17TH CENTURY
1601
Elizabethan Poor
Law
under which each
parish was responsible for looking after its own poor.
Mental Health and the Poor Law
1603 Death of Elizabeth 1. James 6 of Scotland became
James 1 of England
5.11.1605 Gunpowder plot: Attempt to assassinate James.
(Wikipedia)
21.3.1610 Speech to Parliament in which king James said
"kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon
God's
throne, but even by God himself they are called gods".
(external link)
1611 Official (King James or Authorised) version of the
Bible in
English published. [See 393]
The Bible story is largely chronological -
beginning
with
the genesis of the world
and ending with divine
revelation of its end.
It provided the framework for many historical explanations of
nature and
society. Usher gave it
precise
dates. For generations this book, more then any
other, provided
the English speaking peoples with poetry, history, religion,
politics,
ethics, names, imagery and visions, as well as a framework for
natural and
social science. Its
downfall as the
basis of science in the 19th century was a cultural
cataclysm. However, the Bible, critically read, continued to be
a major source of material for emerging social sciences such as
anthropology.
1613 Francisco de Suarez, a Spanish Catholic
theologian,
published Defensio Fidei Catholicae, criticising
James
1st's theory
of the divine right of kings. Saurez's book was
burned in
London.
1614 In France, the
Queen Regent called the States
General (a
representative body like the English parliament) together in
an effort to
counter the power of the nobility. It was dismissed in 1615,
and did not
meet again until 1789
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ENGLISH CIVIL WAR
November 1642 English civil war began between
Charles 1st and
parliament over the power of each.
1643
Filmer arrested by
Parliamentary
forces
and kept for
several months in Leeds Castle, Kent. It is not clear how much
of 1643-1647
he was imprisoned, but he was at liberty in 1647
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In 1644 the seven General Baptist churches issued the
London
Confession which said that men must be allowed to obey
their own
conscience and understanding. In 1647
George Fox
(Quaker)
began preaching
under the conviction of the "inner light". The civil war, and
the
republican Commonwealth that followed it, were a period of
intense
religious ferment, individual thought and social disorder.
Knowledge by the
inner inspiration of God was known as
"enthusiasm".
Locke's Essay on Understanding
(1690) sought to establish science as a common
knowledge that
could control the divisiveness of enthusiasm.
1646 In Paris
Hobbes
became
mathematical
tutor to the exiled
Prince of Wales (later Charles 2nd)
May 1646 King Charles 1st surrenders himself to the Scottish
Covenanters, who ally with the English Parliament in the summer. He is
still King - But from now on he is a king under duress. From June 1646 he
was held by the army. He is still free enough (in prison on the Isle of
Wight) to initiate a new civil war by a concluding a military alliance with
the Scottish Covenanters that threatened the English Parliament -
1647/1648.
(See Open University Civil War Timeline)
1647/1648 The
Westminster Confession: An official document (no longer official
in England after
1660) specifying the
Bible as a foundation of belief superior to (though not,
presumably, contradicted by) nature. [External link to
Michael Marlow's introduction]
1648
Filmer published political
pamphlets
in
support of
absolute
monarchy and the
divine right of king's
|
1648 Peace of Westphalia - It is argued that the peace treaties
recognised the territorial integrity of nation states.
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30.1.1649 Execution of Charles 1st.
Abolition of the monarchy and the House of Lords in
England.
Commonwealth established. Under the Commonwealth
Filmer lost some of his
property as a result of his loyalty to the king
1650
Rene Descartes died
Between 1650 and 1654, James Usher's Annales Veteris at
Novi
Testamenti (years of the old and new testaments) dated the
events in
the Bible. The
creation was
fixed as taking place in
4,004 BC.
Usher's dates
were not only printed in the
margins of many Bibles, but were accepted as scientific for a
long time.
End of 1651
Hobbes returned to England
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1653
20.4.1653 Oliver Cromwell, Commander in Chief of the
Parliamentary
Army, dissolved Parliament.
30.5.1653 Sir Robert
Filmer died
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16.12.1653 Oliver Cromwell became Lord Protector under
a
constitution that combined his rule with a Parliament.
1654 Community care under the Old Poor Law
RESTORATION and ROYAL SOCIETY
1660 Restoration of English monarchy under Charles
2nd, who
attempted to unify
the country around a common religion. Charles landed at Dover on
25.5.1660 (Pepys). From then to
1662 there was a period attempting to include moderate puritans
(not baptists, ranters and quakers)
in the established church.
28.11.1660 Meeting that decided to start a "College for
the
Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning" which
led to the
"The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge"
(the Royal
Society).
John Locke became a member 26.11.1668.
Isaac
Newton became a
member 11.1.1672.
Thomas Hobbes did not become a member.
Trailblazing timeline 1650-2005 To celebrate the
350th anniversary in 2010 - Articles published by the Royal
Society.
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1662
Act of
Uniformity
Act of
Settlement
said one acquired a right to relief in a
parish by being born there, married there or serving an
apprenticeship
there. Adam Smith later
(1776)
criticized
this
Act
for interfering with the mobility of labour.
1662: Simon Patrick in Brief account of the new sect of Latitude
Men, together with some reflections on the New Philosophy argues that
the mechanical idea of the world will mend a clock, but the
scholastic will not. A
fashionable version of the mechanical philosophy is that everything is the
result of the inter-action of atoms. There was a hope (soon to be
disappointed) that
microscopes would reveal this. - See external link
Atomism in the 17th century
1662 Anonymous publication of The Port Royal Logic:
La logique,
ou l'art de penser (logic or the art of thinking), by
Antoine Arnauld
(1612-1694) and Pierre Nicole (1623-1695) of the Jansenist
convent of Port
Royal just outside Paris. Written in everyday French, and
translated into
everyday English and other modern languages, it popularised
"the art of
using reason well in the acquisition of the knowledge of
things".
(See Mill A System of
Logic)
1673 The first of the letters from Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-
1723) to the Royal Society, in which he described what he saw through his
single lens magnifier
(microscope). Amongst the small living things he looked at were
sperm, blood cells,
bacteria, algae (spirogyra) and protozoa (vorticella).
See
external link
1685 James 2nd English king. He tried to enforce
Catholic
toleration.
November/December 1688 Glorious Revolution: William and Mary
(protestants) were
invited to become king and queen by the English parliament.
James 2nd fled
to France. - Constitutional
monarchy - The monarch having been selected by parliament, under
conditions laid down by parliament,
Divine Right
ceased to be the legitimating argument for monarchy. Legitimacy could be
built on the consensual grounds of theorists such as
John Locke. This secular (non-religious) base reduced the need
for all loyal subjects to be members of the established church.
1689 Bill of
Rights and
Act of Toleration
1697 Britain began to keep records of the gap between
its imports
and its exports (the "balance of trade"). When nations kept
figures from
year to year
(time
series)
in economics, weather or whatever, it made
possible the
production of graphs
like the following which shows the British balance of
trade from 1697 to 1925. Click on the picture to read the
article by James
Galbraith from which the graph comes.
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*********
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19TH CENTURY
1800-1828
Robert
Owen
ran a model factory community at
New
Lanark in Scotland, demonstrating, he thought, that people
respond to good
treatment by becoming good people. This was a refutation in
practice of
Malthusian
pessimism.
Monday 10.3.1801: First British Census
The censuses of 1801, 1811, 1821 and
1831 were purely
numerical.
