A father’s authority over his children is an indispensable element in the stability of society, and a master’s authority over his men, though derivative in character, is scarcely less so. The continuance of social peace largely depends upon the latter, and the preservation of social peace should be the essential aim of social science.[1039] We are continually meeting with the expression “social peace” in the writings of Le Play and his school, and the associations which they founded became known as “Unions of Social Peace.”
Play’s first essay, an admirably planned Exposition of Social Economics, was published in 1867. The sole object of its author was to further the establishment of such institutions as were likely to promote understanding among all persons employed in the production of the same goods. We might even be tempted to say that the whole co-partnership movement started by Dollfus at Mulhouse in 1850 with the utterance of the famous phrase, “The master owes something to the worker beyond his mere wages,” was inspired by Le Play.[1040] Le Play pinned his faith to the benevolent master. It was quite natural that the apostle of the family group should regard the factory as possessing a great deal of the stability and many of the other characteristics of the family, such as its quasi-permanent engagements[1041] and its various grades of working men all grouped together under the authority of a well-respected chief.
Le Play’s thesis that the salvation of the working classes can only come from above seems to have even less foundation than the opposite doctrine of syndicalism, which claims that their deliverance is in their own hands, and it was once for all refuted in a brilliant passage of Stuart Mill’s:[1042] “No times can be pointed out in which the higher classes of this or any other country performed a part even distantly resembling the one assigned them in this theory. All privileged and powerful classes as such have used their power in the interest of their own selfishness.… I do not affirm that what has always been must always be. This at least seems to be undeniable, that long before the superior classes could be sufficiently inspired to govern in the tutelary manner supposed, the inferior classes would be too much improved to be so governed.”
Besides the master and the State there was still another factor of social progress which is of prime importance at the present time, namely, working men’s unions. One might reasonably have expected a more sympathetic treatment for them at Le Play’s hands, especially when we remember that they were proscribed by the “false dogmas of ’89.” But he had little faith in union, whether a corporation or a co-operative society.[1043] Trade unionism especially seemed rather useless, because it tended to destroy the more natural and more efficient organisation which appeared to him to be merely an extension of the family group. It is true that Le Play never saw unionism in operation, but it is hardly probable that he would have modified his opinion. At any rate, the attitude of his disciples is not much more favourable.
One feels tempted to say that there is nothing very new in all this. The remark would have been particularly gratifying to Le Play, who considered that invention was impossible in social science and that what he himself had done was merely to make a discovery.
The discovery of “the essential constitution of humanity,” as he called it, was, he thought, the outcome of his methods of observation. His method was really always more important than his doctrine. It has always enjoyed a considerable measure of success, and it seems to-day as if it would survive the doctrine. Le Play was brought up as a mining engineer and had travelled extensively.[1044] Twenty years of his life had been spent in this way, and during that period he had travelled over almost the whole of Europe, even as far as the Urals. It was while staying in the neighbourhood of those mountains that he conceived the idea of writing monographs dealing with individual families belonging to the working classes, a method of investigation which he is never weary of contrasting with that other “disdainful method of invention.”[1045]
To write a family monograph[1046] à la Le Play is not merely to relate its history, to describe its mode of life, and to analyse its means of subsistence, but also to sum up its daily life in a kind of double-entry book-keeping where every item of expenditure is carefully compared and balanced with the receipts. But there is much that is artificial and a great deal that is childish in this seemingly mathematical precision, where not merely economic wants but such needs as those of education, of recreation, and of intemperance, virtues as well as vices, are catalogued and reckoned in terms of £ s. d. Its advantage lies in its holding the attention of the observer, even when he is a mere novice at the work, by obliging him to put something in every column and allowing nothing to escape his notice.[1047]
But when Le Play proceeds to declare that this method has revealed the truth to him and helped him to formulate the doctrines of which we have just given a résumé it really seems as if he were making a great mistake. Actually it has only revealed what Le Play expected to find; in other hands it might have yielded quite different results. He declares that it has proved to him that only those families which are grouped under paternal authority and which obey the Ten Commandments are really happy.[1048] That may be, but how would he define a happy family? “A happy family is one that dwells in unity and abides in the love of God.” He has thus armed himself with a definite a priori criterion of happiness;[1049] but there is nothing to prove that the unstable disorganised family of the Parisian factory hand may not be infinitely more happy than the family group of Melouga or the patriarchal family of the Bashkirs of Turkestan.
A comparison has often been drawn between Le Play’s school and the German Historical school. It is pointed out that both schools lay great emphasis upon the method of observation and focus attention upon the institutions of the past, and that to some extent they both represent a reaction against Liberalism and Classical optimism. But the resemblance is wholly superficial. At bottom the two schools are not merely different, but even divergent. The German school seeks the explanation of the present in the past, while Le Play’s school is merely out to learn a few lessons. The one studies the germ which is to develop and to bear fruit, while the other admires the type and the model to which it thinks it necessary to conform. The one is evolutionary, the other traditional, and the conclusions of the former are radical in the extreme, and even socialistic, while those of the latter are usually conservative.
And so Play’s true position is in the chapter dealing with Social Christianity, and not among the writers of the Historical school.