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vii

Contents

List of Figures viii

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Foreword xiiSteve Fuller

Introduction 1

Part I

1 Political Economy, the BAAS, and Sociology 19

Part II

2 Francis Galton and the Science of Eugenics 45

3 Patrick Geddes’ Biosocial Science of Civics 70

4 L. T. Hobhouse’s Evolutionary Philosophy of Reform 98

Part III

5 The Origins and Growth of the Sociological Society 123

6 The End of Biological Sociology in Britain 147

Conclusion 170

Notes 183

Bibliography 209

Index 231

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1

In 1985 the prominent American sociologist Edward Shils, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and winner of the prestigious Balzan Prize, looked back at the ways his discipline had developed since its inception a little over 150 years earlier. ‘The sober attempts of a small group of dourly upright reformers and administrators in the nineteenth century to describe in a reliable way the real “condition of England” were among the first of their kind’, he wrote. The reason was that ‘for the first time men and women sought to arrive at a judgment of their own society through the disciplined and direct study of their fellow citizens’. However, Shils went on, after a ‘great surge’, which lasted from the Poor Law Commissioners of the 1830s until the surveying work of Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb in London during the 1880s and 1890s, ‘British sociological powers seemed to exhaust themselves’. In early twen-tieth-century France and Germany, Shils declared,

powerful and learned minds thought about the nature of society and tried to envisage modern society within the species of all the socie-ties known to history. In America, sociologists busied themselves in villages and in the city streets, carrying on the work of Booth, find-ing illustrations of the ideas of [Georg] Simmel, [Ferdinand] Tönnies, and [Emile] Durkheim and developing under the guidance of Robert Park, a few of their own. In Britain, however, for nearly fifty years, while social anthropology and economics flourished as in no other country, sociology gathered the soft dust of libraries and bathed in the dim light of ancestral idolatry.1

Far from being specific to Shils, this view of British sociology is emblem-atic of a general historiographic trend, which suggests that the UK failed

Introduction

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2 British Sociology’s Lost Biological Roots

to develop a sociological imagination during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, for many scholars who have written about the history of sociology, there is little to say about the theoretical, rather than empirical, dimension of the subject in Britain before the emergence of Anthony Giddens during the late 1960s and early 1970s. As this book demonstrates, though, this perception of the discipline’s past is not only misleading, it also conceals a history that illuminates a whole range of current debates about how to understand and reform society.

At the heart of this book is a new account of the intellectual origins of British sociology, which is focused on a series of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discussions that have been overlooked by scholars such as Shils. During the course of those debates, which culminated between 1903 and 1908 with the creation of the UK’s first organization, university chair, and journal for sociology, a number of different visions of the burgeoning discipline’s future were put forward. However, only one of those visions, that of the former Oxford philoso-phy don L. T. Hobhouse, who was appointed Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics in 1907 and editor of the Sociological Review in 1908, emerged from those discussions with the power to direct sociology in its institutional setting. By charting the emergence of sociology in the UK from the mid-1870s through to Hobhouse’s double appointment during the first decade of the twen-tieth century, this book recovers the frequently ignored context and often forgotten content of the founding British debates about sociol-ogy and explains why they concluded with the selection of Hobhouse, rather than any of his rivals, for the discipline’s first and most impor-tant jobs.

In so doing, this book traces how the British understanding of the identity of sociology – what it should strive for, what methods are appropriate to it, and how it fits with the rest of science and culture – was developed in response to a specific question: how should sociology, as the general science of society, be related to biology, as the general sci-ence of life? What is shown is that, by choosing Hobhouse, those who laid the intellectual and disciplinary foundations for British sociology also chose to keep biology and sociology separate – a decision that had enormous consequences for the field’s identity. Yet despite the fact that this issue was not only of such importance to early British sociology but has also re-emerged in recent years as a subject of debate in sociology, it is seldom mentioned in the history that sociologists tell about their discipline.


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Introduction 3

The origins and development of an independent science called ‘sociology’

From the writings of the ancient Greeks, through the eighteenth-cen-tury Enlightenment’s aspirations for a ‘science of man’, to the social and behavioural sciences of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Western thought has always featured writings that have aimed to under-stand man and society in a systematic way. However, there was no such thing as sociology before the nineteenth century. As is well known, the word ‘sociology’ was coined by the French positivist philosopher August Comte in the 1830s as the name for the science he believed would ena-ble humans to comprehend society in the same way that mathemat-ics, physics, chemistry, and biology had made it possible for them to understand the natural world. Yet after his writings about the prospect of replacing existing theological beliefs and arrangements with a ‘reli-gion of humanity’, which the English naturalist and public defender of Darwin, T. H. Huxley, once famously described as ‘Catholicism minus Christianity’, sociology possessed such radical social and political con-notations that few outside of Comte’s loyal group of followers were pre-pared to openly identify themselves with the idea.2 It was therefore not until other writers, in particular the English philosopher of evolution Herbert Spencer, had separated sociology from its original Comtean context that it became the subject of serious, mainstream scientific debate in Europe and North America.

Of the thinkers whom sociologists now believe contributed most to the intellectual foundations of their field, it is a group known as the ‘classical’ generation, with which thinkers such as Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Wilfredo Pareto, Georg Simmel, and George Herbert Mead are associated, whom sociologists consider the most important. The reason is that the classical generation, unlike Comte and Spencer, provided a definition of sociology and its subject matter that has informed the work of sociologists ever since. For the classical generation, sociology was not simply the scientific study of man but the more precise practice of studying a realm of phenomena, known as the ‘social’, which they claimed has an existence beyond the individuals and political organizations that had been the subjects for their predecessors. Moreover, in pointing to this class of phenomena, the classical genera-tion also argued that its study required a new and specific set of analytic tools and methods. In this sense, as Durkheim put it in 1895 in The Rules of Sociological Method, sociology was not ‘the appendage of any other sci-ence’ but was instead ‘a distinct and autonomous science’.3


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As Shils suggested, the consequence of these arguments about the independence of sociology from other fields was the formalization by a number of thinkers of a new way of looking at society. The overriding concern of what C. Wright Mills later called the ‘sociological imagina-tion’ was to show how human action is constrained by the traditions, ide-als, and formal arrangements of the societies in which it takes place.4 For example, in Suicide, which was first published in 1897, Durkheim sought to establish that suicide is not just a psychologically motivated act but also a social phenomenon that is related to the degree of social solidarity present in the society in which it occurs. Moreover, using his ‘ideal type’ methodology, Weber laboured to provide an account of how human action, despite its subjective meaning to individuals, can be classified into a number of distinct types, such as value-rational and instrumen-tal kinds.5 Although the classical sociologists applied such approaches to societies throughout history, they were primarily interested, as Shils observed, with explaining what made the industrial societies in which they lived different from the social forms that had preceded them. Whilst writers expressed this concern in many different ways, it was per-haps most famously summed up by Tönnies in 1887 in Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, known as either Community and Association or Community and Civil Society in English, which contrasted the traditional relation-ships in static and small-scale communities with the informal contracts of the rapidly changing societies in the modern world.6

The achievements of the classical generation were not limited to intel-lectual insights alone, though. By establishing journals, professional organizations, and university departments, the classical sociologists founded a basic disciplinary framework for sociology that, in many cases, still exists today. In France, for example, Durkheim not only helped establish sociology as a university subject through his teaching at the University of Bordeaux and then at the Sorbonne in Paris, but also participated in the founding of L’Année sociologique – Europe’s first journal for sociology. Furthermore, in the USA, which took the discipli-nary process further than any other country in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, figures such as Franklin Giddings – America’s first professor of sociology – and Albion Small – the first editor of the American Journal of Sociology, which commenced publication in 1895 – established the institutions that would serve as the basis for sociology’s expansion after World War I. Indeed, the case of the department of soci-ology at the University of Chicago, which Small helped found during the 1890s, is a model of institution building that has interested scholars ever since.7