Names were first recorded in
1841. 1801
recorded the
number of people in each parish, the inhabited and uninhabited
houses, and
classified occupations into agriculture, manufacturing,
commerce and
handicrafts.
Population of England and Wales: 8,893,000; Scotland:
1,608,000
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October 1801 Having established the preliminaries of
peace with
the British, Bonaparte began preparation for a military
expedition to Haiti
to restore white rule. War between French forces and
Toussaint.
Autumn 1803 French forced to evacuate Haiti by the
black led
armies
1804
Immanuel Kant died
1.1.1804 First ever black republic established.
Called Haiti as
it had been before European conquest.
May 1804 Napoleon became Emperor.
8.10.1804 The black leader of Haiti, Dessalines,
crowned himself
emperor as Jean Jacques 1st.
1805
Thomas Malthus became the first
Professor of
Political
Economy
1806
20.5.1806 John Stuart
Mill, co-author of
the future of the
labouring classes, born. (early
life)
Harriet Taylor was born 10.10.1807 (life and
ideas).
October 1806, Napoleon won the
battle of Jena against the Prussians. Hegel described him as
"the soul of
the
world"
1807
25.3.1807 British Parliament prohibited slave trade. (1807 Abolition
of the Slave Trade Act
became law) -
National Archives weblink -
Wikipedia
1808: John Dalton's A New System of Chemical
Philosophy
argued that all
matter consists of a range of elemental atoms (indivisible
particles) each
of which has a distinct atomic weight. The chemical
combination of
different atoms in different proportions producing substances
qualitatively
different from each other - although the constituent atoms
remain the same.
The experimental power of this theory (related to the
calculation of
weights) laid the foundations of modern
chemistry - And put an end to any idea that qualities can only
be explained
as a result of the merging of constituent qualities.
(external link)
a precise and
beautiful
theory
1808 Charles Fouriere
Théorie des quatre mouvements
et des destinées générales -
(Theory of the Four Movements and General Destinies)
"As a general thesis: Social progress and
historic changes occur by virtue of the progress of women toward liberty,
and decadence of the social order occurs as the result of a decrease in the
liberty of women."
(external source) -
(Compare with John Stuart Mill)
1809 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's
Philosophie zoologique, ou exposition des considérations
relatives à l'histoire naturelle des animaux. (Zoological
Philosophy. An Exposition with
Regard to the Natural History of Animals) - One of the books in which
Lamarck set out his theory of
evolution. -
External link to extracts in English
1810
12.2.1810 French
Code pénal de 1810
March 1811: Percy Byshee Shelley, a young aristocrat, expelled
from Oxford
University for publishing a pamphlet on The Necessity of
Atheism and
challenging the clergy to debate it with him. In the following
years he
distributed pamphlets to the working class calling for
revolution in the
cause of liberty, equality and justice.
The first two volumes of Barthold Georg Niebuhr's Römische
Geschichte (Roman History) were published in Berlin in 1811-1812. The
full three volume set was published in Berlin between 1811 and 1832. They
were translated into English from 1827 onwards.
1812
1812 to 1814 Robert Owen wrote his four
Essays on the Formation of Human Character
1813
1813 Humphry Davy engaged Michael Farady as his assistant at
the Royal
Institution and entrusted him with performing the experiments
which led to
the condensation of gases into liquids by pressure.
First edition of
James Cowles Prichard's
Researches into the Physical History of Man
1815 Corn Law. During the Napoleonic Wars farmers
flourished
because corn from abroad could not undercut their prices. Once
the war was
over foreign corn could come in and bring down the price of
corn. To
protect the rents of the landed aristocracy Parliament passed
the Corn Law
(repealed 1846)
which put taxes on imported corn.
This rise in the price of
the people's
staple food coincided with a period of widespread poverty and
unemployment,
following the end of the war. The cost of poor relief soared,
leading to a
movement to reform the Poor Laws
18.8.1816 The Observer reported a project in
which a balloon
the
shape of a dolphin, powered by steam and with wings that would
act as
rudders would "carry the nobility and gentry to Paris, and
subsequently
elsewhere" in ten hours or less. [I do not know what
happened]. Balloons
for flight, carrying humans, had been demonstrated in France
in
1783, and used by Napoleon as military observation
platforms.
1817 Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy
and
Taxation published. People, like
Malthus
and Ricardo, who wanted to abolish any
form of poor relief were known as the Abolitionists. They
argued that poor
relief perverted the market, undermined incentive, reduced the
mobility of
labour and encouraged overpopulation. Such arguments were at
the strongest
about 1817. Between 1817 and 1834, when the
Poor Law Amendment
Act
was passed, they were modified considerably.
Wealth and Poverty: Malthus and
Ricardo
1818
1819 Our Village sketches by Mary Mitford in The Lady's
Magazine. Idyllic pictures of an English village, its cottages and
gardens and village green. Book form 1824 - 1826 - 1828 - 1830 - 1832.
John Clare's Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery was
published in 1820 and his The Village Minstrel, and Other Poems in
1821.
16.8.1819 Peterloo. Troops fired on demonstrators in
Manchester.
(External Link- Spartacus
schoolnet)
JAMES MILL'S ESSAY ON GOVERNMENT
1820
James
Mill's
Essay on
Government
first
published in
the supplement to the Encyclopedia Brittanica. See
1825
Monday 28.5.1821:
Third
British Census
Population of England and Wales: 12,000,000; Scotland:
2,092,000
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1822
John Stuart Mill
and his
friends formed a Utilitarian
Society (broken up 1826).
Utilitarianism
was the dominant theory of Social Science in nineteenth
century Britain. It
was challenged by the French Sociologist,
Emile Durkheim,
in the 1890s.
1823: Charles Babbage built a mechanical
computing device
considerably more complex than an
abacus.
David Ricardo died
1824
German historian
Franz Leopold Ranke (21.12.1795 -23.5.1886) wrote that
rather than "judging the past" would seek "only to show what actually
happened" (wie es eigentlich gewesen)
1824
Comte
and
Saint-Simon
fell out over the way
Comte's
Systeme de Politique Positive was to be
presented in Saint-
Simon's Catechism Des Industriels
The Athenaeum club for leading artistic, literary and scientific men and
for patrons of the arts and sciences was founded in 1824.
Michael Faraday was secretary, and Humphry Davy chairman. The
Athenaeum literary and scientific periodical was first published in
1828.
1825
James
Mill's Essay on
Government
(1820)
distributed in a free edition with other
essays. William
Thompson's Appeal on
Behalf of Women
written in collaboration with
Anna
Wheeler
criticised this essay.
. Thompson and Wheeler were
Irish Owenites who developed socialist theories from
Benthamism. See
Radicals, Socialists and Early
Feminists and
Thompson and Wheeler weblinks
December 1825: Two Lombard Street (London) banks failed
with
consequent failures of country banks. Over one hundred banks
failed in a
few weeks. The bank crisis was stabilised by greater reliance
on gold, but
this was the start of the first world wide economic
depression.
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John Stuart Mill's melancholy winter of 1826/1827. Autobiography paragraphs
5.2c -
5.6
30.4.1827 A foundation stone laid in Gower Street of
what became
London University, the first "godless" university in England.
Although many
who supported it were very religious, the University was
founded on the
principle that religious tests would not be required of staff
or students.
