THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIBERTARIANISM

Spencer, Herbert (1820-1903)
https://www.libertarianism.org/encyclopedia/spencer-herbert

Although Herbert Spencer has been rightly regarded as the most influential libertarian theoretician of the 19th century, he was much more than that. He also was a founding father of modern sociology, a pioneer in the theory of evolution—his theories were developed prior to those of Charles Darwin—an important figure in progressive education—his name still adorns the education building at Stanford University—and a philosopher of distinction whose work in ethics and epistemology gained the respect of J. S. Mill and other notable contemporaries. He was, moreover, an early proponent of the rights of children, of equal rights for women, and of other civil liberties that have since gained widespread acceptance in Western democracies.

Spencer lived during a period that coincided with the rise and fall of political liberalism—or what Spencer called true liberalism, what today is known as classical liberalism. This political philosophy, which had made great strides in bringing about greater individual freedom in religion, commerce, speech, and other areas, had suffered a setback during the Napoleonic Wars. After this conflict ended in 1815, England experienced a revival of liberal ideas. Peace brought with it not only a resurgence of these views, but also the development of a form of social organization, “voluntary cooperation” founded on a “regime of contract,” that supplanted much of an older form of social organization based on “compulsory cooperation” that characterized a “regime of status.”

Unfortunately, things had changed for the worse by the time Spencer published The Man versus the State in 1884. In the first of four essays that comprise this work, “The New Toryism,” Spencer noted that “most of those who now pass themselves off as Liberals are Tories of a new type.” This new liberalism had abandoned its original central principle that “habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion.” Instead, it embraced the Tory principle of unlimited state authority with a slight difference: Whereas the Tories prior to the Glorious Revolution had vested unconditional authority in the monarch, a theory that was opposed to the Whig doctrine of conditional authority, modern liberalism, riding the wave of democratic sentiments, vested unconditional authority in “the people.” Spencer viewed this disagreement as a distinction without an essential difference: “the real issue is whether the lives of citizens are more interfered with than they were; not the nature of the agency which interferes with them.” A person is no less coerced and his rights are no less violated merely because unjust restrictions on his liberties are imposed by a majority, rather than by a single ruler.

Spencer offered several reasons for the transformation of what had been a philosophy of individual liberty into a new type of statism. The most interesting of these reasons, from a philosophical point of view, is one that he had cautioned against decades earlier. While in his early 20s, Spencer published a series of 12 letters (1842–1843) in Edward Miall’s periodical, The Nonconformist. Collectively titled “The Proper Sphere of Government,” these articles address a central problem of political philosophy, viz: “Is there any boundary to the interference of government? and, if so, what is that boundary?”

Spencer responded with the classical Lockean doctrine that the fundamental purpose of government was “to defend the natural rights of man—to protect person and property—to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak—in a word, to administer justice.” He contrasts this conception with the common belief that the purpose of government is to promote the “general good.” The “general good,” Spencer noted, lacks a determinate meaning, so it cannot serve as a standard, or criterion, of legislation. Its vagueness gives to government a blank check on power. Has not every law, no matter how tyrannical, been justified by appealing to the general good? Spencer concluded that the “general good” cannot serve to define the duties of government because the purpose of any definition is “to mark out the boundaries of the thing defined,” and “that cannot be a definition of the duty of a government, which will allow it to do anything and everything.”

Spencer expanded on this theme in his first book, Social Statics (1851). Here he focuses his criticism on the principle of utility defended by Jeremy Bentham and his followers. He there stated that a government should promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. Spencer noted that standards of happiness are “infinitely variable,” so the principle of utility, although it may serve as a general formulation of the purpose of government, cannot serve as a determinate standard of legislation; an appeal to social utility does not tell us which measures a government should, and should not, enact. Hence, doctrines of expediency—whether expressed in terms of utility or the general good—“afford not a solitary command of a practical character. Let but rulers think, or profess to think, that their measures will benefit the community, and your philosophy stands mute in the presence of the most egregious folly, or the blackest misconduct.” Social Statics contained Spencer’s first extended justification of his celebrated “law of equal freedom,” according to which “every man may claim the fullest liberty to exercise his faculties compatible with the possession of like liberty by every other man.” The young Spencer, having been raised in a tradition of Protestant dissent, which he once described as “an expression of antagonism to arbitrary control,” grounded this principle in a divinely ordained duty to pursue happiness, which in turn requires the freedom to exercise one’s faculties according to one’s own judgments. He further defends a version of the moral sense theory that had been developed by Francis Hutcheson and other luminaries of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Spencer later abandoned these doctrines, replacing them with an ethical theory that was thoroughly positivistic and more attuned to his theory of evolution. The “establishment of rules of right conduct on a scientific basis is a pressing need,” wrote Spencer in 1879, and he published his two-volume Principles of Ethics to fill this need. These volumes constitute the final volumes of his massive Synthetic Philosophy, a project that took 38 years to complete. Spencer’s efforts to deduce moral rules, including the law of equal freedom, from the “laws of life” and thereby achieve “results which follow … in the same necessary way as does the trajectory of a cannon-shot from the laws of motion and atmospheric resistance” had mixed results. Some critics, including those who were otherwise sympathetic to Spencer’s ideas, have claimed that this scientistic approach to ethics undermined the earlier humanistic tradition of natural rights. However one may appraise Spencer’s “scientific” system of ethics, there can be little doubt it later became discredited as the Larmarckian theory of evolution on which it was based (which upheld the inheritability of acquired characteristics) fell into disfavor.

Spencer’s sociological insights almost certainly were to influence later libertarian thinkers such as Albert J. Nock more than did his ethical theories. In The Study of Sociology, Spencer pointed to instances of short-sighted political thinking by persons who have but a rudimentary grasp of social causation and who accordingly propose simplistic political solutions for complex social problems. Many people are ignorant of physical causation, he observed, so it is perhaps no surprise that many more are ignorant of social causation, “which is so much more subtle and complex.” Where there is little or no appreciation of social causation, “political superstitions” flourish. Among these false notions is the belief that government has a special efficacy “beyond that naturally possessed by a certain group of citizens subsidized by the rest of the citizens.” In addition, the “ordinary political schemer is convinced that out of a legislative apparatus, properly devised and worked with due dexterity, may be had beneficial State-action, without any detrimental reaction.”

In addition to his other contributions to libertarian theory, such as his detailed typology of the militant and industrial forms of social organization, Spencer made seminal contributions to the theory of spontaneous order. In The Principles of Sociology, Spencer likened social development to a “rolling snowball or a spreading fire” where there is “compound accumulation and acceleration.” An intricate social network evolves as in a market economy that is so interdependent that any considerable change in one activity “sends reverberating changes among all the rest.” Society, in other words, is an unplanned spontaneous order, one that “grows” rather than is “made.” A major function of sociology—which in Spencer’s conception subsumed economics—is to explain the evolution of this order that is the result of human action, but not of human design. The difficulty of this task is why Spencer displayed such contempt for social planners: “A fly seated on the surface of the body has about as good a conception of its internal structure, as one of the schemers has of the social organization in which he is embedded.”



