Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
15 - The astronomical conception of society
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
Leipzig, 29 April 1871 The French school, always absorbed in the astronomical preoccupations of its founder, sees in man, who lacks freedom of the will, only a being who is subjected to some sort of external and independent force, one which has the remarkable knack of making man, who is not conscious of this force, yet feel responsible for his actions.
The German school… finds this French interpretation perverse and untenable, for it turns a proposition, that in itself is sound, upside down. One need not deny that if there were such a powerful external law at work, then there would be a regular repetition of crimes, marriages, suicides etc. But it is a mistake to say that existing regularities can be explained only by such external laws. The regularities establish for the careful thinker only the existence of some powerful causes, whether they be external to the agent or internal.
Buckle published the first volume of his History of Civilization in England in 1857. He was 36, a familiar Victorian figure – the shy bachelor, neurasthenic, constantly beset by nervous and gastric disorders, working obsessively, prodigously erudite, filled with a vision of some unspoken grandeur, and, in a brief moment of total success, lionized. His book won instant fame all over Europe. He was dead at 40. A line in Dostoyevsky's St Petersburg notebook, written about 1862: ‘Read and reread Buckle and Moleschott!’ But he was not received in the same way in all parts of Europe.
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- Chapter
- Information
- The Taming of Chance , pp. 125 - 132Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990