For the first time, dissenters and jews (in particular) could
study for a
degree without travelling to Scotland or continental Europe.
(external link) - The first academic sessions
started in October 1828 - On 28.11.1836 the university, renamed University
College, was united with King's College as the University of London. King's
College was a rival university founded by the established church. The North
London Hospital was opened opposite the university in 1834. It became
University College Hospital in 1837. See
1840s -
1846 -
1869 -
1871 -
1878
Michael Farady succeeded Humphry Davy in the chair of
Chemistry at the
Royal Institution. He published the first edition of
Chemical
Manipulation
1828 John Stuart Mill established contacts with
Saint-Simonians
at the London Debating Society.
1829
Thomas Babington Macaulay's review of James Mill's
Essay
on Government criticised it for using
deduction
rather
than
induction.
John Stuart Mill read Comte for
the first time.
Robert Owen returned to England to find he is a guru of
the labour
movement.
May 1829: The British Association for Promoting
Cooperative Knowledge
founded in London.
1830: Revolution in France - Marx identified the revolution of
1830 with the
class victory of finance capital.
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Swing Riots in England.
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1830 was the end of the Liverpool Tory Government (The
only English
government to last longer than Mrs
Thatcher's).
1830: Royal Geographic Society founded. It
incorporated the
African Society (founded in 1788), in 1831. From 1830 to
1840 it met
in the
rooms of the Horticultural Society.
[external link to history]. The
National
Geographic
Society of
the United States was founded in 1888.
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1831
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Monday 30.5.1831:
Fourth
British Census
Population of England and Wales: 13,897,000; Scotland:
2,364,000
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September 1831 British Association for the
Advancement of
Science founded. A brief (pdf) history on the
British Association's website
implied that an
objective was to make science more open, and less elitist. The
focus of the
Association's activities was its Annual Meeting "which was an
important
forum for major scientific announcements and debate". - There is now
a web brief history.
Major scientific announcements the brief history lists are
"Joule's experiments on the mechanical equivalent of heat in the
1840s, Bessemer's steel process
(1856), the discovery of the first of the inert gases, argon, by
Rayleigh and Ramsay
(1894), the first public demonstration of wireless transmission
over a few hundred yards by Sir Oliver Lodge
(1894), and J. J. Thomson's discovery of the electron
(1899)." It also mentions the debate on
Darwin's theory in
1860. As can be seen, the
emphasis is on the natural sciences, and the new
statistical section (1835) was told not to be political.
The Spirit of the Age
Georg Friedrich
Hegel, the philosopher of history as the
development of ideas, died in Germany in 1831.
German
"idealism" and French
"positivism"
provided English speakers with alternative approaches to
social science to
utilitarianism.
John Stuart Mill's articles on the
Spirit of the Age (1831) showed the influence of
Saint-Simon
in his
explanation of the way different ideas fit different periods
of history.
Mill was a utilitarian arguing that there is a cultural
difference in what
gives pleasure. He adapted utilitarianism to the philosophy of
history.
Thomas Carlyle argued against utilitarianism in a fiction
called Sartor
Resartus (Latin for "clothes maker repaired"), which he
wrote in 1831
(published later). This argued for a social science based on
the analysis
of symbols. Clothes are typical social symbols. We are
naturally naked, but
in society we use clothes to convey meaning to one another.
Although the
movement of planets may be described on the model of a
machine, Carlyle
said social science requires the analysis of meanings.
Religion had
provided this, but, like old clothes, it no longer fits. The
times require
new clothes. Utilitarianism will not do, because it removes
the
significance of symbolic meanings, reducing them all to
degrees of pain and
pleasure in an effort to imitate the machine model used by
physics.
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1832
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In 1832 a Whig Government passed a
Parliamentary Reform
Act. This did not add many voters, but it spread
the vote more
evenly over
the country. There was a marked shift in the balance of power
from the
landed aristocracy to the urban middle classes.
Jeremy Bentham died.
He left his body to medical science and you can still visit
his corpse at
the University of London.
Royal Commission on the Poor Laws appointed. It
reported in 1834
1832 Michael Faraday (England) Joseph Henry (USA) reported their
separate conversion of electricity into magnetism and back into
electricity, Faraday sent a current through a coil of wires,
creating a magnetic field which induced a momentary current in a second
coil. This discovery of electromagnetic induction led to the development of
electric motors, generators and dynamos.
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1833
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Emancipation of Slaves: In August 1833, the British
Parliament
passed an Act prohibiting slavery in British colonies. This
Act came into
force on Friday 1.8.1834,
which was treated as a day of celebration by the people of
Britain. As in
France in 1794,
the
common people of the slave-owning country identified with the
freedom of
the slaves. This is how the novel John Halifax,
Gentleman (D.M.
Craik, 1856) described the celebrations:
"what a soft, gray, summer morning it was, and how it broke
out into
brightness; how everywhere bells were ringing, club
fraternities walking
with bands and banners, school-children having feasts and
work-people
holidays."
Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar was published in Berlin in six part
in 1833, 1835, 1842, 1847, 1849 and 1852. The full title being
Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen,
Litauischen, Gotischen und Deutschen (Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit,
Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic and German). It is the comparative
study of languages that is thought of as the origin of scientific as
distinct from literary philology and linguistics.
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Statistical
Societies
formed
Members of the
British Association for the Advancement
of Science,
meeting at Cambridge in the summer of 1833, formed a
statistical
section. - See
history on website of the
Royal Statistical Society). The Belgian mathematician
Quetelet was invited and presented a paper on the
relationship between the statistics of
crime and age in France and Belgium to a small private meeting
which included Thomas
Malthus and
Charles Babbage. Crime statistics were figures that European
states
had only recently begun to generate.
State generated numbers opened a bright new window through which
society could be looked at scientifically. Babbage proposed a statistical
section of the British Association (section F) and this was agreed on the
condition that it was non-political.
Manchester Statistical Society was established before
the end of
1833.
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1834
|
The Statistical Society of London, which had been projected at
Cambridge,
was established in the spring of 1834, and
"since that time the pursuit of this science has extended very
rapidly".
Journal of the
Statistical
Society of London,
Vol.1, no.1 May 1838 p.4
The decision to found was made at a meeting at Babbage's house on
21.2.1834 and the society held its first meeting within two weeks,
setting down its aims as 'the collection and classification of all facts
illustrative of the present condition and prospects of society, especially
as it exists in the British Dominions'. The Council was elected at a
meeting on 3.5.1834.
(web brief history).
1834 POOR
LAW
1834 Poor
Law
Amendment
Act. By this Act a Poor Law
Commission was created to regulate the poor law centrally.
Under its
influence local authorities were encourage to build workhouses
and to
refuse poor people any welfare payments unless they left their
home and
lived in the workhouse. The Act was hated by the working class
who called
workhouses the English "Bastilles". To erect some workhouses
the government
had to provide an army guard. Malthusianism was blamed for the
New Poor
Law. So evil were its motives thought to be that many thought
they would be
poisoned in the workhouse to control population.
See Social Science History, chapter five:
Social Science and the 1834 Poor Law
The Theories that Smith, Bentham, Malthus and Owen
made
England's Poor Law
Commissioners
and the Trade in Pauper Lunacy 1834-1847
and
Mental Health, for the effect of the Act on
the growth
of asylums.
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1835
|
The first volume of Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in
America
published in French. The second volume was published in 1840.