Further Readings

Caneiro, Robert L. “Herbert Spencer as an Anthropologist.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 5 no 2 (Spring 1981): 153–210.

Francis, Mark. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007.

Smith, George H. “Herbert Spencer’s Theory of Causation.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 5 no. 2 (Spring 1981): 113–153.

Spencer, Herbert. The Man versus the State; with Six Essays on Government, Society, and Freedom. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics, 1981.

———. “The Proper Sphere of Government.” Political Writings. John Offer, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

———. Social Statics. New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1954.
by George H. Smith
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Originally published August 15, 2008.
See alsoLiberalism, Classical; Limited Government; Sociology and Libertarianism; Spontaneous Order.

Herbert Spencer and His American Audience - Loyola ... 

by JF Yoder - ‎2015 - ‎

INTRODUCTION

British philosopher Herbert Spencer has fallen into such obscurity that his
tremendous popularity among his contemporaries is difficult to believe. Though he was
an “independent scholar” in the truest sense of the word—refusing all institutional
affiliation and almost all public recognition of any kind—he was famous not just among
intellectuals, but among educated readers worldwide. He was, quite possibly, the only
philosopher in history whose books sold more than a million copies during his lifetime.1
Spencer’s work was translated into more than a dozen languages, first into Russian, then
to French, German, Italian, and Spanish, and eventually to Hungarian, Bohemian, Polish,
Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and possibly even Mohawk.2 For many non‐
Western readers he stood for science, rationality, and progress against backwardness
and mysticism; his anti‐imperialism took some of the sting out of his affirmations of
European superiority.3 Educated men and women all over the world considered Spencer
the master thinker of the age, whether or not they agreed with him.
                                                 
Spencer wrote on an incredible variety of topics, from physics to metaphysics,
from biology to aesthetics. His greatest work, and the one which cemented his fame,
was his ten‐volume Synthetic Philosophy, which covered all scientific phenomena from
the beginning of the cosmos to its end, embracing biology, psychology, sociology, and
ethics. He also wrote on topics as diverse as style, manners, music, art, health, and
parenting. Yet today his books sit in libraries unread. One brave explorer, reporting that
he was the first to read the Royal Society’s copy of The Principles of Biology, described
the volumes as “thicker and squarer than Gibbon’s, each bound in a cloth which has
acquired with age a reptilian colour and texture, so putting one in mind of some great
extinct monster of philosophic learning.”4 The metaphor is pervasive: in a book on
Spencer’s sociology, J. D. Y. Peel referred to Spencer’s works as “the fossil remains of an
extinct megasaur,” while Richard Hofstadter called them “a fossil specimen from which
the intellectual body of the period may be reconstructed.”5 Spencer’s work no longer
lives for modern readers. However, a study of its petrified remains provides a window
into the intellectual culture of the Victorian era. This is particularly true of the American
scene, for Spencer was more popular in the United States than in his home country,
especially at the beginning of his career

 1 Michael W. Taylor, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (London: Continuum, 2007), 4. Taylor
extrapolates based on the nearly 370,000 books sold by his American publisher alone.
2 John Offer, Herbert Spencer and Social Theory (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 8‐9.; Naomi Beck, “The Diffusion of Spencerism and its Political Implications in France
and Italy,” in Herbert Spencer: The Intellectual Legacy, Proceedings of a Conference Organised by the
Galton Institute, London, 2003 (London: The Galton Institute, 2004), 41‐57.
3 J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 

Being Modern The Cultural Impact of Science in the Early Twentieth Century
 Edited by Robert Bud 
Paul Greenhalgh 
Frank James 
Morag Shiach

PDF E-BOOK
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10057847/1/Being-Modern.pdf

Foreword
History of science lacks organising narratives for the twentieth century.
This is especially true when we widen the lens to the discipline’s
more-inclusive coterie: science, technology, engineering, mathematics
and medicine. Mostly, we’ve chosen war as a narrative structure.
Add imperialism. Add globalisation, though that seems simply to be
imperialism by another name. We seek narratives that either describe or
explain science’s growing presence, resonance and (dare we suggest)
hegemony across a plenitude of landscapes. Try as we might, these
continue to prove elusive.
One viable choice engages the century’s endlessly nuanced
encounter with Modernity. Whatever Modernity is, or was, we seem
certain science is somehow intimately associated. At once science seems
causal for and caused by this thing, this philosophy, this miasma. Our
quest to delineate precisely what and how has led us scholars towards
ever more refined species of its genus. We seem to be getting somewhere,
though the going is slow and the way is sometimes lost.
Being Modern shifts our perspective from observer to participant.
The aim is to capture Modernity at work within mentalities, within
cultural and biographical aesthetics, within the collisions between
scientific and other things occurring in the lived experience of the people
we study and from within their perspective. This anthology is a collective
study of potency, infection and resistance.
The result is a refreshing alternative to scholastic delineations of
movements seen from abstracting distances. This collection of original
papers delivers richly researched, critical and thought-filled case studies
of Modernity as an actor’s category, observed in situ. It ranges across
familiar and new settings. It certainly will help us as we build a better
conceptualisation of the Modern both as project and product.
Joe Cain
Professor of History and Philosophy of Biology
Head of Department of Science and Technology Studies
UCL

Technological parables and iconic illustrations: American Technocracy and the rhetoric of the technological fix

