ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Observation of Workers’ Households and the Monographic Method as an Activist Research Tradition

• In Event: Science and Activism: A Long History

English Abstract

Monographic observation—the engaged and comprehensive observation of a single household or a tightly delimited locality—emerged against the backdrop of widespread pauperization during the first half of the nineteenth century as an activist practice of social and environmental knowledge. This paper looks at two epistemological and political debates that exemplify its origins at the time of the 1848 revolution in France and its consolidation in interwar German speaking world. First, I present the monographic household studies conducted by the mining engineer Frédéric Le Play in the 1830s and 1840s, at a moment when close observation of workers’ lives directly contested the data practices and methodological claims of classical political economy. The monographic form enabled new techniques of measurement and typologies to be linked with the imperative of “direct inquiry” and the moralizing mission of the face-to-face encounter. It established a moral economy of science that based the reliability of facts on proximity and familiarity with the object of research. The second part of my paper connects the monographic tradition with the establishment of social work research (Fürsorgewissenschaft) as an independent discipline in the interwar period, challenging the idea of value-free social science. In both contexts, the household and the family served as an intimate object of knowledge that combined moral, environmental, and political questions. Following the history of household and family research from nineteenth-century engineering to the interwar bourgeois women’s movement, the paper reconstructs the moral economy of an activist research tradition that articulated broader struggles over the disciplining of the social and environmental sciences.

Author

• Martin Herrnstadt, Universität Bremen