John Stuart
Mill wrote a review in The Edinburgh Review, vol 72,
1840.
Tocqueville's Recollections were written in 1850/1851.
His The
Ancien Regime and the French Revolution was published in
1856. He died
in 1859
Quetelet
published his conception of the qualities of an
average person as the
central values of measurements grouped in "curve of
possibility" - which we
now call a
"normal curve".
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This bell shaped picture drawn by Quetelet illustrates a
distribution
according to
laws of probability. Quetelet showed that the
distribution of
naturally occurring features, such as the heights of adult
men,
approximated to the same shape. So, there would be very few
very short men
(left), large numbers of medium height men (around the central
axis) and
very few very tall men. Hidden in this picture was the
possibility of
measuring normality and abnormality (deviance)
"scientifically".
This external link illustrates the relation
between the
normal curve and probability.
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Farr in "Mortality
of lunatics" has the idea of a natural death rate as something
distinct from the (statistically) normal death rate - without using these words
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1836
|
James Mill died
1836 The post of Registrar General (births, deaths and marriages)
for England and Wales created by the
Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration
Act. Registration began in
1837. The Registrar
General was responsible the census in England and Wales from 1841,
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1837
|
1837 to 1839
Thomas Carlyle's two volume
The French Revolution established him amongst the chief writers
of the day.
1.7.1837
Registration of births, deaths and marriages in England and
Wales
required by law. - External link to
General Register Office
Poor Law Commission decide to extend the law to the north.
Opposition spread faster than the Commissioners. An Anti-Poor
law campaign
and a campaign to control factory working hours merged with
the campaign
for the Charter.
The Charter called for a vote for every adult male.
Chartists believed that if the working class could gain
control of
Parliament they would gain control of the welfare system and
of the
economy. Tied to the Charter was a plan to bring it about. A
large
demonstration would present a monster petition to Parliament
asking that
all men should have a vote. They would wait outside
Parliament and when
the petition was rejected they would declare themselves a
National
Convention -a kind of People's Parliament which would take
over from the
official Parliament - To enforce their will they would call a
sacred month
or national strike of the working classes. The use of the word
"Convention"
was seen as deliberate reference to the French Revolution. The
idea of the
"sacred month" was common amongst the Owenites.
Aborigines' Protection Society (London) founded in the
aftermath of
British emancipation of
slaves. The Ethnological Society of London was
founded in
1843
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1838
|
Charles Lyell The Elements of Geology -
An Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by
Reference to Causes now in Operation
In October 1838,
Charles
Darwin
read
Malthus on
Population. This eventually led to his
theory of
evolution by natural
selection.
|
September 1838 The London to
Birmingham Railway opened. The first main line in the world.
|
Objective statistics In an 1820 paper to the Royal Society,
Benjamin Gompertz criticised life assurance societies for
selecting mortality tables that they hoped would be favourable to them,
rather than seeking objectivity. In 1838 he was a member of a committee
formed by seventeen assurance offices to pool information in the search for
reliable statistics.
|
1839
|
The speed of the train may annihilate distance: The
first volume of
The Quarterly Review (January-March) for 1839 started with an
article in
which the author suggested the current speed of possibly 30 miles per hour
might increase to sixty or even a hundred.
"It will be evident that the first effect of this increasing
series is the gradual annihilation, approaching almost to the final
extinction, of that space and of those distances which have hitherto been
supposed unalterably to separate the various nations of the globe; and that
in proportion as this shall be effected, the centralisation, whether for
weal or woe, of the human family, must be accomplished. For instance,
supposing that railroads, even at our present simmering rate of travelling,
were to be suddenly established all over England, the whole population of
the country would, speaking metaphorically, at once advance en masse, and
place their chairs nearer to the fireside of their metropolis by two-thirds
of the time which now separates them from it; they would also sit nearer to
one another by two-thirds of the time which now respectively alienates
them. If the rate were to be again sufficiently accelerated, this process
would be repeated ; our harbours, our dock-yards, our towns, the whole of
our rural population, would again not only draw nearer to each other by
twothirds, but all would proportionally approach the national hearth. As
distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it
were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger
than one immense city, and yet by a sort of miracle every man's
field would be found not only where it always was, but as large as ever it
was!"
7.5.1839 First presentation of the Charter to
Parliament.
|
Hungry Forties
|
The Hungry Forties; life under the Bread Tax was the
title chosen by
Jane Unwin, in 1904, for a collection of documents from the
1840s. The term
caught on as the British labour movement of the early
twentieth century
recounted to itself the struggles of its predecessors, and
British
communists studied the Communist Manifesto and tried to relate
it to the
decade that gave birth to it.
The "hungry forties", when a large part of the Irish peasantry
starved to
death and the condition of the English workers was also
miserable, had a
strong effect on the ideas about society of people of many
different
political persuasions.
But the date 1840 is artificial, the period really begins in
the 1830s. The
1830s and 1840s were a period of rapid industrial development,
social
distress and the emergence of open class conflict. A period
when Britain
came nearer to revolution than at any other time in recent
history.
It was also a period when people were thinking about how
society is
structured and how society changes. There was a great deal of
political and theoretical discussion, not only about class,
but also about
how we should think about men, women and children and their
position in
society.
|
|
1840
|
December 1840
An article
by Lord
Ashley
in the Tory
Quarterly
Review, discussed the employment of children in factories,
and argued
that society and the family in Britain were being destroyed by
the
industrial revolution. The way to restore a healthy society
was for the
rich to concern themselves with the welfare of the poor.
Brief note on Ashley
Ashley's
writings
Ashley in the 1830s and 1840s
Ashley as a Lunacy Commissioner
|
1841
|
Hugh Miller The Old Red Sandstone
Sunday 6.6.1841/Monday 7.6.1841:
Fifth
British Census
This recorded names for the first time. People over 15
years old had
their age recorded to the lowest term of five. The place a
person was born in was partially recorded: Y for born in the
same county, N
for not. S for Scotland, I for Irelend. For the first time,
householders
could complete their own forms if they were able to.
(Census layout - external)
Population of England and Wales: 15,914,000; Scotland:
2,620,000
Suicide statistics Emile Durkheim's table of
"Stability of suicide
in the principal European countries (absolute figures)" has
time series starting in
1841 for France, Prussia, Saxony and Denmark, in
1844 Bavaria, and in
1857 for England
|
Poems by Alfred Tennyson published. One that was soon
popular
(Locksley Hall), celebrates science and the march of
mind and
industry as the spirit of the age in Europe and contrasts it
with the
savagery of dusky races. (The words are Tennyson's, not mine).
"Here about the beach I wander'd, nourishing a youth sublime
With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of
Time;
When I dipt into the future far as human eye could see;
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would
be -
In the steamship, in the railway, in the thoughts that shake
mankind.
Tennyson dreams of having children with a "savage woman" so
that they are
supple-sinewed, leaping brooks rather than poring over books,
but recoils.
"I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time -
Let the people
spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change. Better fifty
years of
Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
Compare
with Barry
Cornwall
The poet recognises mind in women as well as men: "Women is
the lesser
man, and all thy passions, match'd with mine are as moonlight
unto
sunlight, and as water unto wine". In 1847 Tennyson published
a poem in
which a royal princess founds a women's university. She falls
from the
chastity of thought when she falls in love, but the dominant
image is that
European men and women are both to be engaged in the
adventures of science
and thought.