 Sean F. Johnston 

University of Glasgow

 School of Interdisciplinary Studies 

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/141781/7/141781.pdf

 Abstract

 This paper traces the role of American technocrats in popularizing the notion later dubbed the “technological fix”. Channeled by their long-term “chief”, Howard Scott, their claim was that technology always provides the most effective solution to modern social, cultural and political problems. The account focuses on the expression of this technological faith, and how it was proselytized, from the era of high industrialism between the World Wars through, and beyond, the nuclear age. I argue that the packaging and promotion of these ideas relied on allegorical technological tales and readily-absorbed graphic imagery. Combined with what Scott called “symbolization”, this seductive discourse preached beliefs about technology to broad audiences. The style and conviction of the messages were echoed by establishment figures such as National Lab director Alvin Weinberg, who employed the techniques to convert mainstream and elite audiences through the end of the twentieth century. Keywords technocracy; technological fix; rhetoric; Howard Scott; Alvin M. Weinberg Introduction Confidence in societal progress via engineering solutions became a feature of industrial discourse from the early twentieth century. 1 This paper addresses the popularization of such modernist faith over subsequent decades, focusing on the narrative techniques that underlay them. It argues that effective rhetoric about the problem-solving powers of technologies was developed and delivered by two key apostles, the technocrat Howard Scott and national post-WWII laboratory director Alvin Weinberg. Their evangelizing of the transformative social and political potential of technologies was unusually enduring, influencing broad audiences through the end of the century. The paper focuses on a specific but fertile article of their shared faith: the notion that technological solutions are superior to more traditional political, economic, educational, and other social-science approaches to problem-solving. In the most radical form of the claim, its proponents argued that technological innovation could bypass or entirely replace these traditional approaches to human issues. By tracing the idea through its networks of dissemination, and employing close textual analysis of newly available sources, the paper addresses how modern technological beliefs were packaged and spread for wider publics. The account traces these discourses about technology, and the ways they were communicated, from the era of high industrialism between the World Wars through, and beyond, the nuclear age. Trust in the transformative social powers of technology was promoted most consistently in North America by a handful of self-identified “technocrats”, identified by John M. Jordan as the most radical of a wave of progressive technologists.2 Centered initially on groups associated with autodidact engineer Howard Scott (1890-1970), the nascent concept was later refined and championed through the speech-making of physicist-administrator Alvin Weinberg (1915-2006) from the 1960s who dubbed it “the technological fix”. The time frame, historical correlations and methodology of this study are noteworthy extensions of prior researches. Scott and Weinberg are both well known to historians of the twentieth century in the distinctive contexts of interwar Technocracy and postwar nuclear power, respectively, but they and their organizations have previously been studied History and Technology 33 (2017) “Technological parables and iconic illustrations: American Technocracy and the rhetoric of the technological fix” 2 separately and over the periods of their greatest public prominence, and with attention to more diffuse themes. 3 The present paper instead begins from such familiar but segregated accounts to trace the intersecting professional activities of these key promoters over some nine decades. Its focus is not the flowering and decline of a political movement, or of societal experimentation with novel energy supplies. Instead, the work specifically tracks the promotion of engineering solutions for societal problems, a notion that was condensed into popular faith in technological fixes. The research is based on hitherto unavailable archival holdings that chronicle this broad timespan via a variety of unpublished correspondence, speeches, exhibition materials and limited-circulation texts. Importantly, the archives of regional Technocracy chapters extend some thirty years beyond the death of their founder to the end of the twentieth century, and document how narratives about the societal power of technology mutated during the postScott era for members and their targeted audiences. Similarly, the unpublished papers of Alvin Weinberg provide significant insights into how his private views and public addresses about technology altered over the latter decades of his career. The collections reveal how, in both contexts, their creators dedicated unusual attention to condensing and communicating their claims. These textual and illustrative materials consequently provide privileged access to evolving notions of technological fixes and to the development of influential rhetorical practices. 4 Indeed, careful attention to the nature of this discourse, and its orientation toward wider culture, is at the methodological center of this piece.5 Focusing on a close-reading of the speeches, articles and illustrations employed by both Scott and Weinberg, I argue that the techniques of popularization adopted by them were markedly different from traditional engineering communications. This rhetorical interpretation illustrates how their style of dissemination, as much as the rationale of their arguments, promoted cultural confidence in technological fixes. The work argues that self-evident and simple examples were presented as easily-absorbed tales that reshaped the radical discourse of interwar technocracy into a style of communication amenable to post-Second World War policymaking and public understandings of science and technology. Key determinants in this transition were the characters of Howard Scott and Alvin Weinberg as energetic missionaries, and the form and content of their rhetoric, which supported a form of persuasion more akin to religious discourse. The resonances between expressions of technological confidence, social progress and religious faith had been remarked as early as the 1920s, with Dora Russell, for example, linking American industrial zeal (“the dogmas of machine-worshippers”) with the social ideals of the Russian revolution.6 Both the ideological and theological connotations of this conviction, and more particularly the style of communication by which it was promoted, are threads interwoven through this paper. It focuses on how the deceptively discrete and simple claim was proselytized to influence wider cultural creeds. Scott and Weinberg preached tales of wise technological problem-solving to broad audiences. Their typical narrative structure resembled a parable, and iconic graphics replaced detailed illustrations. Recounting universalized tales of engineering authority and honed by years of repetition, the sparse narratives and concrete examples attracted successive waves of receptive audience. The timescale, comparative approach, and attention to the style of dissemination to broad audiences argue that faith in the progressive nature of technologies was not limited to a naïve period of early engagement, but became a confidence embedded throughout modern culture by the late twentieth century

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World 

by Steven Johnson (Author)  Format: Kindle Edition

A National Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book, and an Entertainment Weekly Best Book of the Year
 
“By turns a medical thriller, detective story, and paean to city life, Johnson's account of the outbreak and its modern implications is a true page-turner.” —The Washington Post
“Thought-provoking.” —Entertainment Weekly

It's the summer of 1854, and London is just emerging as one of the first modern cities in the world. But lacking the infrastructure-garbage removal, clean water, sewers-necessary to support its rapidly expanding population, the city has become the perfect breeding ground for a terrifying disease no one knows how to cure. As the cholera outbreak takes hold, a physician and a local curate are spurred to action-and ultimately solve the most pressing medical riddle of their time.

In a triumph of multidisciplinary thinking, Johnson illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of disease, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry, offering both a riveting history and a powerful explanation of how it has shaped the world we live in.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Monday, August 28

THE NIGHT-SOIL MEN

IT IS AUGUST 1854, AND LONDON IS A CITY OF SCAVENGERS. Just the names alone read now like some kind of exotic zoological catalogue: bone-pickers, rag-gatherers, pure-finders, dredgermen, mud-larks, sewer-hunters, dustmen, night-soil men, bunters, toshers, shoremen. These were the London underclasses, at least a hundred thousand strong. So immense were their numbers that had the scavengers broken off and formed their own city, it would have been the fifth-largest in all of England. But the diversity and precision of their routines were more remarkable than their sheer number. Early risers strolling along the Thames would see the toshers wading through the muck of low tide, dressed almost comically in flowing velveteen coats, their oversized pockets filled with stray bits of copper recovered from the water’s edge. The toshers walked with a lantern strapped to their chest to help them see in the predawn gloom, and carried an eight-foot-long pole that they used to test the ground in front of them, and to pull themselves out when they stumbled into a quagmire. The pole and the eerie glow of the lantern through the robes gave them the look of ragged wizards, scouring the foul river’s edge for magic coins. Beside them fluttered the mud-larks, often children, dressed in tatters and content to scavenge all the waste that the toshers rejected as below their standards: lumps of coal, old wood, scraps of rope.

