Abstract
The rise of nation-states created new spaces for scholarship. The development of sociology has been shaped, both institutionally and intellectually, by different national contexts. This paper looks at the development of the social sciences, and sociology in particular, in little Belgium. We first discuss the work and the international ambitions of the social physicist and homo statisticus Adolphe Quetelet. Next we look at the ideological rivalry between the emerging sociological centers in and around the universities of Brussels and Louvain in the decades around 1900. Afterwards we discuss the growing divergence between the French- and Dutch-speaking scientific communities and the development of different sociologies within Belgium in more recent decades. We conclude with a discussion of the internationalization imperatives currently imposed by Belgian universities and funding agencies.
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Notes
In addition, a small German-speaking community is situated in the east; this territory was annexed by Belgium following Germany’s defeat in World War I and the subsequent Treaty of Versailles. Overall, the population of Belgium increased from around 4 million inhabitants in 1830 to over 11 million at present. 58% of the population is nowadays living in Flanders, 32% in Wallonia and 9.5% in the Brussels Region.
The history of statistics generally distinguishes German descriptive statistics from political arithmetic and mathematical social statistics. Adolphe Quetelet’s work on social physics played a key role in the development of the latter (see Echterhölter 2016:84; Desrosières 1998:18). The motives for the shift from a qualitative form of statistics, based on an encyclopedic version of completeness, to quantitative forms of statistics are multifaceted (e.g., Schaffer 2015). This transition initially also met with a lot of resistance. The use of numbers for political objectives, for example, was strongly questioned (e.g., Lueder 1817:52; see also Echterhölter 2016).
Illustrative is the creation of the Brussels Observatory. Although this observatory was established with the financial support of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, it only opened in 1832, viz. after Belgian independence, and would go down in history as a “national monument” to the new Belgium.
Although our paper focuses specifically on Quetelet as the creator of “social physics,” we should not ignore the value of the many other contributions to Quetelet’s project of social physics.
In preparation for the establishment of the Brussels Observatory, Quetelet had been sent to France, England and Germany to meet scientists and collect suitable material. It is on these missions that Quetelet came into contact with renowned scholars and intellectuals, who would later be of importance for his scientific projects, such as Alexis Bouvard, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Joseph Fourier, Goethe, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and von Humboldt.
Comte (1825-26) described social physics as “that science which occupies itself with social phenomena, considered in the same light as astronomical, physical, chemical, and physiological phenomena, that is to say as being subject to natural and invariable Laws the discovery of which is the special object of its researches” (Iggers 1959: op. cit. 434). An often recited anecdote is that when Comte found that Quetelet had adopted the term “social physics,” he deemed it necessary to invent the term “sociology” since he disapproved of Quetelet’s collection of statistics.
The International Statistical Institute, which was founded in 1885, currently still presents itself as the heir of Quetelet’s Congress.
We have focused in this chapter on Quetelet’s contributions that are of direct relevance to the development of sociology. After his work on social physics, Quetelet devoted himself to the study of climate and meteorology in Belgium and his project on the physics of the globe (“physique du globe”).
Quetelet saw social physics as a way to determine a projected course of society rather than a way for an individual to navigate that course. Émile Durkheim, however, maintained that Quetelet’s theory felt short of explaining how “the average man” and its statistical laws could exert any force on individuals. Quetelet’s theory rested in Durkheim’s view on an inaccurate observation, because it required social forces to act on individuals at an evenly distributed rate. Durkheim instead recurred to collective forces to explain variations in suicide rates (Durkheim 1897).
The immediate cause was the cancellation by the Academic Board of the University of a planned lecture series by the French geographer and anarchist Elisée Reclus. But this conflict escalated because of a range of tensions between conservative and progressive ‘free-thinkers’ in and around the university in Brussels.
Among the participants of the first Solvay Conference on Physics in 1911, for example, were scholars such as Hendrik Lorentz, Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Henri Poincaré, Max Planck and Albert Einstein. Inspired by research in physiology and chemistry, Solvay’s sociology portrayed each human being as a “machine,” which struggles to increase and maximize its output in order to augment its overall well-being.
In 1904, Solvay had a third building erected in the Leopold Park. It accommodated the École de Commerce Solvay, which was intended to train an elite group of business directors and instituted a new degree of “commercial engineer.” The directorship of this school was also entrusted to Waxweiler. The building of the Institut de Sociologie Solvay has in recent years been transformed into a prestigious event venue. Located in the middle of Brussels’ European quarter, it is currently known as the Bibliothèque Solvay.