But the march of mind and the march of hunger are in
competition. In
the immediate present "all things here are out of joint,
science moves, but
slowly slowly, creeping on from point to point: Slowly comes a
hungry
people, as a lion, creeping nigher". (Quotations all from
Locksley
Hall)
May 1842 Second presentation of the Charter to
Parliament.
7.6.1842
Lord Ashley introduced a bill intended to
ban women and
children from working in coal mines.
10.8.1842 Coal Mines Act became law.
Summer 1842 Plug riots. English workers, striking
for the
Charter, roamed the Midlands and North of England setting
light to rich
men's houses and pulling out the plugs of factory boilers.
Parliament
thought that the revolution was upon them.
|
1843
|
Blackwood's Magazine volume 53, p.397 "These are to constitute a new
science, to be called Social Ethics, or
Sociology" - First use recorded in the Oxford English
Dictionary.
|
February 1843
Ethnological Society of London founded by members of the
Aborigines' Protection
Society. To be "a centre and depository for the
collection and
systematisation of all observations made on human races".
Divided over
racialist issues from early days, it split into an
Ethnological Society and
an
Anthropological Society in
1863.
Merging in
1870, it became
The
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland in
1871. (Royal
from 1907). Now The
Royal Anthropological Institute (Link goes directly
to its
website)
Autumn 1843
Bennet Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert established the
Broadbalk experiment
on Lawes' Rothamsted Estate in Berkshire. This was the first of the long-
term "classic experiments", and it still exists today.
A winter-wheat crop was first sown in the autumn of 1843. A control strip
has received no fertiliser or manure since 1843. Other strips have received
farmyard manure or inorganic fertiliser. Lawes was the pioneer of
artificial fertilisers having established the manufacture of superphosphate
at his factory in Deptford, England in 1842.
|
|
1844
|
The Claims of Labour. An Essay on the Duties of
the
Employers to the Employed, published anonymously, argues
for a new
order of society based on benevolence of employers towards the
employed.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
(external link -
archive)
|
1845
|
John Stuart Mill's review of The Claims
of
Labour in the Edinburgh Review argues that a new
moral order
based on benevolence would undermine the independence and
self-
determination of working class people
Summer 1845 Engels:
The Condition of
the Working
Class in
England
October 1845 Beginning of the Great Famine in
Ireland. Potato
blight destroyed three-quarters of the crop.
|
1846
|
26.6.1846
Repeal of the Corn Law
In Dickens' 1838 satire on the Poor Law, Oliver Twist caused a
sensation by
asking for more food. In 1846 it seemed the satire had come
true. It was
revealed that in Andover Workhouse the residents were so
hungry that they
fought over rotten bones. The scandal of Andover led to the
replacement of
the Poor Law Commissioners, in 1847, by a Poor Law Board
responsible
directly to Parliament and, under new management, the poor law
became the
centre of a remarkably extensive pauper welfare state. Poor
law hospitals
laid the foundations for the National Health Service - and
many are still
in use.
12.8.1846 Term
"folklore" suggested for the culture and traditions of ordinary
people
Winter 1846/1847: John Stuart Mill laid aside work on
the
Principles of Political Economy to campaign for land
reform in
Ireland.
|
1847
|
July 1847 Poem
Song of the Famine
in Dublin
University Magazine
1847-1852 (Three volumes): Studien über die innern
Zustände,
das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen
Russlands by Baron August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) published in
Hanover.
Described by Frederick Starr (1968)
as "the first attempt to bring the Russian commune into the sphere of
European social thought". -
See
Engels footnote
1848: John Stuart
Mill's
Principles of Political
Economy published with a chapter drafted by
Harriet
Taylor
on the
self-
determination of the labouring classes - and women
1848:
Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton
|
1848 REVOLUTIONS
|
1848 was a year of revolutions in Europe. In
France
the monarchy
collapsed and the Second Republic was established. In the
German Confederation there were many revolts for constitutional
government and a
national parliament.
24.2.1848 Louis Philippe driven out of Paris and the French Republic
proclaimed.
25.2.1848 Armed workers occupied the French Assembly demanding the
right to work.
4.3.1848 Marx arrested by the police (in Brussels) and escorted to
the French frontier. Continued to Paris
13.3.1848 People of Vienna broke the power of Prince Metternich. He
fled the country.
18.3.1848 People of Berlin took arms. King surrendered to them after
18 hours.
10.4.1848 Chartists gathered on Kennington Common
to
prepare for a march to Parliament. The marchers were fewer
than expected
and the presentation of the third, and final, petition ended
peacefully.
April 1848 to May/June 1849: Marx and Engels worked for the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne
May or June 1848. First copies of The Communist Manifesto
circulating in Germany.
|
1849
|
August 1849 Marx settled in London as a political refugee.
November 1949 Engels arrived in London.
From 1849
Engels worked in his father's business in Manchester and
supported Marx
financially. Between December 1849 and November 1850,
a series of articles, by Marx, in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung analysed political events in France from 1848 to 1850 in terms
of class struggles.
|
*********
|
Germany 1850 Geschichte der sozialen Bewegung in Frankreich von
1789 bis auf unsre Tage (History of the
social movement in France from
1789 to the present) by Lorenz von Stein published in Leipzig in
three volumes.
December 1850 Napoleon 3rd (President) dissolved
the French
Assembly and restored universal male suffrage. His total power
was then
approved by plebiscite. See Neumann's
dictatorship types
1851
Lord Ashley became the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
Natural Sciences and
Moral Sciences Triposes established at Cambridge University. The
moral sciences included politics, philosophy and economics.
Sunday 30.3.1851/Monday 31.3.1851:
Sixth
British Census
From 1851 the exact ages and birthplaces were given,
together with
marital status and relationship to the householder. The number
of blind,
deaf and dumb was noted.
(Census layout - external)
In 1851 there was also a special census of church
congregations and accommodation.
Population of England and Wales: 17,928,000; Scotland:
2,889,000
|
30.5.1851: Meeting to establish the Central
Co-operative Agency, 76
Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square. Founder
Edward Vansittart
Neale
and
Thomas
Hughes
one of the contributors
21.4.1851 Marriage of John Stuart Mill and Harriet
Taylor
1853 Karl Knies's Political Economy from the
Historical Point
of View published in German and Harriet Martineau's
English
translation of
Auguste Comte
, published.
1854 to 1856 Crimean War
27.3.1854 and 28.3.1854 France and Britain declare war on
Russia
1854 Einleitung zur Geschichte der Mark-, Hof-, Dorf-, und
Stadtverfassung und der offentlichen Gewalt was the first of a series
of books on the early institutions of the Germans by Georg Ludwig von
Maurer (1790 - 1872) - Source
Wikipedia
- See
Engels footnote
1855
Herbert Spencer's Social Statics and the first edition
of his
Principles of Psychology published
|
|
1856
Sigmund Freud (author of
Interpretation of
Dreams)
born
1857
National Association for the Promotion of Social
Science founded.
This held annual Congresses to discuss issues of social reform
and
published its proceedings. Isa Craig, a working Scottish poet
from Scotland
was the secretary until her marriage in 1866. Henry (Lord)
Brougham
and
Ashley
Cooper, the
Earl of Shaftesbury, were frequent leaders of the Congresses.