Above the river, in the streets of the city, the pure-finders eked out a living by collecting dog shit (colloquially called “pure”) while the bone-pickers foraged for carcasses of any stripe. Below ground, in the cramped but growing network of tunnels beneath London’s streets, the sewer-hunters slogged through the flowing waste of the metropolis. Every few months, an unusually dense pocket of methane gas would be ignited by one of their kerosene lamps and the hapless soul would be incinerated twenty feet below ground, in a river of raw sewage.

The scavengers, in other words, lived in a world of excrement and death. Dickens began his last great novel, Our Mutual Friend, with a father-daughter team of toshers stumbling across a corpse floating in the Thames, whose coins they solemnly pocket. “What world does a dead man belong to?” the father asks rhetorically, when chided by a fellow tosher for stealing from a corpse. “’Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world.” Dickens’ unspoken point is that the two worlds, the dead and the living, have begun to coexist in these marginal spaces. The bustling commerce of the great city has conjured up its opposite, a ghost class that somehow mimics the status markers and value calculations of the material world. Consider the haunting precision of the bone-pickers’ daily routine, as captured in Henry Mayhew’s pioneering 1844 work, London Labour and the London Poor:

It usually takes the bone-picker from seven to nine hours to go over his rounds, during which time he travels from 20 to 30 miles with a quarter to a half hundredweight on his back. In the summer he usually reaches home about eleven of the day, and in the winter about one or two. On his return home he proceeds to sort the contents of his bag. He separates the rags from the bones, and these again from the old metal (if he be luckly enough to have found any). He divides the rags into various lots, according as they are white or coloured; and if he have picked up any pieces of canvas or sacking, he makes these also into a separate parcel. When he has finished the sorting he takes his several lots to the ragshop or the marine-store dealer, and realizes upon them whatever they may be worth. For the white rags he gets from 2d. to 3d. per pound, according as they are clean or soiled. The white rags are very difficult to be found; they are mostly very dirty, and are therefore sold with the coloured ones at the rate of about 5 lbs. for 2d.

The homeless continue to haunt today’s postindustrial cities, but they rarely display the professional clarity of the bone-picker’s impromptu trade, for two primary reasons. First, minimum wages and government assistance are now substantial enough that it no longer makes economic sense to eke out a living as a scavenger. (Where wages remain depressed, scavenging remains a vital occupation; witness the perpendadores of Mexico City.) The bone collector’s trade has also declined because most modern cities possess elaborate systems for managing the waste generated by their inhabitants. (In fact, the closest American equivalent to the Victorian scavengers—the aluminum-can collectors you sometimes see hovering outside supermarkets—rely on precisely those waste-management systems for their paycheck.) But London in 1854 was a Victorian metropolis trying to make do with an Elizabethan public infrastructure. The city was vast even by today’s standards, with two and a half million people crammed inside a thirty-mile circumference. But most of the techniques for managing that kind of population density that we now take for granted—recycling centers, public-health departments, safe sewage removal—hadn’t been invented yet.

And so the city itself improvised a response—an unplanned, organic response, to be sure, but at the same time a response that was precisely contoured to the community’s waste-removal needs. As the garbage and excrement grew, an underground market for refuse developed, with hooks into established trades. Specialists emerged, each dutifully carting goods to the appropriate site in the official market: the bone collectors selling their goods to the bone-boilers, the pure-finders selling their dog shit to tanners, who used the “pure” to rid their leather goods of the lime they had soaked in for weeks to remove animal hair. (A process widely considered to be, as one tanner put it, “the most disagreeable in the whole range of manufacture.”)

We’re naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. In many ways, this is the correct response. (It was, to be sure, the response of the great crusaders of the age, among them Dickens and Mayhew.) But such social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people. The great contribution usually ascribed to Mayhew’s London Labour is simply his willingness to see and record the details of these impoverished lives. But just as valuable was the insight that came out of that bookkeeping, once he had run the numbers: far from being unproductive vagabonds, Mayhew discovered, these people were actually performing an essential function for their community. “The removal of the refuse of a large town,” he wrote, “is, perhaps, one of the most important of social operations.” And the scavengers of Victorian London weren’t just getting rid of that refuse—they were recycling it.

WASTE RECYCLING IS USUALLY ASSUMED TO BE AN INVENTION of the environmental movement, as modern as the blue plastic bags we now fill with detergent bottles and soda cans. But it is an ancient art. Composting pits were used by the citizens of Knossos in Crete four thousand years ago. Much of medieval Rome was built out of materials pilfered from the crumbling ruins of the imperial city. (Before it was a tourist landmark, the Colosseum served as a de facto quarry.) Waste recycling—in the form of composting and manure spreading—played a crucial role in the explosive growth of medieval European towns. High-density collections of human beings, by definition, require significant energy inputs to be sustainable, starting with reliable supplies of food. The towns of the Middle Ages lacked highways and container ships to bring them sustenance, and so their population sizes were limited by the fecundity of the land around them. If the land could grow only enough food to sustain five thousand people, then five thousand people became the ceiling. But by plowing their organic waste back into the earth, the early medieval towns increased the productivity of the soil, thus raising the population ceiling, thereby creating more waste—and increasingly fertile soil. This feedback loop transformed the boggy expanses of the Low Countries, which had historically been incapable of sustaining anything more complex than isolated bands of fishermen, into some of the most productive soils in all of Europe. To this day, the Netherlands has the highest population density of any country in the world.

Waste recycling turns out to be a hallmark of almost all complex systems, whether the man-made ecosystems of urban life, or the microscopic economies of the cell. Our bones are themselves the result of a recycling scheme pioneered by natural selection billions of years ago. All nucleated organisms generate excess calcium as a waste product. Since at least the Cambrian times, organisms have accumulated those calcium reserves, and put them to good use: building shells, teeth, skeletons. Your ability to walk upright is due to evolution’s knack for recycling its toxic waste.

Waste recycling is a crucial attribute of the earth’s most diverse ecosystems. We value tropical rain forests because they squander so little of the energy supplied by the sun, thanks to their vast, interlocked system of organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. The cherished diversity of the rain-forest ecosystem is not just a quaint case of biological multiculturalism. The diversity of the system is precisely why rain forests do such a brilliant job of capturing the energy that flows through them: one organism captures a certain amount of energy, but in processing that energy, it generates waste. In an efficient system, that waste becomes a new source of energy for another creature in the chain. (That efficiency is one of the reasons why clearing the rain forests is such a shortsighted move: the nutrient cycles in their ecosystems are so tight that the soil is usually very poor for farming: all the available energy has been captured on its way down to the forest floor.)