Both the formation of transnational networks and the creation of bibliographical services were considered essential for shaping the discipline of sociology. To this purpose, two ‘documentalists,’ Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, established the Office International de Bibliographie Sociologique in Brussels in 1893. Otlet and La Fontaine believed that social knowledge could help solidify a new world order. In 1913, thus shortly before the outbreak of the Great War, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to La Fontaine (Van Acker 2016).
To obtain support for this idea, Waxweiler referred to similar plans developed in Louvain, in particular within the context of the Société Belge de Sociologie. In the words of Waxweiler, the Société Belge de Sociologie was a clerical association, not a scientific one, whose plans would widely discredit the idea of sociology as an autonomous scientific discipline (e.g., Weber 1994:196–197; Simmel 2008a:720–721). We will discuss the positions held at the Catholic University of Louvain in more detail in the following section.
The term “sociologie religieuse” was probably taken from Durkheim’s L’Année Sociologique, in which first volume it was already used as heading to classify relevant publications. Other, related headings in L’Année included “sociologie générale,” “sociologie biologique,” and “sociologie économique.”
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Congo Free State was still a personal colony of Leopold II, the second King of Belgium. The Belgian state took official control of the country in 1908, creating the Belgian Congo. The transition prompted much administrative and scholarly activity within Belgium – at both sides of the ideological spectrum.
It should be added that the Belgian university system as a whole lost much of its international orientation. On the eve of the First World War just under 30% of all university students came from abroad. On the one hand, the high number of universities in such a small country had created the need for attracting foreign students. On the other hand, the international reputation of Belgium as a land of freedom contributed to the popularity of its universities. It was experienced as a politically neutral and ‘quiet’ country (especially in comparison with the neighboring countries Germany and France) with strong liberal traditions, such as freedom of opinion, freedom of press, and freedom of education (Dhondt 2011). As a consequence of the First World War, Belgium of course lost this reputation.
Sociology also became an easy target for other scholars. Henri Pirenne, arguably Belgium’s best-known scholar in the field of the humanities and social sciences in the first decades of the twentieth century, did not hesitate to ridicule and dismiss the ambitions and tools of sociology (see Wils 2011).
In the political science literature, one also speaks of “consociationalism.” A consociational state is defined as a state which has major internal divisions along ethnic, religious, or linguistic lines, with none of the divisions large enough to form a majority group, yet nonetheless manages to remain stable, due to consultation among the elites of each of its major social groups (the pioneering publication for this tradition is Lijphart 1977). A high degree of autonomy for each social group or segment was expected – either in the form of territorial autonomy (federalism) or in that of cultural self-government (pillarization).
In 1958, Georges Gurvitch and the Brussels sociologist and politician Henri Janne founded a Francophone pendant, the Association Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française (AISLF).
The ASBLF disappeared in the 1990s, but a new association of French-speaking Belgian sociologists and anthropologists was created in 2009 (Association Belge Francophone de Sociologie et Anthropologie). It held its first conference in 2016. The Flemish VVS is currently the only Belgian collective member of ISA.
From the onset, the sociology program in Louvain consisted of both a Francophone and a Flemish section. In 1966, a Dutch-speaking program was also created in Brussels. But this program led to a degree in the social sciences. Initially, it relied heavily on lecturers from the Netherlands.
Sociologos, a new Dutch-language journalpredominantly directed towards younger researchers, especially PhD students, was set up by the Flemish Sociological Association (VVS) in 2014, but disappeared again in 2019. The lower status of the Flemish publication outlets in the output- or performance-based funding system, now used in Flanders, is detrimental to their ambition to represent the Flemish research communities.
A contrasting example might be illustrative. The Belgian-born George Sarton, who matured intellectually in the milieu we sketched on the preceding pages, founded in 1913 the journal Isis – which is now associated with history of science, but whose disciplinary orientation was initially much broader. Isis’ first issues were published in Sarton’s place of residence in Belgium (Wondelgem-lez-Gand), but the First World War soon interrupted its publication. After the German invasion of Belgium, Sarton emigrated via England to the United States and ended up at Harvard University. He remained the editor of Isis for four decades, during which “his brainchild,” now increasingly published in English, established itself as the flagship journal of the field. For more details about Sarton and his journal, see, among others, Merton (1985), Pyenson (2007) and Vanderstraeten and Vandermoere (2015). For analyses of another case, viz. Leo Baekeland (who invented and patented Bakelite or the first synthetic plastic), see Mercelis (2020).
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Vanderstraeten, R., Louckx, K. Sociology in Great Little Belgium. Am Soc 51, 101–123 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09447-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09447-z