Robert
Owen
contributed five papers to the first Congress and spoke at
the second. In
1866, with
Shaftesbury
presiding,
its topics included the best means of preventing
infanticide, education of various groups of working class
children and
control of their work, public health and housing. The last
congress was
held in Birmingham in
1884. The
Association
dissolved itself in
1886
1857
First edition of History of Civilisation in England by
Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-1862), in which he argued that the regularity of
social statistics demonstrates that human behaviour is as
predictable as natural phenomena and determined rather than free.
November 1859
Charles Darwin's
Origin of Species
published.
The theory that species develop from another through a long
process of
evolution became credible when Darwin showed how it could
happen. He argued
that there was a natural selection of naturally
occurring variations
through the survival of those best adapted to their
circumstances. Social
theorists drew different conclusions for society from Darwin's
biological
ideas. Marx and Engels welcomed the theory because it had a
material base
and provided a developmental theory for the natural world to
match theirs
for society.
Herbert Spencer, who had developed evolutionary
theory
independently of Darwin, saw competition as the mechanism
through which the
fittest members of society are selected. The theory that the
fittest should
be selected through struggle is known as
"Social
Darwinism".
It has been
used by Spencer and his followers to support an unregulated
market.
Benjamin Kidd,
however,
argued that the struggle is between societies, and
that the strength of a society depends largely on the
collective support
its members give one another. Adolf Hitler's
Mein
Kampf argued
human history is a struggle for survival between biological
races of human
beings. By the early 20th century, social darwinist theories
had become a common "scientific" analysis of society. The
joint shocks of
the second world war and the revelation of attempted race
extermination
were followed by a reconstruction of European culture that
marginalised
such theories. See
1871 -
1872 -
1894 -
1903 -
1913 -
1925 -
1930 -
1933 -
1939 -
1860
Herbert Spencer's
First Principles published
in six parts, between 1860 and 1862.
It was about "those highest generalisations now
being disclosed by science which are severally true not of one
class of
phenomena but of all classes of phenomena; and which are thus
the keys to
all classes of phenomena". Published as one volume in
1862, there were revised editions in 1867, 1875, 1880, 1884,
1900.
|
|
The Anglo-French [Cobden-Chevalier] commercial treaty of 1860 stimulated a
series of commercial treaties "binding Europe into the nearest it got to a
common market before the late twentieth century"
(external link).
Durkheim speaks of a "commercial
revolution" caused by these treaties.
1860
Das Mutterrecht: eine Untersuchung über die Gynaikokratie der alten
Welt nach ihrer religiösen und rechtlichen Natur by
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 - 1887) of Switzerland. Later
translaated into English as "Mother Right: An Investigation of the
Religious and Juridical Character of Matriarchy in the Ancient World"
April-June 1861
Max Müller gave nine
lectures on "the science of language" at
Royal Institution. - In these he referred to
Aryans as a "race" - A fuller text than that delivered was
published in 1862.
(Available on Google Books). - See
1870 -
1888
|
1.8.1861
Robert FitzRoy's first public weather forecast appeared on page 10 of
The Times.
(source). Daily forecasts were discontinued
in May 1866. Storm warnings resumed in 1867, public forecasts in 1879.
(source)
|
1862
1863
24.2.1863 James Hunt "Introductory Address on the Study of
Anthropology",
delivered before the newly formed
Anthropological Society of London. One of the first
actions of the Society (at the end of 1863) was to publish a translation
(from German into English) of Theodore Waitz's Anthropologie der
Naturvölker [Anthropolgy of
natural or primitive people] of 1858
as Introduction to Anthropology - Available from
Google Books
James Hunt: On the Negro's Place in Nature Anthropological Society
Available from
Google Books
21.4.1864 Max Weber born
First International Workingmen's Association established by
French and
English Labour leaders in London (dissolved 1876). Marx drew
up its
Inaugural Address - a much more moderate document than the
Communist
Manifesto
8.2.1865 and 8.3.1865 Gregor Mendel's Experiments in Plant
Hybridisation read at meetings of the Brünn Natural History
Society. They were published, in German, in the proceedings of the society
in 1866, but received little attention until
1900. They were translated into English in
1902. See
Genetics.
19.2.1870
Max Müller's Lectures on the Science of Religion
began at the
Royal Institution.
1871
Charles
Darwin's
The Descent of
Man
published
Edward Burnet Tylor's Primitive Culture: Researches into the
Development of
Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom
8.6.1871 Edward Burnet Tylor, author of "various memoirs on savages
and their customs" was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on the
proposal of (amongst others)
Charles Darwin -
Francis Galton -
Charles Lyell
Sunday 2.4.1871/Monday 3.4.1871:
Eighth
British Census
From 1871 the census for England and Wales was taken
separately from
that for Scotland, but on the same date.
Population of England and Wales: 22,712,000; Scotland:
3,360,000
The 1871 to 1911 censuses asked if the person was blind, deaf
or dumb,
"imbecile or idiot" or "lunatic".
(See 1870 Act).
(Census layout - external)
|
1872
Charles
Darwin's
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
published. Darwin's study of
body language provided a
starting point for
symbolic interaction sociology. Whist Darwin focused on the
expression of
emotions, George Herbert
Mead
interpreted body language as a system of communication
(the
conversation of gestures) that preceded and allowed
the
development of symbols and conscious reflection.
(weblink to illustrated copy)
10.5.1872
Marcel Mauss born. See
1925
November 1872 Giuseppe Villella died in an Ittalian prison,
Cesare Lombroso performed an autopsy on his body and discovered
an abonormality in his skull. He wrote later:
|
|
biological
positivism
|
"The sight of that fossette suddenly appeared to me like a
broad plain beneath an infinite horizon, the nature of the criminal was
illuminated, he must have reproduced in our day the traits of primitive man
going back as far as the carnivores." source
|
1873 John Stuart Mill died in Avignon and buried
with Harriet.
His Autobiography was published after his death.
5.9.1873 Times page 6. "At the Congress of Bologna a
cotery of Marxists had tried to impede all progress, but in vain." First
example of
"marxists" in Oxford English Dictionary. The earlist example of
"marxism" is in
1883.
1874
Mary Paley passed the Cambridge University
"Moral Science Tripos" with
distinction. She took over, from Alfred Marshall, the lectures to women
students on
economics, and was then asked to write a textbook on economics.
In 1876 she became engaged to marry Alfred Marshall and they worked on the
book together. It was published as
The Economics of Industry by Alfred and Mary Paley Marshall in
1879.
It was from this book that Alfred Marshall eventually developed his
Principles of Economics (External source:
Valerie Muir 1995)
John Stuart Mill's
Autobiography
The
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
published
the first edition of its Notes and Queries on Anthropology for the Use
of Travellers and Residents of Uncivilised Lands in 1874. Edward Burnet Tylor contributed
the largest number of sections (18).