Coral reefs display a comparable knack for waste management. Corals live in a symbiotic alliance with tiny algae called zooxanthellae. Thanks to photosynthesis, the algae capture sunlight and use it to turn carbon dioxide into organic carbon, with oxygen as a waste product of the process. The coral then uses the oxygen in its own metabolic cycle. Because we’re aerobic creatures ourselves, we tend not to think of oxygen as a waste product, but from the point of view of the algae, that’s precisely what it is: a useless substance discharged as part of its metabolic cycle. The coral itself produces waste in the form of carbon dioxide, nitrates, and phosphates, all of which help the algae to grow. That tight waste-recycling chain is one of the primary reasons coral reefs are able to support such a dense and diverse population of creatures, despite residing in tropical waters, which are generally nutrient-poor. They are the cities of the sea.

There can be many causes behind extreme population density—whether the population is made up of angelfish or spider monkeys or humans—but without efficient forms of waste recycling, those dense concentrations of life can’t survive for long. Most of that recycling work, in both remote tropical rain forests and urban centers, takes place at the microbial level. Without the bacteria-driven processes of decomposition, the earth would have been overrun by offal and carcasses eons ago, and the life-sustaining envelope of the earth’s atmosphere would be closer to the uninhabitable, acidic surface of Venus. If some rogue virus wiped out every single mammal on the planet, life on earth would proceed, largely unaffected by the loss. But if the bacteria disappeared overnight, all life on the planet would be extinguished within a matter of years.

You couldn’t see those microbial scavengers at work in Victorian London, and the great majority of scientists—not to mention laypeople—had no idea that the world was in fact teeming with tiny organisms that made their lives possible. But you could detect them through another sensory channel: smell. No extended description of London from that period failed to mention the stench of the city. Some of that stench came from the burning of industrial fuels, but the most objectionable smells—the ones that ultimately helped prod an entire public-health infrastructure into place—came from the steady, relentless work of bacteria decomposing organic matter. Those deadly pockets of methane in the sewers were themselves produced by the millions of microorganisms diligently recycling human dung into a microbial biomass, with a variety of gases released as waste products. You can think of those fiery, underground explosions as a kind of skirmish between two different kinds of scavenger: sewer-hunter versus bacterium—living on different scales but nonetheless battling for the same territory.

But in that late summer of 1854, as the toshers and the mud-larks and the bone collectors made their rounds, London was headed toward another, even more terrifying, battle between microbe and man. By the time it was over, it would prove as deadly as any in the city’s history.

LONDON’S UNDERGROUND MARKET OF SCAVENGING HAD ITS own system of rank and privilege, and near the top were the night-soil men. Like the beloved chimney sweeps of Mary Poppins, the night-soil men worked as independent contractors at the very edge of the legitimate economy, though their labor was significantly more revolting than the foraging of the mud-larks and toshers. City landlords hired the men to remove the “night soil” from the overflowing cesspools of their buildings. The collecting of human excrement was a venerable occupation; in medieval times they were called “rakers” and “gong-fermors,” and they played an indispensable role in the waste-recycling system that helped London grow into a true metropolis, by selling the waste to farmers outside the city walls. (Later entrepreneurs hit upon a technique for extracting nitrogen from the ordure that could be reused in the manufacture of gunpowder.) While the rakers and their descendants made a good wage, the work conditions could be deadly: in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit.

By the nineteenth century, the night-soil men had evolved a precise choreography for their labors. They worked the graveyard shift, between midnight and five a.m., in teams of four: a “ropeman,” a “holeman,” and two “tubmen.” The team would affix lanterns at the edge of the cesspit, then remove the floorboards or stone covering it, sometimes with a pickax. If the waste had accumulated high enough, the ropeman and holeman would begin by scooping it out with the tub. Eventually, as more night soil was removed, the men would lower a ladder down and the holeman would descend into the pit and scoop waste into his tub. The ropeman would help pull up each full tub, and pass it along to the tubmen who emptied the waste into their carts. It was standard practice for the night-soil men to be offered a bottle of gin for their labors. As one reported to Mayhew: “I should say that there’s been a bottle of gin drunk at the clearing of every two, ay, and more than every two, out of three cesspools emptied in London; and now that I come to think on it, I should say that’s been the case with three out of every four.”

The work was foul, but the pay was good. Too good, as it turned out. Thanks to its geographic protection from invasion, London had become the most sprawling of European cities, expanding far beyond its Roman walls. (The other great metropolis of the nineteenth century, Paris, had almost the same population squeezed into half the geographic area.) For the night-soil men, that sprawl meant longer transport times—open farmland was now often ten miles away—which drove the price of their removing waste upward. By the Victorian era, the night-soil men were charging a shilling a cesspool, wages that were at least twice that of the average skilled laborer. For many Londoners, the financial cost of removing waste exceeded the environmental cost of just letting it accumulate—particularly for landlords, who often didn’t live on top of these overflowing cesspools. Sights like this one, reported by a civil engineer hired to survey two houses under repair in the 1840s, became commonplace: “I found whole areas of the cellars of both houses were full of nightsoil to the depth of three feet, which had been permitted for years to accumulate from the overflow of the cesspools…. Upon passing through the passage of the first house I found the yard covered in nightsoil, from the overflowing of the privy to the depth of nearly six inches and bricks were placed to enable the inmates to get across dryshod.” Another account describes a dustheap in Spital-fields, in the heart of the East End: “a heap of dung the size of a tolerably large house, and an artificial pond into which the content of cesspits are thrown. The contents are allowed to desiccate in the open air, and they are frequently stirred for that purpose.” Mayhew described this grotesque scene in an article published in the London Morning Chronicle in 1849 that surveyed the ground zero of that year’s cholera outbreak:

We then journeyed on to London-street…. In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity. As we passed along the reeking banks of the sewer, the sun shone upon a narrow slip of the water. In the bright light it appeared the colour of strong green tea, and positively looked as solid as black marble in the shadow—indeed, it was more like watery mud than muddy water; and yet we were assured this was the only water the wretched inhabitants had to drink. As we gazed in horror at it, we saw drains and sewers emptying their filthy contents into it; we saw a whole tier of doorless privies in the open road, common to men and women, built over it; we heard bucket after bucket of filth splash into it; and the limbs of the vagrant boys bathing in it seemed by pure force of contrast, white as Parian marble. And yet, as we stood doubting the fearful statement, we saw a little child, from one of the galleries opposite, lower a tin can with a rope to fill a large bucket that stood beside her. In each of the balconies that hung over the stream the self-same tub was to be seen in which the inhabitants put the mucky liquid to stand, so that they may, after it has rested for a day or two, skim the fluid from the solid particles of filth, pollution, and disease. As the little thing dangled her tin cup as gently as possible into the stream, a bucket of night-soil was poured down from the next gallery.

Victorian London had its postcard wonders, to be sure—the Crystal Palace, Trafalgar Square, the new additions to Westminster Palace. But it also had wonders of a different order, no less remarkable: artificial ponds of raw sewage, dung heaps the size of houses.