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Introduction 5

In writing the history of their discipline, however, sociologists have woven these general points and specific events into a single and greatly expanded narrative that has not only glossed over uncomfort-able details but also deepened the subject’s intellectual roots – a fact that is to be expected from scholars working in a field that is less than 150 years old. For example, few histories of sociology engage with the fact that Weber, who never held a professional sociology post, actively avoided the label of sociologist until around 1910 when he had not only already established his methodological principles and theoretical framework but also published works, such as The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for which he has subsequently become most renowned.8 Furthermore, and highlighting the importance sociologists have attached to the identity of their field as the science of industrial life, Karl Marx has come to be embraced as a sociological thinker, even though he neither called himself a sociologist nor was identified as one during his own lifetime. Indeed, such is his importance to sociology’s sense of its own identity that it has become commonplace to see classical sociology as a response, from Weber in particular, to Marx’s historical materialism.9 Yet whilst the writing of sociology’s history has involved the embracing of thinkers whose status as sociologists was somewhat ambiguous during their own lifetimes, it has also seen the exclusion of others. In particular, the received history of sociology has not only overlooked the participation of the British in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about the subject but also dismissed those contributions as largely inconsequential.

The trouble with British sociology

In common with the USA and its European neighbours, early twentieth-century Britain was a place where sociology captured the imagination of those interested in being scientific about society. Indeed, between 1903, the year of Herbert Spencer’s death, and 1908, a society, a uni-versity chair, and a journal were all established for sociology in the UK. Yet, as historians and sociologists have often observed, that flurry of activity did not translate into any substantial institutional gains until after World War II. Moreover, not a single person involved with the process of founding sociology as discipline in Britain has ever been widely considered worthy of a place alongside the greats of the field’s classical canon. As a consequence, the historiography of British soci-ology has been divided between two groups. On the one hand, there are those, like Shils, who have been genuinely dismissive towards what


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happened in Britain during sociology’s classical age. On the other, there are scholars who have sought to defend the UK from the claim that its failure to develop sociology along the same lines as the rest of Europe and America represents a deficiency of some kind. For almost everyone who has written on the subject, though, there has been an acceptance that there is something distinctive about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British sociology that requires an explanation.

Amongst the most important critiques of British sociology, and one that helped shape a whole generation’s perception of the field, was that of the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, whose theory of structural functionalism dominated sociology during the middle decades of the twentieth century.10 A key figure in the introduction of Weber’s work to English-language audiences during the 1930s, Parsons extolled the virtues of the European classical theorists and presented sociology as a project that had been built on their insights.11 Perhaps surprisingly, Parsons had actually been introduced to the work of a number of the classical thinkers when he was studying at the London School of Economics during the late 1920s. However, it was not L. T. Hobhouse, then still the UK’s only holder of a chair of sociology, who had been responsible for drawing Parsons’ attention towards the classical canon. Instead it was through the historian R. H. Tawney that Parsons learned of Weber and through the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski that he first came into contact with Durkheim’s writings.12 Comparatively unimpressed by the style of sociology that Hobhouse was offering at the LSE at the time, Parsons concluded that British sociologists were unwilling to grasp the abstract theories of their European contemporar-ies, who he argued in The Structure of Social Action, his widely influen-tial book of 1937, were central to the entire enterprise of sociology. In fact, for Parsons, the British were too deeply wedded to an empirical and individualist style of social thought, which he identified as a tradi-tion running from Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in the seventeenth century through to the economics of his own time, to ever embrace sociology proper.13

Of those who followed in Parsons’ footsteps, the English Marxist his-torian Perry Anderson, who despaired at the UK’s failure to produce its own Durkheim or Weber, stands out as the scholar who has offered the most direct attack on the British sociological tradition. As a subscriber to the belief that classical sociology emerged from a dialogue with Marx, Anderson argued in a much discussed article entitled ‘Components of the National Culture’, which was published in 1968, that the key to under-standing why British sociology did not develop along the same lines as


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Introduction 7

it did in Europe is the UK’s long-standing political and social stability.14 According to Anderson, late nineteenth-century France and Germany were susceptible to classical sociology and the grand theorizing it repre-sents because radical leftwing political thought found a place in those countries after the massive upheavals that were caused by invasion, revolution, and unification. In Britain, though, the foundations of the state and government were stable and, as a consequence, there was no platform on which to build sociology. However, Anderson went on, this stability and apparent absence of sociology was not a good thing. On the contrary, Britain’s failure to produce a classical sociology was, he argued, a damning indictment of its intellectual culture.

Since the 1960s, numerous scholars, many of them sociologists, have attempted to defend British sociology and, by extension British intel-lectual life, against the charges levelled at it by Parsons, Anderson, and others. One popular response, which was reflected in Shils’ take on the subject, has been to emphasize that despite not having given the world a substantive body of theory, the UK has nevertheless con-tributed to sociology in other important ways. Specifically, as scholars such as Lawrence Goldman, Raymond Kent and Philip Abrams have pointed out, Britain has always possessed a strong tradition of empirical and statistically orientated social research, which can be traced from the founding of the Statistical Societies of Manchester and London in the mid-1830s, through the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen-tury work on urban poverty by investigators such as Charles Booth in London and Seebohm Rowntree in York, right up to the late twentieth century, when British sociology came to be characterized by ‘studies’ rather than theory.15 For this reason, many scholars have emphasized Britain’s strong commitment to the empirical foundations of social sci-ence, which, if we eschew Parsons and Anderson’s normative claims about the direction that British sociology should have taken, provides a positive history of sociology in the UK.16

However, shifting attention towards the undoubtedly strong empiri-cal tradition in British social science has never provided an effective riposte to the claim that the UK has been an intellectual wasteland in comparison to its European neighbours. As a consequence, schol-ars have frequently explored ways to demonstrate that whatever went wrong with British sociology it was by no means a deficiency of the intellect. Indeed, according to a number of historians and sociologists, the conclusion to be drawn from the failure of sociology to become a significant institutional proposition during the first half of the twen-tieth century is not that it was absent from British culture but rather


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that it was dispersed throughout it. For Philip Abrams and Geoffrey Hawthorn, for example, sociology was at a disadvantage in late nine-teenth- and early twentieth-century Britain because of politics. Not only did the British state embrace social, or vital, statistics, Abrams and Hawthorn have argued, but the political culture was gradually shaped by a liberal-social political consensus, which was premised on a sophis-ticated understanding of the structural causes of poverty.17 Given that the natural audience for sociology was social reformers, who saw social science as a tool for social and political change, British sociology suf-fered, Abrams and Hawthorn have claimed, because too many people, including Edwin Chadwick and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, were able to realize their ambitions through the machinery of government rather than academia.