1875 German social democrats (ADAV and SAP) merged on
the basis of
The Gotha Programme. This was more Lassallean than
Marxist. Marx
sent a private criticism and said that he would have to
dissociate himself,
but he did not - because the press perceived the Gotha
Programme as
"communist". The party became the SDP in 1890. From 1878 to
1890 the
Anti-socialist law prohibited socialist societies,
assemblies and
pamphlets. But the party was still able to take part in
Reichstag elections
- where it increased its representation in the (powerless)
German national
parliament.
|
|
The ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was published
between 1875
and 1889 (finished writing 1888?) in 24 volumes. "It embodied as no other
publication of the day the transformation of scholarship wrought by
scientific discovery and new critical methods"
(Encyclopedia Britannica website). The article on
"Evolution in
Biology" was written by
Thomas Huxley and the article on Anthropology by
Edward Burnet Tylor. The editor was
Thomas Spencer Baynes (born
24.3.1823, died 31.5.1887), assisted
from late 1881 by
William Robertson
Smith, who had lost his professorship as a result of his
articles on the Bible. Robertson Smith had the major responsibility for the
concluding twelve volumes of the Encyclopedia (Beginning with "L"?).
1876
"Founding [Paris], by Jules Guesde, of the first sociology journal -
L'Egalite" (external link) - See
Wikipedia Jules Guesde
1877: Georg Cantor (1845-1918) became Professor of
Mathematics at
Halle.
He laid the
foundations of modern set theory, leading to the heady
possibility that all rational human thought can be rationally
understood by
human thought - A possibility that
Bertrand
Russell, to his own
annoyance,
proved unproven.
(external link). In his
autobiography,
Russell reproduces a letter to him from Cantor saying "dear
Colleague... I
am a
Baconian...and am quite an adversary of Old
Kant..."
See discussion of relevance to positivism
5th, 12th and 19th April 1877
Francis Galton 's three part article "Typical Laws of
Hereditary" in
Nature
(External link to pdf)
In this (12.4.1877 page 513, column 2) he says the produce of peas of the
same class
"deviated normally on either side of their own mean weight". This is an
early example of the use of
normal as in "normal curve" (See
Quetelet above and
Math Word at York).
1878 Jardin Zoologique d'Aclimatation, (opened 1860 in the northern
part of the Bois de Boulogne) converted to "l'Acclimatation
Anthropologique", a zoo that exhibited humans. Albert Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire (1835-19019),
the zoo's director from 1865 to 1893, first organised two ethnological
spectacles, one of
Nubians and the other of Inuit(Esquimaux). By
1878, a million (non-exhibited) people had visited. Between 1877 and 1912
(when this human zoo closed), approximately thirty ethnological exhibitions
were presented at the Jardin zoologique d'acclimatation
1878
It was about 1878 that William Stanley Jevons statistically
related
economic cycles
to sunspot
activity.
|
1.5.1878 - 10.11.1878 Exposition Universelle held in Paris to
celebrate the recovery of France after the
1870 Franco-Prussian War. The temporary (glass) building on the
left was the main exhibition in the Champs de Mars, where the Eifel Tower
now stands. On the other (north) side of the river Seine is Palais du
Trocadéro, where meetings of international organizations could be
held during the fair). One popular feature was a human zoo, called a "negro
village", composed of 400 "indigenous people".
The Muséum ethnographique des missions scientifiques (Ethnographic
Museum of Scientific Expeditions) (The Musée d'Ethnographie du
Trocadéro) was established in a wing of Palais du
Trocadéro in 1878. It became the
Musée de l'Homme in
1937.
1879
In Leipzig,
Wilhelm
Wundt
set up the world's first laboratory of
experimental psychology.
Enrico Morselli's
work on suicide was published in Italy in 1879. It was translated
into English in 1881 as Suicide. An Essay On Comparative
Moral Statistics
Albert Einstein born
1880
The young
Freud
translated works by John Stuart Mill into German.
In
later comments, Freud argued
that there
are
fundamental differences between men and women that Mill had
not recognised.
This contrast between Mill and Freud is reflected in late 20th
century
feminist thought in the contrast between those feminists who
(like
Wollstonecraft and Mill) perceive mind as genderless, and
those who believe
the male and female minds are different.
1880: Emile Zola in his essay Le Roman Experimental explains how he
applies the experimental method of science to his naturalistic novels.
[External links to
1890 text and
the Zola pages -
See Park (1925) and urban
life
1880 First edition of
Henri François Marion's De la Solidarite Morale.
See
Durkheim 1893
March 1880-April 1880 UK General Election
29.10.1880
Joseph Swan's development of the
incandescent lamp
reported in Engineering, which quoted him saying "Electric
lighting by incandescence is just as simple as arc lighting is difficult,
all that is required is a material which is not a very good conductor of
electricity, highly infusible and which can be formed into a wire or
lamina, and is neither combustible in air, or if combustible, does not
undergo changes in a vacuum".
1882
Society for Psychical Research founded in London for the
scientific
investigation of psychic phenomena. These included much more than what we
might regard as spritual and ghostly phenomena, and the work included
theoretical development as well as attempted empirical tests. Frederic
Myers, for example, developed the concept of the
subliminal self.
1883
1883 Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to
the Social Sciences) by
Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911)
"The practice of regarding" [the "human sciences"] "as a unity
distinct from the natural sciences is rooted in the depth and totality of
human selfconsciousness... man finds within his self-consciousness a
sovereignty of the will, a responsibility for actions, a capacity for
subjecting everything to thought and for resisting, from within the
stronghold of his personal freedom, any and every
encroachment"
1883 How the Poor Live by George R. Sims - with 60
illustrations by
Frederick Barnard (who illustrated Dickens) Chatto & Windus,
Piccadilly
-
External link to text
14.3.1883
Karl
Marx
died. At his death, a virtually unknown author in the English
speaking
world.
16.10.1883 Pamphlet
The Bitter Cry of Outcast London: an inquiry
into the condition of the abject poor (Congregational
Union) given much
publicity by The Pall Mall Gazette
External link to editorial and condensed
version
1883-1891 Nietzsche's Also sprach
Zarathustra
1884
Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the
State
developed by Engels from notes by Marx. The Origin
provides an
overview of their historical materialism as they left it.
Working on the
theories of
Morgan, they
incorporate
"Reproduction" into the material base,
alongside "Production"
At the final meeting of the National Association for the
Promotion of
Social Science, Edward Vansittart Neale, a cooperator,
read a paper
"What is the social condition of the working classes in 1884
as compared
with 1857, when
the first
meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of
Social Science was
held in Birmingham; and in what way can the working classes
best utilise
their savings?"
EMILE DURKHEIM AND
MAX WEBER
1885
"Gottlieb Daimler's invention in 1885 of the internal-
combustion motor using petroleum spirit was the first step towards the
production of the modern self-propelled road vehicle, the next
step being the recognition in
1887 of the advantages of Daimler's
system by M. Levassor and his application of that system to
the propulsion of a carriage. In the nine years that immediately
followed French manufacturers spent large sums of money in
experimenting with and developing the motor-car" (1911
Encyclopedia)
Ashley Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury died.
24.11.1885-18.12.1885 UK General Election
1885-1886
Durkheim in Germany studying German
social research
and ethical speculation
October 1885 to February 1886
Freud
in France studying nervous
diseases under Charcot, who had developed hypnosis as a
treatment for
hysteria. His experiences were an important stage in moving
from mapping
the human brain and nervous system to mapping the human mind.
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Charcot and Blanche Wittmann
Asylum despair
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1886
11.5.1886 Queen Victoria opened the
International Exhibition of
Navigation, Commerce and Industry in Liverpool
(source). In a special
feature on
15.5.1886, the Illustrated London News wrote:
"Liverpool, thanks to modern science and commercial enterprise,
to the spirit and intelligence of the townsmen, and to the administration
of the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, has become a wonder of the world. It
is the
New York of Europe, a world-city rather than merely British
provincial." (See
Reviews in History)
1.7.1886-27.7.1886 UK General Election
1887:
Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft by
Ferdinand Tönnies -
See dictionary
In
1887 a lectureship of social science was
created for
Durkheim at the
University of Bordeaux.