The elevated wage of the night-soil men wasn’t the only culprit behind this rising tide of excrement. The runaway popularity of the water closet heightened the crisis. A water-flushing device had been invented in the late sixteenth century by Sir John Harington, who actually installed a functioning version for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth, at Richmond Palace. But the device didn’t take off until the late 1700s, when a watchmaker named Alexander Cummings and a cabinetmaker named Joseph Bramah filed for two separate patents on an improved version of Harington’s design. Bramah went on to build a profitable business installing water closets in the homes of the well-to-do. According to one survey, water-closet installations had increased tenfold in the period between 1824 and 1844. Another spike happened after a manufacturer named George Jennings installed water closets for public use in Hyde Park during the Great Exhibition of 1851. An estimated 827,000 visitors used them. The visitors no doubt marveled at the Exhibition’s spectacular display of global culture and modern engineering, but for many the most astonishing experience was just sitting on a working toilet for the first time.

Water closets were a tremendous breakthrough as far as quality of life was concerned, but they had a disastrous effect on the city’s sewage problem. Without a functioning sewer system to connect to, most WCs simply flushed their contents into existing cesspools, greatly increasing their tendency to overflow. According to one estimate, the average London household used 160 gallons of water a day in 1850. By 1856, thanks to the runaway success of the water closet, they were using 244 gallons.

But the single most important factor driving London’s waste-removal crisis was a matter of simple demography: the number of people generating waste had almost tripled in the space of fifty years. In the 1851 census, London had a population of 2.4 million people, making it the most populous city on the planet, up from around a million at the turn of the century. Even with a modern civic infrastructure, that kind of explosive growth is difficult to manage. But without infrastructure, two million people suddenly forced to share ninety square miles of space wasn’t just a disaster waiting to happen—it was a kind of permanent, rolling disaster, a vast organism destroying itself by laying waste to its habitat. Five hundred years after the fact, London was slowly re-creating the horrific demise of Richard the Raker: it was drowning in its own filth.

ALL OF THOSE HUMAN LIVES CROWDED TOGETHER HAD AN inevitable repercussion: a surge in corpses. In the early 1840s, a twenty-three-year-old Prussian named Friedrich Engels embarked on a scouting mission for his industrialist father that inspired both a classic text of urban sociology and the modern Socialist movement. Of his experiences in London, Engels wrote:

The corpses [of the poor] have no better fate than the carcasses of animals. The pauper burial ground at St Bride’s is a piece of open marshland which has been used since Charles II’s day and there are heaps of bones all over the place. Every Wednesday the remains of dead paupers are thrown in to a hole which is 14 feet deep. A clergyman gabbles through the burial service and then the grave is filled with loose soil. On the following Wednesday the ground is opened again and this goes on until it is completely full. The whole neighborhood is infected from the dreadful stench.

One privately run burial ground in Islington had packed 80,000 corpses into an area designed to hold roughly three thousand. A gravedigger there reported to the Times of London that he had been “up to my knees in human flesh, jumping on the bodies, so as to cram them in the least possible space at the bottom of the graves, in which fresh bodies were afterwards placed.”

Dickens buries the mysterious opium-addicted law-writer who overdoses near the beginning of Bleak House in a comparably grim setting, inspiring one of the book’s most famous, and famously impassioned, outbursts:

a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed…. With houses looking on, one very side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate—with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life—here, they lower our dear brother down a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilization and barbarism walked this boastful island together.

To read those last sentences is to experience the birth of what would become a dominant rhetorical mode of twentieth-century thought, a way of making sense of the high-tech carnage of the Great War, or the Taylorite efficiencies of the concentration camps. The social theorist Walter Benjamin reworked Dickens’ original slogan in his enigmatic masterpiece “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written as the scourge of fascism was enveloping Europe: “There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”

The opposition between civilization and barbarism was practically as old as the walled city itself. (As soon as there were gates, there were barbarians ready to storm them.) But Engels and Dickens suggested a new twist: that the advance of civilization produced barbarity as an unavoidable waste product, as essential to its metabolism as the gleaming spires and cultivated thought of polite society. The barbarians weren’t storming the gates. They were being bred from within. Marx took that insight, wrapped it in Hegel’s dialectics, and transformed the twentieth century. But the idea itself sprang out of a certain kind of lived experience—on the ground, as the activists still like to say. It came, in part, from seeing human beings buried in conditions that defiled both the dead and the living.

But in one crucial sense Dickens and Engels had it wrong. However gruesome the sight of the burial ground was, the corpses themselves were not likely spreading “malignant diseases.” The stench was offensive enough, but it was not “infecting” anyone. A mass grave of decomposing bodies was an affront to both the senses and to personal dignity, but the smell it emitted was not a public-health risk. No one died of stench in Victorian London. But tens of thousands died because the fear of stench blinded them to the true perils of the city, and drove them to implement a series of wrongheaded reforms that only made the crisis worse. Dickens and Engels were not alone; practically the entire medical and political establishment fell into the same deadly error: everyone from Florence Nightingale to the pioneering reformer Edwin Chadwick to the editors of The Lancet to Queen Victoria herself. The history of knowledge conventionally focuses on breakthrough ideas and conceptual leaps. But the blind spots on the map, the dark continents of error and prejudice, carry their own mystery as well. How could so many intelligent people be so grievously wrong for such an extended period of time? How could they ignore so much overwhelming evidence that contradicted their most basic theories? These questions, too, deserve their own discipline—the sociology of error.

The fear of death’s contamination can sometimes last for centuries. In the middle of the Great Plague of 1665, the Earl of Craven purchased a block of land in a semirural area to the west of central London called Soho Field. He built thirty-six small houses “for the reception of poor and miserable objects” suffering from plague. The rest of the land was used as a mass grave. Each night, the death carts would empty dozens of corpses into the earth. By some estimates, over four thousand plague-infected bodies were buried there in a matter of months. Nearby residents gave it the appropriately macabre-sounding name of “Earl of Craven’s pest-field,” or “Craven’s field” for short. For two generations, no one dared erect a foundation in the land for fear of infection. Eventually, the city’s inexorable drive for shelter won out over its fear of disease, and the pesthouse fields became the fashionable district of Golden Square, populated largely by aristocrats and Huguenot immigrants. For another century, the skeletons lay undisturbed beneath the churn of city commerce, until late summer of 1854, when another outbreak came to Golden Square and brought those grim souls back to haunt their final resting grounds once more.