For a number of scholars, the problem of viable alternatives to soci-ology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain was not limited to politics, though. Indeed, for Abrams, there were a number of other disciplines, such as social anthropology, which flourished in the UK during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which can be seen as having absorbed thinkers who might otherwise have pursued sociology.18 Yet of all the disciplines Abrams suggested as hav-ing a role to play in the history of British sociology, it is philosophy that has received the most attention from other scholars – a fact that should not be surprising given that Hobhouse started his career as a philoso-pher. As Stefan Collini and, most recently and extensively, Sandra den Otter have shown, sociology and philosophy, which was then domi-nated by an idealism related to the work of Immanuel Kant and G. F. W. Hegel, intersected at a number of different points in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Whilst a number of sociologists, including Hobhouse, drew on aspects of idealist philosophy in their work, a prominent group of philosophers, such as Bernard Bosanquet and D. G. Ritchie, attacked sociology because they did not believe soci-ety could be treated within the framework of scientific naturalism. For Bosanquet, Ritchie, and others, human action could not be understood in materialist terms and, as a consequence, they objected to the idea that it was possible to be scientific about society. In this sense, late nine-teenth- and early twentieth-century British sociology was the site of an important and scholarly discussion about the most appropriate away to understand society and therefore whether it is the sciences or the humanities that are best placed to interpret it.19

The result of these efforts to recover the context in which people talked about and related to sociology in late nineteenth- and early


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Introduction 9

twentieth-century Britain is that it is now by no means the case that one can casually claim, as scholars such as Shils, Parsons, and Anderson once did, that the UK was, and to some extent still is, an intellectual poor relation of Europe and the USA. Building on the important stud-ies by Goldman, Collini, den Otter, and others, this book contributes towards the ongoing spirit of revisionism by returning to a formative set of British debates about sociology and arguing for two general points relating to the historiography of the field as a whole. The first is that we should follow the example of revisionist scholars and reject the argu-ment that British sociology’s institutional fortunes during the twentieth century can be put down to an absence of ideas about the structure and nature of society. However, the second point is that we do not need to compensate for any perceived deficiencies in the standard of sociologi-cal debate in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain by appealing to what was going on in other disciplines. There was a rich, complex, and theoretically informed discussion in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British sociology; but, as this book shows, that debate was largely concerned with a set of issues that seldom appear in accounts of how the current identity of sociology came to be.

Biology and British sociology

The presence of not only biological ideas but also biologists in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British debate about sociology is something that a number of scholars have recognized.20 Indeed, as early as 1948, in what still stands as the most comprehensive survey of sociology from its origins to the mid-twentieth century, the American historian Harry Elmer Barnes commented on the UK’s strength when it came to making connections between the sciences of society and the sciences of life.21 It is therefore surprising that very few scholars have ever paid any attention to the part biology played in laying the founda-tions of sociology in Britain. In fact, of those who have considered the subject at all, only R. J. Halliday, in a 1968 study of the major groups that formed the Sociological Society, has ever taken the issue seriously enough to suggest that biology provided at least some of the reference points when it came to the disputes that divided British sociology dur-ing the early twentieth century. However, since Halliday suggested closer attention should be paid to how members of the British socio-logical movement related biology and sociology, little work has actively engaged with the issue.22 This book demystifies the place of biology in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British sociology and, in


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so doing, it argues that if we want to understand why British sociology became a Hobhousean enterprise then we have to appreciate the signifi-cant part that biological ideas played in making it so.

Over the course of six chapters, which are divided into three parts, this book explores the British debate about the methods, scope, and aims of sociology from the perspectives of the three men who arrived at the Sociological Society in the early twentieth century with the most compre-hensive and significant proposals for how sociology should be practiced: the eugenicist and biostatistician Francis Galton; the biologist and soci-ologist Patrick Geddes; and the former Oxford philosophy don Hobhouse. Exploring how each of their programmes was based on a different under-standing of how to relate sociology and biology, this book restores the debates that took place at the Sociological Society between 1903 and 1907 to their correct intellectual context and recaptures what was at stake for British sociologists when they decided to follow the path laid by Hobhouse rather than Galton or Geddes. Indeed, this book highlights the signifi-cance of what happened at the Sociological Society by demonstrating how very different sociology would have been in the UK had it been built on the biosocial foundations proposed by both Galton and Geddes.

Chapter 1 begins by examining the events that first pushed sociology into mainstream British scientific discussions. Whilst received histories of sociology suggest a straight line can be drawn from Comte’s coining of the word ‘sociology’ in the 1830s to the discipline that took shape in the twentieth century, Chapter 1 argues that the origins of British soci-ology are to be found elsewhere: in the rise and fall of classical political economy. For much of the nineteenth century, the classical form of political economy had dominated British social science. However, as Chapter 1 shows, confidence in the doctrines of classical political econ-omy had declined to such an extent by the late 1870s that there was a hard-fought campaign to close Section F, the social science branch of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS). Although one well-known consequence of the late nineteenth-century revolt against classical political economy was the emergence of modern economics, Chapter 1 demonstrates that another was the rise of sociol-ogy. Indeed, what is shown is how the Irish political economist J. K. Ingram, responding to both the decline of classical political economy and the related attack on social science at the BAAS, first made sociol-ogy a talking point in British social science through his presidential address to Section F in 1878.

Chapters 2, 3, and 4, which comprise the second part of the book, then examine how Galton, Geddes, and Hobhouse developed their


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Introduction 11

programmes for sociology during the late nineteenth century. The com-mon theme of these chapters is the effort of each thinker to be scientific about society but in an intellectual environment that had been shaped by two things: the issues raised during the debate about classical politi-cal economy and the impact of evolution on social thought after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. Whilst it has long been assumed that the most biologically inclined of the pro-grammes that emerged from that process was Galton’s eugenics, we will see in Chapter 2 that there were actually few substantive links between his work on human heredity and the practices of late nineteenth-cen-tury biologists. Motivated by a political programme that was shaped by his objections to the assumptions that classical political economists made about human nature, Galton developed eugenics as a rigorously statistical science through which he strived to convince people that the answers to social questions could be found through a closer study of the laws governing inheritance. However, as a number of high-profile biologists and statisticians sought to incorporate Galton’s insights into their work from the 1890s onwards, eugenics was transformed into a social science with strong connections to the latest biological think-ing. Consequently, Chapter 2 argues, when Galton appeared before the Sociological Society in the early twentieth century, he was proposing that sociologists pool their intellectual and practical resources with their colleagues in biology.

As Chapter 3 shows, the programme for British sociology that actu-ally owed the most to biology was the one developed by Patrick Geddes. Once a student of the anatomist T. H. Huxley, Geddes had been set for a career as a biologist in the late 1870s when he decided to immerse himself instead in the discussions that had been ignited by Ingram’s 1878 address to the BAAS. By examining Geddes’ work in biology, his responses to the debate about classical political economy, and his attempts to establish sociology within his home city, Edinburgh, Chapter 3 traces how his programme for sociology, which he called ‘civ-ics’, was the product of two concerns: Geddes’ desire for sociology to be an independent science and his conviction that it needed to engage with biology. Moreover, in charting Geddes’ efforts to balance these demands, Chapter 3 highlights the previously undocumented ways that his sense of how to do so was shaped by the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer – a source of inspiration that historians of sociology unfamiliar with the complexities of the late Victorian debate about evo-lution might find surprising. In this sense, it will be shown how Geddes, like Galton, arrived at the Sociological Society with a programme that


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required sociologists to incorporate particular aspects of biology into their practices.

In Chapter 4, we will then see how Hobhouse spent the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries researching and writing a multi-volume project that began in late 1880s Oxford and concluded in 1906 with the publication of Morals in Evolution – a statement of how soci-ology should be done and what it should strive for. Beginning his career as a philosophy don, Hobhouse had been drawn into the debate about sociology by his belief, contrary to a number of his illustrious contemporaries in philosophy, that theories of evolution had impor-tant implications for the way that philosophers thought about their subject matter. As with Geddes’ attempts to relate society and evolu-tion, the spectre of Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy loomed large over Hobhouse’s project. However, whilst modelling the structure of his work on Spencer’s system, Hobhouse pursued his research with the determination to overcome the weaknesses that commentators had come to identify with Spencer’s account of evolution. In so doing, Hobhouse formulated an agenda for sociology that made human agency a key part of the evolutionary process and thus social change. Yet, as Chapter 4 makes clear, whilst Galton, Geddes, and Hobhouse all shared this normative understanding of sociology, only Hobhouse was convinced that its realization was dependent on freeing sociology from biology.

