Abstract
Ever since the eighteenth century, the ideals of the Enlightenment inspired educated people the world over to believe not only that human beings could by their own efforts discover the universal laws and scientific principles that govern human and nonhuman behavior, but to assume as well that the pursuit of scientific knowledge would serve the cause of justice. That Enlightenment universals and scientific knowledge could be deployed to support unjust causes, or to reinforce a variety of despotisms and oppressions was inconceivable to the philosophes, and a vexed question for later proponents of radical and revolutionary change. On the other hand, there have always been plenty of scholars and policy-makers for whom Enlightenment universals and scientific knowledge provided a welcome promise of stability, order, and incremental change within quite undemocratic and economically polarized societies. So, from the outset, the “social sciences of humanity” occupied contested terrain.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Martin Shaw and Ian Miles, “The Social Roots of Statistical Knowledge,” Martin Shaw and Ian Miles, eds., Demystifying Social Statistics (London: Pluto Press, 1979), 31.
M.J. Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundation of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975), 11.
Philip Abrams, The Origins of British Sociology: 1834–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 9.
Quoted in Viktor Hilts, “Aliis exterendum, or the Origins of the Statistics Society of London,” Isis 69, no.246 (March 1978): 27.
Mark Blaug, Ricardian Economics (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 15 and
Blaug A, Economic Theory in Retrospect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 667.
Theodore Porter, Rise of Statistical Thinking1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 27.
In general, those troubled by this issue also feared that too great a focus on empirical data would lead to a devaluing of the crucial importance of scientific theory and theoretical understanding. Lawrence Goldman, “The Origins of British Social Science: Political Economy, Natural Science and Statistics, 1830–1835,” Historical Journal6 (1983): 609.
Gerard Koot, English Historical Economics 1870–1926: The Rise of Economic History and Neomercantilism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 20.
M.V. Ptukha, Ocherki po istorii statistiki v SSSR (Moscow: Izd. Akademii nauk, 1959), 111,
and N.K. Karataev, Russkaia ekonomicheskaia mysl’ v period krizisa feodal’nogo khoziaistva (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1957), 72–74.
N.K Karataev, Ekonomicheskie nauki v Moskovskom universitete, 1755–1955 (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1956), 93.
See general discussion in Ulla Schafer, Historische Nationaloekonomie und Sozialstatistik als Gesellschaftswissenschaften (Vienna: Bohlau, 1971),
and G. Eisermann, Die Grundlagen des Historismus in der deutschen Nationaloekonomie (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1956). Among the English-language scholarly works to address the economics methodenstreit in recent decades are
D.C. Coleman, History and the Economic Past: An Account of the Rise and Decline of Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),
and Alon Kadish, Historians, Economists and Economic History (New York: Routledge, 1989).
English-language studies of German historical economics are rare. See William Cherin, “The German Historical School of Economics: A Study in Methodology of the Social Sciences.” Ph.D. diss. (University of California at Berkeley, 1933) and Nicholas Balabkins, Not By Theory Alone: The Economics of Gustav von Schmoller and his Legacy to America (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1988).
Although Verein economists shared a belief in the importance of what they called “the social question,” they differed markedly in their proposed solutions. See Dieter Lindenlaub, Richtungskampfe in Verein fur Sozialpolitik (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1967),
Kenneth Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization 1880–1902 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 138–147,
and Woodruff Smith, The Ideological Origins of Nazi Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 21–30.
See B.N. Chicherin, “Die Leibeigenschaft in Russland,” Deutsche-Staats-worterbuch 6 (Stuttgart, 1861): 393–411
Quoted in S. Frederick Starr, Decentralization and Self Government in Russia, 1833–1870 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 261.
S.M. Bleklov, Travaux statistique des zemstvo russe (Paris, 1893), 15.
Foreign observers like Emile de Laveleye, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, the German scholar Christian Walcher, and the British journalist Donald Mackenzie Wallace criticized the Valuev Commission for the arbitrariness of its conclusions and its failure to invite direct peasant testimony. See discussion of Wallace’s view in Kingston-Mann, In Search 169–170 and the careful analysis of the Valuev investigations in Steven Grant, The Peasant Commune in Russian Thought, 1861–1905, Ph.D. diss. (Harvard, 1973), 192–272.
L.I. Kuchumova, “Iz istoriia obsledovaniia sel’skoi pozemel’noi obshchiny v 1887–1880 godakh,” Istoriia SSSR 3 (1978): 115–127.
I am indebted to Robert Johnson for his generous, long-ago sharing of biographical data on individual zemstvo statisticians. See Robert Johnson, “Liberal Professionals and Professional Liberals: The Zemstvo Statisticians and Their Work,” W.S. Vucinich and T. Emmons, eds., The Zemstvo in Russia: An Experiment in Local Self-government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 343–363. An extremely valuable discussion that illuminates the relationship between zemstvo statistical findings and the expectations of the tsarist regime is
David Darrow, “The Politics of Numbers: Zemstvo Land Assessment and the Conceptualization of Russia’s Rural Economy,” Russian Review 59, no.1 (2000): 52–75. Useful surveys include
NA. Svavitskii, Zemskie podvornye perepisi:Obzor metodologii (Moscow: Gosstatizdat, 1961);
A.A. Kaufman, “The History and Development of Official Russian Statistics,” in John Koren, ed., The History of Statistics: Their Development and Progress in Many Countries (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 520–531;
and A.A. Rusov, Kratkii obzor razvitiia otsenochnoi statistiki (Kiev, 1913).