CRAVEN’S FIELD ASIDE, SOHO IN THE DECADES AFTER THE plague quickly became one of London’s most fashionable neighborhoods. Almost a hundred titled families lived there in the 1690s. In 1717, the Prince and Princess of Wales set up residence in Leicester House in Soho. Golden Square itself had been built out with elegant Georgian townhouses, a haven from the tumult of Piccadilly Circus several blocks to the south. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, the elites continued their inexorable march westward, building even grander estates and townhouses in the burgeoning new neighborhood of Mayfair. By 1740, there were only twenty titled residents left. A new kind of Soho native began to appear, best embodied by the son of a hosier who was born at 28 Broad in 1757, a talented and troubled child by the name of William Blake, who would go on to be one of England’s greatest poets and artists. In his late twenties, he returned to Soho and opened a printing shop next door to his late father’s shop, now run by his brother. Another Blake brother opened a bakery across the road at 29 Broad shortly thereafter, and so for a few years, the Blake family had a mini-empire growing on Broad Street, with three separate businesses on the same block.

The mix of artistic vision and entrepreneurial spirit would define the area for several generations. As the city grew increasingly industrial, and as the old money emptied out, the neighborhood became grittier; landlords invariably broke up the old townhouses into separate flats; courtyards between buildings filled up with impromptu junkyards, stables, jury-rigged extensions. Dickens described it best in Nicholas Nickleby:

In that quarter of London in which Golden Square is situated, there is a bygone, faded, tumble-down street, with two irregular rows of tall meagre houses, which seem to have stared each other out of countenance years ago. The very chimneys appear to have grown dismal and melancholy from having had nothing better to look at than the chimneys over the way…. To judge from the size of the houses, they have been, at one time, tenanted by persons of better condition than their present occupants; but they are now let off, by the week, in floors or rooms, and every door has almost as many plates or bell-handles as there are apartments within. The windows are, for the same reason, sufficiently diversified in appearance, being ornamented with every variety of common blind and curtain that can easily be imagined; which every doorway is blocked up, and rendered nearly impassable, by a motley collection of children and porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot, to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can.

By 1851, the subdistrict of Berwick Street on the west side of Soho was the most densely populated of all 135 subdistricts that made up Greater London, with 432 people to the acre. (Even with its skyscrapers, Manhattan today only houses around 100 per acre.) The parish of St. Luke’s in Soho had thirty houses per acre. In Kensington, by contrast, the number per acre was two.

But despite—or perhaps because of—the increasingly crowded and unsanitary conditions, the neighborhood was a hotbed of creativity. The list of poets and musicians and sculptors and philosophers who lived in Soho during this period reads like an index to a textbook on Enlightenment-era British culture. Edmund Burke, Fanny Burney, Percy Shelley, William Hogarth—all were Soho residents at various points in their lives. Leopold Mozart leased a flat on Frith Street while visiting with his son, the eight-year-old prodigy Wolfgang, in 1764. Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner also stayed in the neighborhood when visiting London in 1839–1840.

From Amazon

Steven Johnson, bestselling author of Everything Bad is Good for You, is fantastically gifted, and anyone who doubts it need only consider this: in The Ghost Map, Johnson manages to make filth, overpopulation, feces and death the cornerstones of one of the year's snappiest page-turners. On the simplest level, The Ghost Map is the true-life tale of the cholera scourge that slammed London in 1854 and the two passionate and whip-smart men who ferreted out its cause. But it's also a biography, a detective saga, a horror story, a history lesson, a sociological rumination on cities, an unlikely but gripping celebration of the modern sewer system and a vivid portrait of historic London life.
"London's underground market of scavenging had its own system of rank and privilege, and near the top were the night-soil men," Johnson observes. "Like the beloved chimney sweeps of Mary Poppins, the night-soil men worked as independent contractors at the very edge of the legitimate economy, though their labor was significantly more revolting than the foraging of the mud-larks and toshers.

"City landlords hired the men to remove the "night soil" from the overflowing cesspools of their buildings. The collecting of human excrement was a venerable occupation; in medieval times they were called rakers. [But] the work conditions could be deadly: in 1326, an ill-fated laborer by the name of Richard the Raker fell into a cesspool and literally drowned in human shit."

Nice. Clearly much more than just a dry recitation of data--though the depth of Johnson's research is obvious--The Ghost Map is a hair-raiser that cooks from page one. A big reason is Johnson's ability to personify and animate what he terms "the invisible kingdom of microscopic bacteria," transforming cholera into a nefarious three-dimensional villain with a role to play and zest for the part.

His work as biographer also impresses. Johnson gives us two protagonists all but forgotten by history who really should be feted: Dr. John Snow, who 150 years ago in an era of superstition and tenaciously held scientific notions, managed to work out the simple equation that excrement + drinking water = death. We also meet Reverend Henry Whitehead who similarly helped to crack the cholera riddle by flat-footing it through Soho, interviewing residents and survivors and eventually coming to believe that Snow was onto something with his water-borne disease theory. (The prevailing wisdom of the day held that disease was airborne and linked to smell).

It is no exaggeration to say that Snow's efforts changed the world. Ditto engineer Joseph Bazalgette, whose sprawling, visionary English sewer system Johnson likens in stature and scope to the Eiffel Tower and Brooklyn Bridge. The Ghost Map is a great, great book, stuffed with cool factoids and told by a writer so conversant in his topic that it plays like an exquisite yarn shared over friendly beers. --Kim Hughes

Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-century Europe

Richard Olson
University of Illinois Press, 2008 - Science - 349 pages
2 Reviews
Exploring the natural scientific foundations of far-reaching social ideologies

The nineteenth century produced scientific and cultural revolutions that forever transformed modern European life. Although these critical developments are often studied independently, Richard G. Olson's Science and Scientism in Nineteenth-Century Europe provides an integrated account of the history of science and its impact on intellectual and social trends of the day. Focusing on the natural scientific foundations underlying liberalism, socialism, positivism, communism, and social Darwinism, Olson explores how these movements employed science to clarify their own understanding of Enlightenment ideals, as well as their understanding of progress, religion, industry, imperialism, and racism. Starting with the impact of the French Revolution on scientific thought, Olson engages with key texts from J. B. Say, Henri Saint-Simon, Kant, Goethe, Darwin, Walter Bagehot, and Edward Bellamy to demonstrate the complex set of forces that shaped nineteenth-century thinking.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=h8C7fe50J0AC&dq=Herbert+Spencer+and+scientism&source=gbs_navlinks_s

The fallacy of objectivity in educational research: scientism as neo-liberal ideology
Citation metadata

Authors: Emery J. Hyslop-Margison and John A. Dale
Date: Winter 2005

From: Journal of Curriculum Theorizing(Vol. 21, Issue 4)
Publisher: Caddo Gap Press

Document Type: Article
Length: 4,020 words


Article Preview :

There are concerted attempts to promote scientifically-based research in contemporary education to the exclusion of other research paradigms. These efforts are reflected "in the No Child Left Behind Act and the reauthorization and reorganization of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement as the Institute for Educational Science" (Maxwell, 2004, p. 3). This prevailing trend within education is predicated on empiricist assumptions that mistakenly believe student achievement and attainment are best enhanced through scientific analysis, measurement and related program reform. Further, the instrumental implications of scientism in educational research are ideological because the approach insulates foundational problems in education from critique and transformation.

