empire in 1870, he founded and directed the Unions of Social Peace, an organization composed of study circles of leading men dedicated to healing France's political and social divisions. He converted toRoman Catholicism in 1879, three years before his death.[1]
Le Play's essay,Social Reform in France, expounds the basis of his thinking and provides his recommendations to heal the divisions within French society. Le Play situated himself within the FrenchCounter-Enlightenment andCounter-Revolutionary tradition by criticising many of the social trends that were the result of theEnlightenment and theFrench Revolution. Le Play was critical of the Enlightenment idea that man was by nature good, and that moralprogress inevitably followed from material progress. He also opposed theories of political and racialdeterminism. He believed that societies, like human beings, are truly free, and that a society that uses its capacities to overcome the human propensity for evil would flourish and those that did not would decay. He looked to the past to glean examples of how this could be done, and he especially held up theMiddle Ages as the exemplar for social relations. For this reason he opposed the French Revolution's uncritical rejection of the past, especially France's Christian past.[1]
Le Play also believed strong families played a key role in the health of a society, and he placed particular emphasis on the role of mothers and women.Social Reform in France makes two key points about the family: the first is that social progress is tied to support forhomeownership and family inheritance. LikeLouis de Bonald before him, Le Play opposedpartitive inheritance and held theagricultural family as the ideal. His second key point was that women are the driving force of social and moral progress in any society.[1]
Le Play's work was further developed by his many disciples: Adolphe Focillon (1823–1890),Émile Cheysson (1836–1910), Alexis Delaire (1836–1915),Henri de Tourville (1842–1903), Claudio Jannet (1844–1894),Edmond Demolins (1852–1907),Paul de Rousiers (1857–1934), Gabriel Olphe-Galliard (1870–1947), the BelgianVictor Brants (1854–1917) and the CanadianLéon Gérin.
After an eclipse between the 1940s and the 1960s Le Play's methods resurfaced when the "history of the family" became a new field of interest in social science. In Britain,Peter Laslett who worked within theCambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure used le Play's methods at the end of the 1960s to study family structures from census and property transmission data, describing particularly the nuclear family structure which Le Play had not worked on.[3]
At about the same time in France, legal history academics working on customary law were the first to re-apply Le Play's methods in scientific research.[4] In the early 1970s, a growing number of ethnologists and historians joined this trend, especially those within thehistorical anthropology school: André Burguière,Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie.[5] In a 1989 book which became a reference in its field,[6] ethnologist Georges Augustins reshaped Le Play's family types classification.[7]
Some sociologists rediscovered Le Play's work as well from the late 1960s on, overcoming the general opinion that Le Play's views were just overly conservative,[8] particularlyPaul Lazarsfeld, Antoine Savoye and Bernard Kalaora.[9]
At the end of the 1970s historian and demographerEmmanuel Todd, a disciple of both Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Peter Laslett, was struck by the geographical similarity between the area of prevalence of the communitarian family system (patriarcal family in Le Play's words) and the regions where communism had become dominant in the 20th century. He reprocessed Le Play's study of family structures and published a number of widely publicised books establishing a link between traditional family structures and the great ideological and society movements in European history (religious and political choices, economic development, ...).[10]
In English translation
This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Le Play, Pierre Guillaume Frédéric".Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 16 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 479.