Building on these analyses, Chapters 5 and 6 then provide a new account of what happened at the Sociological Society in the lead up to Hobhouse’s appointments in 1907 and 1908. Whilst using the new context provided by Chapters 1 through 4 to throw fresh light on what was said and who took part in those debates, Chapters 5 and 6 also utilize correspondence between the major figures in the British sociol-ogy movement, almost all of which has been unknown to historians of sociology, to explain exactly what happened at the Sociological Society between its founding in 1903 and Hobhouse’s appointments. In so doing, Chapters 5 and 6 not only dispel myths about how Hobhouse came to be selected for the chair at the LSE but also reveal for the first time that there was a plan hatched by Victor Branford, Geddes’ clos-est associate, to make Hobhouse the leader of British sociology. As the correspondence and reports of the Sociological Society make clear, the reason it was Hobhouse, rather than Galton or Geddes, who was given the opportunity to shape sociology in the UK was the Society’s dif-ficulties with Galton and Geddes’ calls for sociology to be linked to biology.


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Introduction 13

These themes and arguments will then be brought together and con-sidered more closely in the conclusion. However, rather than evaluating what went on at the Sociological Society in terms of its supposed status as a precursor of the subsequent failure of sociology in Britain, the con-clusion will ask a different question: what might British sociology have looked like had it been put in either Galton’s or Geddes’ hands? Whilst the conclusion takes this counterfactual turn to avoid the problem of reading later institutional difficulties back into the debates of the early twentieth century, it also does so to underscore an important point: that the events considered in this book mattered when they took place and still matter now.23 By pointing to the ways that sociology would have been different on Galton’s or Geddes’ watch, the conclusion explains not only what those who took part in the debates at the Sociological Society understood to be at stake when Hobhouse was appointed but also how the effects of that appointment can still be felt in the discus-sions that are taking place in British sociology today. Indeed, it is argued that it is only by reconnecting with the reasons behind Hobhouse’s appointment that we can make sense of what is at stake right now when sociologists such as W. G. Runciman call for their colleagues to ‘forget their founders’ in favour of a Neo-Darwinian paradigm.

History of science and the history of sociology: wider aims

As this high-altitude sketch suggests, this book also has a number of aims that lay beyond the recovery of the context in which debates about sociology took place in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Indeed, whilst the question of why Hobhouse was appointed the UK’s first professor of sociology and editor of its first sociology journal might ostensibly seem to be of interest to a small group of scholars, this book endeavours to show how the answer is actually relevant to a range of debates from both sociology and history of science. Although these wider issues and discussions intersect at a number of different points, they can be divided, broadly speaking, into three main groups.

The first set of issues concerns the relationship between the history of sociology and history of science more generally. Simply put: why should historians of science, who have paid little attention to the his-tory of British sociology before, be interested in the contents of this book? As the preceding sketch made clear, one reason is that the his-tory told here involves well-known thinkers engaging with questions that had yet to be monopolized by any one field. The British debate


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about sociology is therefore important because it provides a crucial but under-appreciated context for issues and developments that his-torians of science have previously studied through the lens of other sciences and their histories. For example, as Chapters 2, 5, and 6 show, the debate about sociology provides a significant point of reference when it comes to understanding how and why Francis Galton devel-oped his ideas about human heredity in the ways he did. Indeed, as Chapter 5 shows, it is only by taking that debate and its impact on Galton’s research into account that we can explain why he chose to launch his campaign for eugenics to be taken up as a national political concern at an organization called the Sociological Society – a fact that few scholars have commented on before. In this respect, and building on a point that Steven Shapin has made in a number of recent reviews, this book speaks to an important problem in history of science schol-arship: the fact that historians of science, despite their enthusiasm for contemporary sociology and social theory, frequently neglect the social sciences when it comes to the contexts in which their subjects of study were working.24

The second set of general issues that this book tackles concern the relationship between history of science and the sciences themselves. As Peter Dear has pointed out, although history of science and the sciences are now two largely separate enterprises, they were closely entwined as recently as a century ago.25 Whilst the reasons for this shift have yet to be fully documented, one of its consequences has been a weakening of the link that once existed between scientific ideas and the understand-ing of their historical context. For a great many historians, as well as philosophers and sociologists, of science, this growing separation is of great concern and the question of how to bring science and the study of science closer together has been the subject of a growing discussion.26 This book joins that discussion by using the case of British sociology, where questions about the place of biology in social explanation have recently returned to the agenda, as an example of how historical inves-tigation can constitute a meaningful contribution to current scientific debates. Indeed, as the conclusion makes clear, the recovery of the sig-nificant differences between Galton, Geddes, and Hobhouse’s visions of sociological practice is a not only significant but also necessary when sociologists are calling for greater attention to be paid to Geddes’ pro-gramme for sociology.

This conception of how historical scholarship can be related to con-temporary scientific discussion is connected to the third and final set of general issues that this book addresses: how historians conceptualize


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Introduction 15

science and write its history. As James Secord helpfully summarized in Isis in 2004, the writing of the history of science during the past two decades has been characterized by a shift towards a conception of sci-ence as a practice.27 Motivated by a desire to redefine science as some-thing that is moulded by more than just theories, scholars have made a whole range of subjects, from book publishers to instrument makers, a part of our understanding of what science is. However, one important, and perhaps unintended, consequence of these developments has been an overall privileging of material culture in history of science at the expense of what have come to be derided as ‘elite’ ideas. This state of affairs can be gleaned from the contents of history of science journals, which have come to be dominated by an ever-growing body of con-structivist studies that focus on issues such as laboratory skills and the communication of evidence to audiences – a collection of interests that are often grouped under the heading ‘making knowledge’. Yet as Jan Golinski and Jonathan Topham have both argued, thinking is clearly an important part of scientific practice.28 For this reason, this book focuses on the connections between thinking and doing in scientific practice and, in so doing, aims to transcend the dichotomy between intellectual and practical activity that has bedevilled the contemporary historiography of science.

In terms of the six chapters that follow, the most obvious and well-known example of a close relationship between ideas and action comes in Chapter 2 with Galton’s efforts to develop a set of statistical tools that could be used to link social progress and human heredity. However, in Chapters 3 and 4, where Geddes and Hobhouse’s programmes for sociology are shown to be indebted to their appropriation of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary philosophy, we will also see how writings that many scholars have dismissed as irrelevant to the concerns of practicing scientists actually shaped a range of activities in both the physical and intellectual worlds. From Galton’s endeavours to formulate methods that would accurately capture information about human intelligence and form, through the decisions that Geddes made during his research on what we would now call symbiosis, to the way that Hobhouse designed a set of experiments to test the reasoning abilities of animals, those involved in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British sociol-ogy were all engaged in an effort to develop and execute programmes that were driven by specific sets of ideas. In this sense, what this book aims to show is why we should not lose sight of the fact that science is a cognitive activity and that studying that activity is a crucial part of understanding the direction of science in the past, present, and future.


PROOF


However, in order to make this argument, as well as the others that have just been outlined, we must first return to the late nineteenth-cen-tury debate about classical political economy that helped bring Galton, Geddes, and Hobhouse together at the Sociological Society during the first decade of the twentieth century.


PROOF

231

Abrams, Philip, 7, 8, 19, 124American Journal of Sociology, 4, 93Anderson, Perry, 6–7, 9, 177, 183 (n.