The view that science improves education is at least partially indebted to Herbert Spencer's 19th century pseudo-scientific learning principles and Auguste Comte's misguided faith in positivism as a means to understand human interaction. Although science has profoundly influenced education since the middle of the nineteenth-century, its ability to enhance learning is not evident in available statistics on student achievement (Egan, 2000). Nevertheless, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act advances social science assumptions as a means to improve education by demanding that learning programs be based on research that, "employs systematic, empirical methods that draw on observation and experiment" (2000, n.p.).

In this paper, we launch a multi-pronged attack against the commitment to scientism as a means to improve student achievement, in part, by arguing that empirical research in education violates three necessary conditions of meaningful scientific inquiry: (a) empirical research in education is neither objective or value free; (b) empirical research in education commonly makes theoretical assumptions in the interpretation of collected data; and (c) the methods and theories emerging from empirical research in education are not inter-subjective (Railton, 1991). Research findings are considered inter-subjective and scientific when different investigators employing rigorous data collection and analysis methods ultimately reach the same conclusion. We are not arguing against scientific research or science in the main, but we simply wish to emphasize that scientific investigation must satisfy specific epistemological requirements that are not met by existing research practices in education. Our more general intent in this paper is to strip the veneer of science from a conservative ideologically agenda seeking to reduce research in education to instrumental and socially reproductive forms of inquiry.

Ironically, much of the available empirical data regarding academic achievement and attainment accrued by the sociology of education over the past forty years is entirely ignored by the same individuals who openly advocate empirical research in NCLB. Voluminous empirical evidence indicates unequivocally that economic status is the primary variable in determining student academic achievement (Sadovnik, Cookson, & Semel, 2001). Indeed, the significant correlation between socio-economic status and educational outcomes strongly suggests that academic achievement is largely contingent on the social structure of opportunity. This empirical data, and the inter-subjective inferences it generates, are conveniently overlooked by the authors of NCLB who choose instead to emphasize testing, measurement and micro level accountability.

Based on this convenient oversight by the political architects of NCLB, and...

https://go.gale.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA141753920&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=1057896X&p=AONE&sw=w

The Fragility of Modernity: Infrastructure and Everyday Life in Paris, 1870-1914 by Peter S. Soppelsa

https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/62374/psoppels_1.pdf

Introduction: Modernity, Infrastructure and Everyday Life
 We tend to associate “modernity” with power, control, order, progress, durability
and mastery. We also associate it with Western cities in the grips of the twin historical
transformations unleashed by the nineteenth century: industrialization and urbanization.
We often hear that Western cities became safer, cleaner, healthier, more comfortable,
efficient and rational places to live in the nineteenth century because Europeans
judiciously applied reason, science and technology to organizing and managing everyday
urban life. While Europe underwent fundamental social, spatial and technological
changes (urbanization, industrialization and globalization), so the familiar story goes,
European ways of life became more civilized, rationalized, standard, advanced, efficient,
democratic, humane, or even universal.
 But what would happen to this view of modernity if I told the story of a city in the
grips of industrialization and urbanization, whose leaders were anxious to improve life by
applying science and technology, which, however did not only become more rational,
more efficient and more humane in many ways, but also more complicated, more risky
and more fragile? What if that city was Paris, so-called “capital of the nineteenth
century,” “capital of modernity” and “capital of the world”?1
 In this study, I argue that Paris between 1870 and 1914, the scene of massive
work in infrastructural modernization, can help us uncover a different perspective on
modernity that highlights its contingencies, contradictions, complexity and fragility.2
This study is about what I call “the fragility of modernity,” meaning the special
difficulties that confront cities dependent on increasingly complex networked
infrastructures which bind humans, technology and the natural environment in new ways.
Although we often hear that everyday life was transformed by science and technology in
these years (often called the “Second Industrial Revolution”), Paris's modernization from
1870 to 1914 is better characterized as uneven development. In 1900, Paris became the
world’s fourth city to open an electric-powered subway, but as late as 1928, 18% of its
houses did not enjoy direct to sewer drainage.3
 Parisian responses to modernization were equally uneven, expressing both
optimism and anxiety about technological change, and a number of never-completed
fantasies of perfecting, optimizing, and controlling humans, the city, technology, nature,
and their relations.4
 While France’s civilizing mission kept Paris planners, engineers and
politicians on a technological-determinist track that identified infrastructural development
with progress, results on the terrain of everyday life were quite mixed. Technical
accidents, bureaucratic inefficiency, and shortages of crucial resources like water and
affordable housing called this progress into question. In this study we will hear many
voices in Paris questioning the familiar narrative of infrastructural modernization as
progress, as well as many defending it.3

 Infrastructural development did not influence everyday life in predictable ways.
As the Paris authorities used networked infrastructures to solve urban problems
(distributing water and power, public transportation, etc.), they increased the
heterogeneity, complexity and fragility of the city, helped reproduce social inequalities,
and increased the city’s ecological impact. In this study, I show that what Parisians
recognized as urban modernity between 1870 and 1914, which after Haussmann revolved
around the application of networked infrastructures for solving urban problems, was an
increasingly heterogeneous and fragile assembly, vulnerable to disruptions of social

routine, technological function, and the forces of nature.


1 (1) Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” from The Arcades Project, trans.
Howard Elland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard, 2002), pp. 3-26; (2) David Harvey, Paris, Capital of
Modernity (Routledge, 2003); Patrice Higgonet, Paris: Capital of the World (Harvard, 2005).

2 This idea is inspired by a long line of critical theorists who stress the “duality of modernity.” Ideas drawn from classic German theorists like Marx, Weber, Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin have been
retooled by more recent scholars like Raymond Aron, Marshall Berman , Jürgen Habermas, Detlev
Peukert and David Harvey.
3 Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (Yale, 1978), p. 208.
4 Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (University of

California, 1992).

Innovation: the History of a Category - Chaire Fernand-Dumont

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by B Godin - ‎Cited by 74 - ‎Related articles

enhancement “technology” for improving the innovative abilities of our species. (Greely et ... In a recently-launched project on the intellectual history of innovation, of which this paper is ... Hard, M., and A. Jamison (1998), The Intellectual Appropriation of Technology: Discourses on Modernity, 1900-1939, Cambridge (Mass.): ...

Machines Are Frozen Spirit: The Scientification Of Refrigeration And Brewing In The 19th Century--a Weberian Interpretation 

RIGHT UP MY FIELDS OF STUDY, I TUTORED IN REFRIGERATION I LIKE MY BEER, AND WEBER SOCIOLOGY AND ALL THAT

Paperback – Feb. 24 1994

https://books.google.ca/books/about/Machines_are_frozen_spirit.html?id=qbNTAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y