Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796–1874 by Kevin Donnelly (review)

The inventor of the concept of “the average man” is a subject of more than average historical interest. Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874)—one acceptable answer to the pub-quiz question to “name six famous Belgians”—is among the more fascinating figures of nineteenth-century science. The last attempts at a focused biography of him, however, are more than a century old. The Belgian savant is known among modern historians of science through the notion of “l’homme moyen” and of the related program of “social physics” (la physique sociale). Yet Quetelet’s project to build a lawful, quantified social science on the model of the natural sciences has often been subsumed into the ambitions of such Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century predecessors as Nicolas de Condorcet and Pierre-Simon Laplace, and his successors, notably Emile Durkheim, were rude about what they took as his deterministic conception of moral behavior. That is to say, Quetelet has not been considered a towering genius. “The average man” apart, he has no original methods or concepts to his credit. Although Donnelly accepts that judgment, he offers an interpretation of Quetelet’s work that wholly justifies serious and systematic historical treatment.

Quetelet has occasionally been called “the father of statistics” and one of the founders of quantified social science, but Donnelly is closer to the mark in suggesting an apparently deflationary view of him as “the father of modern counting” (113). The ambition to build a social physics was not novel; Quetelet’s innovation was the establishment of concrete data practices. Quetelet reckoned that the age of individual genius in science had passed; what was needed instead were coordinated global networks of competent observers and data collectors—average men of science, so to speak.

Given his projects in astronomy, meteorology, and criminology, Quetelet might be called a polymath, but Donnelly intimates that what drove him more than any specific intellectual or practical goal was the collection of numerical data that could secure state patronage and insinuate itself into the practices of government. The practices of data collection and counting were paramount for Quetelet, and selling the outcomes to bureaucratic patrons would permit even more counting and tabulating, which would, in turn, require more administrators (this sequence should sound familiar enough to any present-day academic).

Quetelet was an enthusiastic and skilled scientific entrepreneur, institution builder, networker, and intermediary between the scientific community and state bureaucrats. The idea of rational government policy based on masses of expertly processed data about the population was one way of enfolding in the state a version of what later came to be called Big Science. Donnelly locates Quetelet’s scientific salesmanship in the politically volatile setting of the short-lived United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815–1830) and the emergence of an independent Belgium following the 1830 revolution. State-building and science-building went together.

In Quetelet’s view, the statistical procedures that produced the idea of the “average man” would attract state support, since the state had an interest in keeping track of the population and the distribution of physical and moral traits. Donnelly briefly treats the differences between mapping the temporal and spatial distribution of deaths, births, and of human physical characteristics and doing the same for such mental and moral traits as courage or musical talent. He is at his best in documenting the intellectual hand waving with which Quetelet responded to critics who argued that some features of human behavior could not be quantified in the same way as could the facts of mortality, height, and weight. Quetelet’s tendency was to respond that doubters would not have to wait long to learn otherwise.

Wisely, Donnelly’s purpose is neither to praise Quetelet nor to bury his reputation but to situate his work in the history of nineteenth-century scientific institution-building and its relations to the practices of government. The biography is a timely achievement.