9), 183–4 (n. 14)anthropology

and British sociology, 1, 9, 183 (n. 12)

social, 1, 8Aquinas, St. Thomas, xivAristotelian Society, 126Aveling, Rev. Dr., 159–60

Babbage, Charles, 26, 37Bacon, Francis, 27Bagehot, Walter, 21, 22, 30Balfour, Francis, 76Ball, Sidney, 103Barnes, Harry Elmer, 9, 177Barnett, Samuel, 196 (n. 82)Bartholomew, J. G., 127Bateson, William, 46, 67–8, 69, 131,

132, 135Bauman, Zigmunt, 208 (n. 19)Beck, Naomi, 73Beveridge, William, xvi-xvii, 163, 196

(n. 82)biology, xv, 37, 71, 77–81, 85, 86–9,

96, 99, 100, 101, 110, 111, 112–13, 114

and eugenics, 46–7, 53–6, 66–9, 131, 176

social biology, xvi-xviiand social science, 72, 76, 82, 83,

85–6, 88–9, 91–7, 111–13, 125, 137, 143–4, 146, 149, 154–5, 161–2, 165, 170, 171–2, 176–7

Biometricians, 66–9Biometrika, 68Boakes, Richard, 99Boardman, Patrick, 148Boer War, 106, 131, 198 (n. 37)Booth, Charles, 1, 7, 142, 154, 159,

196 (n. 82)

Bosanquet, Bernard, 8, 102, 139, 197 (n. 20)

Bowler, Peter, 66, 173, 184 (n. 23)Bradley, F. H., 101Brandt, Karl, 80Branford, Victor, 12, 71, 95–6, 123,

124–6, 129, 139–40, 145, 161, 164, 175, 178, 206 (n. 52)

and Galton, Francis, 130–9, 145, 149–53

and Geddes, Patrick, 95–6, 123, 139, 145, 151–2, 153–4, 160–1, 175, 206 (n. 46)

and Martin White Chair of Sociology, 147–9, 165–9

and Sociological Society strategy, 127–8, 130–1, 135, 139, 145, 147, 161–2

and Welby, Lady Victoria, 126, 131–2, 133, 138, 144, 149, 150, 165, 166, 203 (n. 11), 206 (n. 43), 207 (n. 56)

and White, James Martin, 129, 150, 167–9

British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 10, 19–21, 25–30, 34–42, 58, 63, 72, 81, 83, 85

and political economy, 25–30, 34–5Section E (Geography), 93, 95Section F (Statistics and Economic

Science), 10, 19, 20, 21, 25–30, 34–42, 45, 47, 58, 82, 83, 131, 132, 171

Section H (Anthropology), 58, 61, 62Bryce, James, 129, 133, 166, 167

Caird, Edward, 101Caird, Mona, 89Cairnes, J. E., 21, 22, 29, 33, 34Campbell, Sir George, 25Cane, Sir Edmund du, 59Carnegie, Andrew, 140

Index

9780230_356160_12_ind.indd 2319780230_356160_12_ind.indd 231 11/29/2011 3:31:38 PM11/29/2011 3:31:38 PM

PROOF

232 Index

Carnegie Trust, 140–1Chadwick, Edwin, 8, 23, 37Chamberlain, Joseph, 110Chambers’ Encyclopaedia, 86Charity Organisation Society, 128, 129Chartism, 24Chicago School of Sociology, see

sociologyChubb, Hammond, 36, 37‘civics’, 11, 70, 72, 96, 139, 140,

142–4, 149, 153–60collectivism, 103, 106–7Collingwood, R. G., 103Collini, Stefan, 8, 9, 23, 99Collins, William, 170comparative psychology, see

psychologyComte, Auguste, xv, xvi, 29, 39, 40, 138

coins ‘sociology’, 3, 10Comtean positivism, 19, 20, 29, 39, 40and religion of humanity, 3, 20

Comtean positivism, see Comte, Auguste

Condorcet, Nicolas de, 138contraception, 88–9, 136, 174Corn Laws, 23counterfactual history, 13, 71, 173–7Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, 46, 49, 50Crawley, A. E., 163

Darwin, Charles, xii, xiii, 69, 81, 111, 135, 179, 193 (n. 26)

and Galton, Francis, xv, 46, 47–8, 58, 61, 65, 66

and Malthus, Thomas Robert, xvand Marx, Karl xvnatural selection, xv, 47, 73, 74, 86Origin of Species, On the (1859), 11,

47, 50, 74pangenesis, 53–6, 61, 66, 136and Spencer, Herbert, 73, 74Variation of Plants and Animals

Under Domestication, The (1868), 54, 55

Darwinism, 86, 113neo-, 13, 179social, 73, 75, 179

de Barry, Anton, 77den Otter, Sandra, 8, 9

Dear, Peter, 14Dickson, Alexander, 82Dickson, J. Hamilton, 63–4Dixon, Thomas, 73Douglas, C. M., 130Drysdale-Vickery, Alice, 136–7Durkheim, Emile, xvi, 1, 3–4, 6, 139,

140, 179, 183 (n. 12)

East India College, 27ecology, xiiEconomist, The, 21, 38Edinburgh Social Union, 90–1Ellis, Havelock, 87Encyclopaedia Britannica, 86, 87, 200

(n. 13)Endowed Schools Act, 23epistemology, see philosophyethics, see philosophyeugenics, xii-xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, 11,

174, 204–5 (n. 17)and Galton, Francis, xv, xvi, 11, 13,

45, 46, 47–51, 61, 65–6, 67, 68, 69, 70, 124, 131, 133–7, 169, 174

and Geddes, Patrick, 70, 88–9, 96, 125, 143–4, 151–2

and Hobhouse, L. T., 110, 111, 137, 166

and social policy, xvi, xvii, 46, 174, 179

and the Sociological Society, 131–9, 147, 149–53, 160, 161–2, 163, 166, 174

Eugenics Education Society, 124, 174, 205 (n. 34)

Eugenics Record Office, 174evolution, 11, 37, 71, 72, 86–9, 93,

95, 98, 100, 106–10, 112–13, 124, 142–4, 154–5, 180

debates about mechanisms of evolutionary change, 40, 65–6, 67–8, 86–90

human control of, 12, 69, 88–9, 95, 100, 112–14, 116–17, 126, 130

and philosophy, 8, 12, 99–100, 101–2, 114–19

social, 50–1, 73, 75, 86–9, 93, 98, 100, 112–13, 116, 130, 142, 154–6, 165, 178–9


PROOF

Index 233

evolutionary psychology, see psychology

FabianParty, 103socialism, xvi

Factory Acts, 22Farr, William, 35–7, 40Ferguson, Niall, 173, 184 (n. 23)Ferrier, James Frederick, 197 (28)Fisher, R. A., 174Fogel, Robert W., 207 (n. 8)Fortnightly Review, The, 29, 34, 40, 49Foster, Michael, 76, 193 (n. 24), 195

(n. 68)Foxwell, H. S., 25Fraser’s Magazine, 51Freeden, Michael, 99free trade, 23, 24Free Trade Union, 110, 119French, Steven, 173, 184 (n. 23)Fuller, Steve, 71, 99, 124–5, 147, 173,

176, 178, 180, 184 (n. 23), 208 (n. 19)

Galton, Francis, xii-xiii, xv, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 42, 45–69, 70, 96, 97, 110, 112, 117, 119, 126, 127, 146, 147, 160, 166, 170, 172, 174, 177, 175, 179, 180–2, 195 (n. 67), 205 (n. 37)

anthropometric laboratory, 61–2The Art of Travel, 47and biology, 46–7, 53–6, 66–9, 131,