Karl Marx's
Capital
(1867).
Translated by Samuel Moore & E. Aveling, published by F.
Engels, London 1887. Engels edited the translation and wrote a
preface.
The same year: F. Engels. The Condition of the
Working-Class in England
in 1844, translated by F. K. Wischnewetzky, was published
in New York
and reprinted in London. Engels added an appendix on "The
Working Class Movement in America". Samuel Moore's translation
of The
Communist Manifesto was published early in 1888.
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1888:
Max Müller's
Biographies of words and the home of the Aryas
1889
Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of
London
was published in 17 volumes between 1889 and 1902. Charles
Booth
(1840-1916), a statistician, spent eighteen years preparing
this survey.
Amongst those who helped him was his cousin, Beatrice Potter
Webb.
- External link to Charles Booth Online Archive -
1889
William Robertson Smith's
Lectures on the Religion of the Semites applied
anthropological theory to the analysis of the
Old Testament. His analysis of
sacrifice was an important component of the anthropologies of
both Dukrhheim and
Freud.
James Frazer, in 1900, made an anthropological analysis of the
crucifixion of Christ.
1890
Ivan Pavolv (1849-1936) appointed professor at St Petersburg
Military-
Medical Academy, Russia, where he established a laboratory
observing the
digestion of live animals through a hole in the stomach. He
won the Nobel
Prize for physiology in 1904.
1890 Les lois de l'imitation by Jean-Gabriel De Tarde (1843-
1904). Translated into English in 1903 The Laws of Imitation.
Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics. An introductory
volume
published. His Economics of Industry
(a different book than that
published with Mary Paley Marshall in 1879)
was published in
1892.
Marshall was "Professor of
Political Economy" at Cambridge
University until
1908. Marshall was one of the four major theorists on whom
Talcott Parsons based his
The Structure of Social Action
1890 Henry Morton Stanley's In Darkest Africa: or the quest,
rescue and retreat of
Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in six volumes,
published.
William Booth's Darkest England and the Way Out
was published in 1890. William
Booth (1829-1912) was the founder of the Salvation Army, an
evangelistic
Christian organisation with ideas about the redemption of
society. He
should not be confused with Charles Booth.
"For years past the Press has been filled with
echoes of the 'Bitter Cry of Outcast
London',
with pictures of 'Horrible Glasgow', and the like. We have had
several
volumes describing
'How the Poor Live', and I may therefore assume
that all
my readers are more or less cognizant of the main outlines of
'Darkest
England' (Chapter 5 On the Verge of the Abyss)
"
It was William (not Charles) Booth who wrote of the
"submerged tenth".
This was his heading for chapter two. However, he used Charles Booth's
statistics to support his calculation.
It is unusual for followers of Karl Marx to speculate about
what life
will be like after a communist revolution. This, however, is
what William
Morris did in his 1890 dream novel
News from Nowhere
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James George Frazer's
The Golden Bough. A Study of Magic
and
Religion appeared in twelve volumes between
1890 and 1915.
The second
edition in 1900 analysed the crucifixion of Christ.
He published
an abridgement in 1922 - Without the most controversial material.
Edwin Chadwick died
The right of a husband to use force against
his wife was
first denied by the English courts in 1891.
Sunday 5.6.1891/Monday 6.6.1891:
Tenth
British Census
(Census layout - external)
Asked about the number of rooms and their occupants in all
tenements
with fewer than five rooms. Distinguished between employers,
employees and
the self-employed.
Population of England and Wales: 29,003,000; Scotland:
4,026,000.
In England and Wales, 35% were under 15 and 4% per cent 65 or
over.
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1891
Weber's doctoral thesis: A Contribution to the
History of
Medieval Business Organizations
1891 Edvard Alexander Westermarck's The Origins of Human
Marriage published. See 1903 -
1907
1892
Durkheim's latin thesis on Montesquieu.
1893
July 1893 First meeting of The Institut International de
Sociologie
(International Sociological Institute), created by René Worms, held
in the building of the Society of Anthropology in Paris. "From more than
fifty members and more than twenty associates, approximately twenty were
present and nine sent papers. The participating group comprised between 50
and 150 people". (Schuerkens, F.U. 1996).
External link to its website
(archive) -
new website
Annales de l'Institut International de Sociologie/ Annals of
the International Institute of Sociology first published in 1895 after
the first world congress,
In Division of Labour in Society (1893), Durkheim
tried to
show that societies are real and that the reality of societies
lies in
something that he calls
solidarity.
(Click
here for Extracts).
He also said punishing crime is a way a society defines the
way it
thinks, reinforcing its solidarity
1893
Thomas Huxley's lecture on
evolution and ethics (an external
link)
1894
In Germany, Weber became Professor of Economics at
Freiburg
University in place of Karl Knies.
In America
George Herbert Mead became a
lecturer at Chicago University where, before his death in
1931, he
developed theories that showed how social interaction by means
of symbols
could have developed from the conversation of gestures of
animals. From 1894 to 1904,
John Dewey also lectured at Chicago, where he
developed his
version of pragmatism.
Benjamin Kidd's Social Evolution (See
Darwin) This
book
contained
the idea that "irrational" religion is needed by societies to
hold them
together. Societies require the subordination of individual
self interest
to the collective welfare, and the motivation for this is
provided by
religion.
1895
Engels died.
Weber's inaugural address at Freiburg, The
National State and Economic Policy, - a confession of
belief in
imperialist realpolitik and the House of Hohenzollern.
In Rules of
Sociological Method,
Durkheim argued that if we want to be
sociologists
we should "treat social facts as things".
(Extracts)
He also argued that crime is necessary and normal for
society.
Fabians found The London School of Economics and Political
Science, which
held its first classes in October 1895. It became a major
centre for the social sciences in England. By employing staff
of diverse
political
persuasions, it has been as often the centre for conservative
as for
radical thought. See
1896 -
1903 -
1904 -
1935 -
1951
1896
Weber became Professor at the University of Heidelberg
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky born
1897
Durkheim's Suicide seeks to show that society is so
real that it controls acts as (apparently) individual as
suicide.
(Extracts)
Weber's father's death was followed by Weber's mental
breakdown.
Ferdinand Tönnies' Der Nietzsche-Kultus. Eine
Kritik.
Leipzig. An
extremely successful book on
Nietzsche that influenced Weber.
1898
First volume of
L'Année Sociologique. It continued until 1913.
Then the war stopped it. A
short lived revival began in 1923-1924. It was published as Annales
Sociologique between 1934 and 1942.
The first of a third series of L'Année Sociologique appeared
in 1949, and has continued since.
1899
October 1899 Wiesbaden meeting of European and American Academies
planned an international association with sections for natural science and
"literary science": meaning the scientific study of language, history,
philosophy, antiquities, and other subjects not considered "natural
sciences". The
Royal Society represented Britain for the natural sciences. The
British Academy was formed to represent the others. The
International Association of Academies first met in Paris in 1900, without
British representation of the non-natural sciences. The Association did not
survive the first world war, but was replaced by the
International Research Council and the
International Association of Academies
after the war
(main source)
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