Belokonskii was himself a zemstvo statistician exiled to Siberia for his connection with the revolutionary organization Zemlia i Volia. See I.P Belokonskii, V gody bespraviia (Moscow: Izd. Vses. Ob-va Politkatorzhan i Ssyl’no-poselentsev, 1930), 43.
Kaufman made this argument in l894 at the Ninth Congress of Naturalists and Physicians. See Z.M. Svavitskaia, “Moskovskii universitet i zemskaia statistika,” Ocherki po istorii statistiki SSSR, 2 (Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk, 1957), 99, 101.
In Russia, the practices traditionally associated with the English commons were far more pronounced in the peasantry’s traditional, repartitional land communes. Although hereditary (podvornoe) tenure prevailed in the western regions of the Russian Empire and some parts of the south, the distinction between communal and podvornoe tenure was frequently problematic, because both usually featured the communal use of pasture and forest lands. See Steven Grant. Although hereditary (podvornoe) tenure prevailed in the western regions of the Russian Empire and some parts of the south, the distinction between communal and podvornoe tenure was frequently problematic, because both usually featured the communal use of pasture and forest lands. See Steven Grant, “Obshchina i Mir,” Slavic Review 35, no.4 (1976): 636–651.
V.V. Veselovskii and Z.G. Frenkel, Iubileinyi zemskii sbornik (St. Petersburg: Izd. Popovoi, 1914), 346–348.
Vera Romanova Leikina-Svirskaia, Intelligentsiia v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine xix veka (Moscow: Mysl’, 1971), 209–210.
V.V. Veselovskii, Istoriia zemstva za 40 let (St. Petersburg: Izd. Popovoi, 1909–11), 1: 81–83.
I.P Belokonskii, Dan vremeni (Moscow: Zadruga, 1918), 79–80.
Z. Tverdova-Svavitskaia, Zemskie podvornye perepisi1880–1913 (Moscow: Ts.SU SSSR, 1926), 117–118. In Kherson province, research was suspended after zem-stvo statisticians revealed massive evidence of gentry tax evasion; see Robert Johnson, “Liberal Professionals,” 345–346, 353–354.
N.M. Astyrev, “K voprosu ob organizatsii tekushchei zemskoi statistiki,” Russkaia Mysl’ 5 (1887): 43–60; and Bleklov, Travaux statistique, 21–22.
See Chris Argyris, “Diagnosing Defenses against the Outsider,” in G. McCall and J.L. Simmons, eds., Issues in Participant Observation (New York: Random House, l969), 114–127,
See especially V.P Vorontsov, Progressivnye techeniia v krestianskom khoziaistve (St. Petersburg, 1892), 25–27.
See discussion in Esther Kingston-Mann, Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 48.
V.E. Postnikov, Iuzhno-russkoe krest’ianskoe khoziaistvo (Moscow: I.N. Kushnerev, 1891).
N.N. Chernenkov, K kharakteristike krest’ianskogo khoziaistva (Moscow: Russkoe Tovarichestvo, 1905). According to the statistician
K.R. Kachorovskii, Chernenkov was the first to focus on this cyclical process. See “The Russian Land Commune in History and Today,” Slavonic and East European Review 7, no.21 (1929): 565–576. In the late nineteenth century, N.A. Kablukov and A.V. Peshekhonov published research and analysis along similar lines, which foreshadowed the post-1905 work of A.V. Chaianov’s “Organization and Production School.”
It is worth noting as well that after 1917, the former Marxist economist M.I. Tugan Baranovskii came to agree with this analysis of the zemstvo statistical data. Osnovy politicheskoi ekonomii, 5th edition (Petrograd: Pravo, 1918), 188–192.
See Rchard Pipes, “Russian Marxism and Its Populist Background: The Late Nineteenth Century,” The Russian Review 19, no.4, (October, 1960): 316–377 and Struve: Liberal on the Left (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 85. For a perspective quite sympathetic to Lenin’s judgment on “populists” as anti-Western reactionaries, see the writings of
Andrzej Walicki, and in particular, The Controversy over Capitalism: Studies in the Social Philosophy of the Russian Populists (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1989), 2–3.
For tsarist Finance Minister Witte, capitalism represented the high point and culmination of Russia’s economic development. To Lenin and his supporters, capitalism represented an essential prerequisite for proletarian socialist revolution. See discussion in Kingston-Mann , “Deconstructing the Romance of the Bourgeoisie: A Russian Marxist Path Not Taken,” Review of International Political Economy 10, no.1 (2003): 102–106.
David Macey, Government and Peasant in Russia, 1861–1906: The Prehistory of the Stolypin Reforms (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), 37.
V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th edition (Moscow: Gos. Izd. Polit. Lit., 1971–1975), vol. 3, 7.
See, e.g., K.R. Kachorovskii, Bor’ba za zemliu (St. Petersburg: Tip. D. P. Veisborg, 1908), xlviii.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Susan P. McCaffray and Michael Melancon
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kingston-Mann, E. (2005). Statistics, Social Science, and Social Justice: The Zemstvo Statisticians of Pre-Revolutionary Russia. In: McCaffray, S.P., Melancon, M. (eds) Russia in the European Context, 1789–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982261_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403982261_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53073-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-8226-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)