176and Branford, Victor, 130–9composite photography, 59and Darwin, Charles, xv, 46, 47–8,

53–6, 58, 61, 65, 66data collection, 52–3, 58–60, 61–3eugenics, xv, xvi, 11, 13, 45, 46,

47–51, 61, 65–6, 67, 68, 69, 70, 124, 131, 133–7, 169, 174

evolutionary change, 40, 65–6‘Golden Book of Thriving Families’,

134, 139, 150, 153Hereditary Genius (1869), 51–3, 57,

62, 64and human intelligence, 15, 59–60

Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883), 60, 65–6

and law of frequency of error, 52–3, 57, 63–4

and laws of inheritance, 48, 51, 57–8, 62–3, 131, 139

Natural Inheritance (1889), 62, 64–6, 67, 70, 143

and natural selection, xv, 47normal distribution, 58, 62, 65pangenesis, 46, 53–6, 61, 66, 136and political economy, xiii, xv,

35–7, 39, 40, 47, 49–51, 58and psychology, 46, 59–60, 190

(n. 58)Record of Family Faculties (1884),

61, 62regression, 58, 63–4Research Fellowship in National

Eugenics (UCL), 151, 153, 162, 174

reversion, 54, 58and Section F (BAAS), 35–7, 38, 40,

45, 58, 131and the Sociological Society, 45, 47,

123, 131–40, 145, 149–53, 162, 165, 169

statistical methods and techniques, 36–7, 52–3, 57–8, 62, 63–4, 65, 67

‘statistics by intercomparison’, 57–8‘stirp’, 56, 189 (n. 49)supporters, 66–9and Welby, Lady Victoria, 126,

132–3, 149, 151, 152Garden Cities Movement, 142Geddes, Anna, 91, 95, 96Geddes, Arthur, 148Geddes, Patrick, xii, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15,

16, 64, 69, 70–2, 76–97, 99, 100, 120, 123, 124, 127, 146, 170, 172, 173, 174–5, 178, 179, 180–2

biology, 71, 77–81, 85, 86–9, 96biology and social science, 72, 76,

82, 83, 85–6, 88–9, 91–97, 125, 143–4, 154–5, 176–7

and Branford, Victor, 95–6, 123, 139, 145, 151–2, 153–4, 160–1, 175, 206 (n. 46)


PROOF

234 Index

Geddes, Patrick – continuedCity Development (1904), 141–2, 143,

145, 158, 196 (n. 88)‘civics’, 11, 70, 72, 96, 139, 140,

142–4, 149, 153–60Co-Operation Versus Socialism

(1888), 87Edinburgh, 11, 81–2, 89–94, 127eugenics, 70, 88–9, 96, 125, 143–4,

151–2evolution, 71, 72, 86–90, 93, 95,

142–4, 154–5Evolution (1911), 194 (n. 59), 208

(n. 18)Evolution of Sex, The (1889), 72,

87–9, 92, 144and Huxley, T. H., 76–7Life: Outlines of General Biology

(1932), 176and Martin White chair of

sociology, 147–9, 177, 204 (n. 6)museums, 93–5, 163–4‘Neotechnic’, 158–9, 163,

203 (n. 73)Outlook Tower, 93–6, 123, 127, 128,

129, 153, 159, 163‘Paleotechnic’, 158–9, 163, 203

(n. 73)‘Place-Work-Folk’, 155–7and political economy, 11, 82, 85practical projects, 90–3‘reciprocal accommodation’, theory

of, 76–81, 82, 86, 96, 144social surveys, 90–9, 141, 154, 158and the Sociological Society, 111,

127–8, 130, 140, 142–5, 147, 149, 153–60, 163–4, 165, 169, 175, 176

sociology, 82, 83, 85, 89, 96–7, 117, 142–4, 153–60, 174–7

Spencerian ideas, 72, 76, 80–1, 86–7, 89, 144, 176

symbiosis, 15, 77–81thinking machines, 155–7, 159, 194

(n. 46)and Thomson, J. Arthur, 86–9, 151–

2, 176, 194 (n. 59), 195 (n. 67)and town planning, 70–1, 141, 176and Welby, Lady Victoria, 126, 140,

144–5, 152, 153, 164, 206 (n. 43)

Giddens, Anthony, 2Giddings, Franklin, 4Giffen, Robert, 33, 36, 37Ginsberg, Morris, 179Gladstone, William, 21, 23, 34Glass, David, xviiGoldman, Lawrence, 7, 9, 23, 26Golinski, Jan, 15Gould, Stephen Jay, 192 (n. 9)Green, T. H., 101, 102–3, 170Guardian, The Manchester, 105–7, 110,

111, 166Gunn, Richard, 175

Haddon, A. C., 73, 96, 111, 128, 129, 140, 145, 161, 166–7, 168, 200 (n. 13)

Haeckel, Ernst, 77, 78, 86Haldane, H. B., 197 (n. 22)Haldane, J. S., 101Halliday, R. J., 9, 124Hamlin, Christopher, 181Harrison, Frederic, 29, 40Hartog, Joseph, 166, 206 (n. 52)Hawthorne, Geoffrey, 8Hayek, Friedrich, xviiHegel, G. F. W., 8, 101Helmholtz, Herman, 138Henry, John, 173, 184 (n. 23)Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 138heredity, 45, 48, 54–6, 59, 61, 62, 64,

66–8, 70, 136–7, 163, 188 (n. 17)human, 11, 14, 15, 61, 62, 136, 156,

204–5 (n. 17)laws of, 48, 57–8, 62–3, 67

Hill, Octavia, 90, 91Hobbes, Thomas, 6, 167, 170, 183

(n. 13)Hobhouse, Emily, 106Hobhouse, L. T., xvii, 2, 10, 12, 13, 14,

15, 73, 97, 98–120, 124, 127, 140, 146, 161, 181–2

animal intelligence, 15, 107–10, 115biology, 99, 100, 101, 110, 111,

112–13, 114collectivism, 103, 106–7comparative psychology, 99, 107–10Democracy and Reaction (1904), 98,

111–12, 113, 114


PROOF

Index 235

Hobhouse, L. T. – continuedethics, 114–19, 124eugenics, 110, 111, 137, 166evolutionary development, 98, 100,

106–10, 112–13Fabian socialism, 198 (n. 37)and Green, T. H., 103–4, 170–1Guardian, The Manchester, 105–7,110, 111, 119importance to British sociology,

172–7, 179–80inaugural address as Martin White

Professor of Sociology, 170–2Labour Movement, The (1893), 103,

107, 116, 198 (n. 37)and liberalism, 99, 103, 110Liberalism (1911), 99Martin White chair of sociology,

119–20, 123–4, 147–9, 165–9, 170–2, 177

Mind in Evolution (1901), 99, 100, 107–10, 111, 113, 114

Morals in Evolution (1906), 12, 100, 114–19, 161, 165

New Liberalism, 99and Oxford University, 12, 99,

100–5and Parsons, Talcott, 6philosophy, 8, 12, 103–5, 110political philosophy, 99, 103,

113, 117relationship between biology and

sociology, 100, 111–13, 137, 146, 149, 161–2, 165, 170, 171–2, 177

social evolution, 112–13, 114–17, 165

and the Sociological Society, 111, 123, 124, 128, 130, 137, 140, 147, 160, 161–2, 165, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174

sociology, 98, 99, 100, 110, 114, 116–17, 170–2

Spencerian ideas, 100, 101, 110, 114–15, 119

Theory of Knowledge, The (1896), 103–4, 107, 110, 114

and Welby, Lady Victoria, 115, 126, 149, 165, 199 (n. 81)

