French sociologist and engineer Frédéric Le Play (1806-1882) devoted himself to building a science of society that would emulate the natural sciences such as metallurgy, chemistry, and statistics. He believed that social science, which unites statistics, history, law, and political science, should shape government decisions. In ideological terms, Le Play had a negative view of the individualism of liberalism, but he, as well, disliked traditional conservatism.

To develop the science of society, Le Play conducted a huge empirical study of working families in Europe. He combined qualitative observation and interviewing methods with quantitative data to make 36 studies of individual families from Britain, Russia, France, Germany, and Switzerland. The results of this research were presented in the book European Workers (in French 1855), which had six volumes and two editions (in the second, expanded edition, 57 family studies were presented). To collect data on each family, Le Play spent time with each of them, interviewing family members, and talking to their acquaintances and local authorities, thus obtaining additional information.

He wanted to collect as much economic data as possible for each family: the types of jobs that family members do and all the income they earn, data on their household budgets, that is, all types of expenses and their total value, as well as data on all forms of property that the family-owned. In addition, he collected, in detail, data on labor relations, the legal status of agricultural land and those who cultivate it, ecology, and workers' and citizens' associations, for each region in which a family was located. To theoretically systematize his approach, Le Play made a two-dimensional classification. There were four types of social organizations of labor on one dimension: nomadic, forced labor (serfs in a feudal organization), patronage, and industrial employment; while the second dimension represented seven types of workers. The combination of these two dimensions yields twenty-eight fields, and each field was presented with at least one family study.

Le Play saw the family as the basic unit of society and believed that "family happiness", above all, i.e. the economic well-being of the family, leads to the achievement of "social happiness", which concerns the moral order of society. The ultimate goal of his study of workers was to come up with the institutional and work pattern that gives the greatest chance to achieve "family happiness", but also "social happiness", that is, the socio-economic type that influences the creation of the best "moral law".

In the book Family Organization (in French 1871), Le Play presents three basic types of family in Europe: patriarchal, basic, and unstable. The patriarchal family is based on collective ownership, authoritarian family relations, and the male primogeniture of inheritance of property. The basic (nuclear) family has a private type of property ownership and the rule that a child who inherits property must provide for his elderly parents and other siblings who did not inherit property. An unstable family is characterized by private property, the collapse of parental authority, and equal inheritance of property, without the obligation for the heirs to take care of their elderly parents. Le Play considered the basic (nuclear) family to be ideal because he was between two extremes - excessive conservatism, embodied in a patriarchal family, on the one hand, and excessive individualism, which characterizes an unstable family, on the other.

Le Play's approach to social sciences had made a significant influence on many social scientists in France, Belgium, and Canada, of which some of the most notable are Edmond Demolins, Robert Pinot, Paul de Rousiers, and Henri de Tourville.

Authors: Le Play, Frédéric. Demolins, Edmond; Pinot, Robert; Rousiers, Paul de; Tourville, de Henri.

Books:

Le Play. The Organisation of Labor in Accordance with Custom and the Law of the Decalogue (1872, in French 1870).