Hobson, J. A., 99

Hogben, Lancelot, xvi-xviiHoward, Ebenezer, 142Hume, David, 91, 101, 104Husbands, Christopher, 71, 124–5,

147, 178Huxley, T. H., 3, 11, 45, 69, 70, 72, 81

and Geddes, Patrick, 76–7relationship between evolution and

society, 76–7, 193 (n. 26)and Spencer, Herbert, 75, 76, 193

(n. 26)

Independent Review, 117Ingram, J. K., 10, 19–20, 21, 38–42,

72, 82, 85, 96Comtean positivism, 20, 39, 40political economy, 19–20, 38–40sociology, 19–20, 38–40

International Congress of Hygiene and Demography, 69

International Health Exhibition (1884), 61–2

International Journal of Ethics, 106, 114Irish Statistical Society, 19

James, William, 96Jevons, W. Stanley, 23, 31–2, 33–4,

35, 37Jones, Richard, 27–8, 29, 30, 31, 185

(n. 31)Joule, James Prescott, 138Journal of the Anthropological Institute

of Great Britain and Ireland, 59Journal of the Statistical Society of

London, see Statistical Society of London

Kant, Immanuel, 8, 101Kent, Raymond, 7Kidd, Benjamin, 130, 200 (n. 13)Kings College London, 23, 27Kropotkin, Peter, 91

laissez-faire, see political economyLamarck, Jean-Baptiste, xiii, 74L’Année sociologique, 4Le Play, Frédéric, 72, 92–3, 155, 156,

157Leslie, Thomas Edward Cliffe, 31, 34


PROOF

236 Index

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 139liberalism, 105–6

neo-, xivNew, 99

Liberal Party, 102, 105–6Loch, Charles, 128, 200 (n. 13)Locke, John, xiv, 6, 101, 104London School of Economics, xii, xvi,

2, 6, 12, 99, 133, 135, 139, 141, 153, 154, 163, 170, 171, 172

Martin White Chair of Sociology, 2, 99, 119–20, 123–4, 125, 147–9, 168–9, 175

Lowe, Robert, 21, 23, 24, 34, 40–1, 47

MacKenzie, Donald, 46, 49, 50Mackenzie, J. S., 104Macleod, Henry Dunning, 29, 30, 34Macmillan’s Magazine, 48, 51, 69Malinowski, Bronislaw, 6Malthus, Thomas Robert, xiv, 22, 23,

27, 87, 111Malthusian League, 136Marshall, Alfred, 23, 25, 103Martin White Benefaction, 129, 153,

161, 166, 168Committee, 129, 168

Martin White Chair of Sociology, 2, 99, 119–20, 123–4, 147–9, 165–9, 175, 177, 203 (n. 4), 204 (n. 6)

Marx, Karl, xiv, xv, xvi, 5, 6–7, 183 (n. 9)

Maudsley, Henry, 136Mavor, James, 91Mawson, T. H., 140Mayr, Ernst, 73McDougall, William, 163, 207 (n. 56)Mead, George Herbert, 3Meller, Helen, 71Mendel, Gregor, 66Mendelians, 66–9Menger, Carl, 31Mill, James, 22, 23Mill, John Stuart, xvi, 23, 30–1, 32,

49, 101, 104, 167Mills, C. Wright, 4Mind, 60, 104, 190 (n. 62), 202 (n. 58)Moore, G. E., 102, 117Morgan, Llloyd, 96, 107

Moseley, H. N., 80Mumford, Lewis, 175–7, 192 (n. 6),

194 (n. 46), 194–5 (n. 59), 207–8 (n. 18), 208 (n. 19)

National Association for the Promotion of the Social Sciences (Social Science Association), 23, 30, 40, 132, 186 (n. 61)

national efficiency movement, 111, 113

Naturalismphilosophical, 102, 117–19scientific, 8, 56, 76, 193 (n. 26)

naturalistic fallacy, see philosophynatural selection, xv, 47, 65, 73, 74,

86, 137, 171Nature, 55, 57, 80, 84, 88, 150, 202

(n. 39)neo-Darwinism, see DarwinismNeurath, Otto, xviNineteenth Century, The, 40, 59North, Douglass, 207 (n. 8)

Origin of Species, On the (1859), see Darwin, Charles

Pareto, Wilfredo, 3Park, Robert, 1Parsons, Talcott, 6, 9, 177, 183 (n. 9),

183 (n. 11)Pearson, Karl, xiii, 37, 46, 53, 67–8,

69, 113, 131, 132, 133, 135, 138, 152, 174, 195 (n. 67)

Penrose, Lionel, 174philosophical naturalism, see

naturalism; philosophyphilosophy, 8, 115, 126

analytic, 102, 119, 197 (n. 12), 199 (n. 81)

empiricism, 101, 104epistemology, 104, 197 (n. 28)ethics, 114–19and evolution, 8, 12, 99–100,

101–2, 114–19idealism, 101–3, 104, 171naturalism, 102, 117–19naturalistic fallacy, 117–19of history, 171


PROOF

Index 237

philosophy – continuedpolitical, 99, 101, 102–3, 113, 117,

170–1and psychology, 190 (n. 58)and science, 101–2, 104of science, 27and sociology, 8, 117–19utilitarian, 22

phrenology, 190 (n. 58)Playfair, Leon, 33, 50political economy, xiii, 19, 23, 81, 87

and British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), 25–30, 35–42

and business community, 20, 21, 23, 25

classical, 10, 11, 16, 20–1, 22–5, 28, 29, 30–2, 33, 34, 39, 41, 49–51, 58, 102, 105, 184 (n. 9)

and Comtean positivism, 29, 39–42deduction, 27–8, 29, 39–40, 171‘economic man’, 49and the economy in Victorian

Britain, 22–3, 24–5, 33and eugenics, 49–51free trade, 23, 24and government, 21, 22–5, 33historical, 27–8, 31, 33, 171induction, 27–8laissez-faire, 21, 22, 23, 33, 73marginal revolution, 31–2mercantalism, 23methodology, 20, 26–8, 29, 39and political debate, 22–3, 24protectionism, 24and sociology, 19–20, 35–42,

131–2, 170, 171and universities, UK, 23, 185 (n. 13)wages-fund doctrine, 22, 30–1,

32, 49Political Economy Club of London,

23, 34, 70political philosophy, see philosophyPoor Laws, 22Price, Bonamy, 30protectionism, 24psychology, 46, 59–60, 110, 167, 190

(n. 58)comparative, 99, 107–10

evolutionary, xii, 178social, 161, 166, 167

Quetelet, Adolphe, 26, 37, 52

Radick, Gregory, 73, 99, 100, 173, 184 (n. 23)

Reform Act, Second, 24, 32, 50Regional Planning Association of

America, 175Reid, G. Archdall, 163‘religion of humanity’, 3, 20Ricardo, David, xiii-xiv, 21, 23, 25,

29, 31and classical political economy, 22,

25, 184 (n. 9)and historical political economy, 31Principles of Political Economy (1817),

xiiiRicardianism, 27, 31

Richards, Robert J., 73Ritchie, D. G., 8, 102Rivers, W. H. R., 73Robertson, J. M., 130, 143, 144Rogers, James E. Thorold, 31Rowntree, Seebohm, 7Royal Institution, 58, 59Royal Society of Edinburgh, 82–3,

85, 87Royal Society of London, 55, 68, 132Royal Statistical Society, see Statistical

Society of LondonRoyer, Clémence, xiiiRücker, Sir Arthur, 129, 151, 170Runciman, W. G., 13, 178–9Ruse, Michael, 73Russell, Bertrand, 102, 117–19, 199 (n. 81)

Saint-Simon, Henri, xiSchool of Sociology and Social

Economics, 129, 201 (n. 18)Schuster, Edgar, 153, 162, 205 (n. 37)Schwendener, Simon, 77scientific naturalism, see naturalismScott, C. P., 105, 110Scott, John, 71, 124–5, 147, 178Scottish Leader, The, 70Secord, James, 15Senior, Nassau, 27, 37


PROOF

238 Index

Seth, James, 114sex, 86–9Shapin, Steven, 14Shaw, George Bernard, 135, 152, 198

(n. 37)Shils, Edward, 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 173, 183

(n. 14)Sidgwick, Arthur, 105Sidgwick, Henry, 29, 30–1, 32Simmel, Georg, 1, 3Singer, Peter, xvSlaughter, J. W., 161, 166–7, 168,

206–7 (n. 56)Small, Albion, 4Smith, Adam, 21, 22, 24, 170, 171

centenary of Wealth of Nations (1776), 21, 34

classical political economy, 22, 184 (n. 9)

social anthropology, see social anthropology

social biology, see biologysocial Darwinism, see Darwinismsocial evolution, see evolutionsocialism, 87, 99

and biology, xviFabian, xvi, 198 (n. 37)

social organicism, 102–3social psychology, see psychologySocial Science Association, see

National Association for the Promotion of the Social Sciences

sociobiology, xvii, 178Sociological Papers, 111, 130, 161, 164,

165, 169, 172Sociological Review, The, 2, 123, 125,

169, 172, 173, 175, 177Sociological Society, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14,

16, 20, 45, 69, 70, 72, 96, 100, 111, 119–20, 123–46, 147–69, 170, 172, 175, 176, 180, 181

civics, 142–5, 147, 154–60, 161, 163–4, 166

council of, 111, 130, 160, 161, 162, 165eugenics, 131–9, 147, 149–53, 160,

161–2, 163, 166, 174foundation of, 127–8, 130funding, 129, 140, 148, 150, 151,

167, 200 (n. 15)

and the University of London, 129–30, 140, 161–2, 164

Sociology, 85in America, 1, 4Chicago school, 4classical, 2, 3–5, 6–7, 183 (n. 7), 183

(n. 9)Comtean positivism, 3, 20, 29and economics, 1, 6empirical tradition, UK, 2, 6, 7–8environmental, 71and eugenics, 123, 174in France, 1, 4and Galton, Francis, 45, 47, 123,

131–40, 149–53, 174and Geddes, Patrick, 82, 83, 85, 89,

96–7, 117, 142–4, 153–60, 174–7in Germany, 1, 4, 183 (n. 8)and governments, 7–8, 184 (n. 17)historiography of, 1–10, 173, 177–9and Hobhouse, L. T., 98, 99, 100,

110, 114, 116–17, 170–2national traditions, 1, 3–5neo-Darwinism, 13, 179origins, 3–5and philosophy, 8, 117–19and political economy in Britain,

19–21, 38–42, 81–6and social anthropology, 1, 8in the UK, perceptions of, 1–2, 5–9,

173and universities, UK, 7–8, 129

Speaker, The, 130, 199 (n. 57)Spencer, Herbert, xvi, 3, 5, 11, 15, 59,

72, 73–6, 81, 101, 104, 109, 110, 114–15, 116, 192 (n. 9)

biology, 73, 74and Darwin, Charles, 73, 74ethics, 75, 119evolutionary philosophy, 73–5First Principles, 73–4, 104and Huxley, T. H., 75, 76, 193 (n.

26)and philosophy, 102Principles of Biology, The (1884–7),

74, 76Principles of Ethics, The

(1879–93), 75and sociology, 20


PROOF

Index 239

Spencer, Herbert – continuedSynthetic Philosophy, 12,

73–5, 100, 114, 194 (n. 46), 197 (n. 16)

Spottiswoode, William, 52Statistical and Social Inquiry Society

of Ireland, 19Statistical Society of London (Royal

Statistical Society), 7, 28, 35–6, 38, 83, 110, 128

Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 38

Statistical Society of Manchester, 7statistics, 27–8, 36–7, 45, 81,

82–3, 85and evolution, 62–9Galton’s data collecting activities,

52–3, 58–60, 61–3Galton’s statistical methods and

techniques, 52–3, 57–8, 62, 63–4, 65, 67

law of frequency of error, 52–3, 57, 63–4

methods, 37, 46, 52, 62–4, 83normal distribution, 58, 62, 65regression, 58, 63–4vital, 8, 37

Studholme, Maggie, 71, 124–5, 147, 178

Sykes, William, 29symbiosis, 15, 77–81

Taunton Commission, 23Tawney, R. H., 6, 183 (n. 12)Thomasson, Franklin, 119Thomson, J. Arthur, 86–9, 96, 151–2,

163, 194 (n. 59)Thorndike, Edward, 107, 108Thornton, William T., 34Times, The, 19, 40, 61Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1, 3, 4, 140, 202

(n. 58), 204–5 (n. 17)Tooke, Thomas, 37Topham, Jonathan, 15Toynbee Hall, 103, 129, 196

(n. 82)trades unions, 30, 32, 103transhumanism, xiiiTribune, The, 119

UNESCO, 179University College London, xiii, 21,

23, 67, 113, 161, 165–7, 174, 206 (n. 52)

University of London, 111, 115, 129–30, 140, 151, 152, 161–2, 164, 165–9, 170, 174

utilitarianism, 22, 158utopianism, xv, 76

Vico, Giambattista, 138

wages-fund doctrine, see political economy

Wallas, Graham, 102Walras, Leon, 31Ward, Lester, 111Wealth of Nations (1776), see Smith,

AdamWebb, Beatrice, xii, xvi, 1, 8, 20, 163,

198 (n. 37)Webb, Sidney, xii, xvi, 8, 198 (n. 37)Weber, Max, xvi, 3, 4, 5, 6, 179, 183 (n.

8), 183 (n. 9), 183 (n. 11), 183 (n. 12)Weismann, August, 81, 189 (n. 49),

192 (n. 9)Welby, Lady Victoria, 115, 126, 127,

132, 137–8, 139, 144, 147, 150, 202 (n. 58), 204 (n. 17)

and Branford, Victor, 126, 131–2, 133, 138, 144, 149, 150, 165, 166, 203 (n. 11), 206 (n. 43), 207 (n. 56)

and Galton, Francis, 126, 132–3, 149, 151, 152

and Geddes, Patrick, 126, 140, 144–5, 152, 164, 206 (n. 43)

and Hobhouse, Leonard, 115, 126, 149, 165, 199 (n. 81)

part played in crucial developments at Sociological Society, 126, 149, 151, 152

philosophy, 126, 202 (n. 58)‘significs’, 126

Weldon, W. F. R., 46, 67–8, 69, 131, 132, 135, 136, 152, 153

Wells, H. G., 130, 135, 136, 152, 164Welter, Volker, 71Westermarck, Edward, 111, 140, 164,

166–7, 168, 207 (n. 58)


PROOF

240 Index

Weymouth, E. S., 160Whewell, William, 26–7, 29

and political economy, 27, 28, 30and Section F (BAAS), 26, 27, 38

White, James Martin, 89, 95, 127, 128, 129, 164, 167–8, 195 (n. 80), 200 (n. 13), 206 (n. 52)

funding for Sociological Society, 129, 140, 148, 150, 151, 167, 200 (n. 15)

and Martin White Chair of Sociology at LSE, 148, 167–8

Whitehouse, J. H., 141Wilson, E. O, xvii, 178Wright, Sewall, 73

Young, Robert, 73

Zueblin, Charles, 93


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