Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play

Frédéric le Play

Born	(1806-04-11)11 April 1806 La Rivière-Saint-Sauveur, France
Died	5 April 1882(1882-04-05) (aged 75) Paris, France
Institution	École Polytechnique, Écoles des mines
Influences	Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald
Influenced	René de La Tour du Pin, Albert de Mun, Charles Maurras, Louis Dimier, Edmond Demolins, Frédéric Amouretti

Part of a series on
Conservatism
Variants Cultural Fiscal Green Liberal Libertarian National Neo- New Right Old Right (United States) One-nation Religious Social Southern Agrarians Traditionalist
Concepts Conformity Tradition Social norm Family values Social order Patriotism Social hierarchy Statutory law Private property Protectionism
People Edmund Burke Joseph de Maistre Louis de Bonald Adam Müller Pope Pius X Plínio Salgado Gustavo Barroso François de Chateaubriand Antoine de Rivarol Klemens von Metternich Leopold von Ranke Nikolay Karamzin John A. Macdonald Samuel Taylor Coleridge Juan Donoso Cortés Jaime Balmes John C. Calhoun Benjamin Disraeli Otto von Bismarck Hippolyte Taine Antonio de Oliveira Salazar Francisco Rolão Preto Alexis de Tocqueville Orestes Brownson Louis Veuillot Marcel Lefebvre Frédéric le Play Juan Vázquez de Mella Heinrich von Treitschke Konstantin Leontiev Maurice Barrès Robert Frost Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo William Hurrell Mallock John Henry Newman Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet Konstantin Pobedonostsev George Santayana Othmar Spann Charles Maurras Keith Joseph Julius Evola Ivan Ilyin Edgar Julius Jung Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly Léon Bloy John Howard John A. Macdonald Henri Massis Robert A. Taft Samuel P. Huntington Enoch Powell William F. Buckley, Jr. Ronald Reagan Margaret Thatcher Carl Schmitt Ramiro de Maeztu T. E. Hulme Pope Benedict XVI Víctor Pradera Larumbe Winston Churchill Eric Voegelin Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn Michael Oakeshott G. K. Chesterton John Howard Robert Bork C. S. Lewis Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola Richard M. Weaver Leo Strauss Peter Viereck Russell Kirk Geoffrey Blainey Thomas Molnar Christopher Dawson Álvaro d'Ors Nicolás Gómez Dávila Robert Nisbet John Kekes Roger Scruton
Organizations American Center for Law & Justice International Democrat Union International Young Democrat Union Asia Pacific Democrat Union European People's Party European Democrats Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists (AECR) List of conservative parties
Religious Christian right Conservative Christianity Conservative Islam High Church Anglicanism Traditionalist Catholics
National variants Australia Britain (UK) Canada China (PRC) Colombia Germany South Korea Serbia Turkey United States
Related topics Agrarianism Aristocracy Capitalism Carlism Center-right Corporatism Conservative Revolution Counter-revolutionary Monarchism Neo-liberalism New Right Radical centrism Reactionary Reaganism Right-wing politics Small government Thatcherism Toryism
Conservatism portal Politics portal

Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play (French: [lə.plɛ]; April 11, 1806 – April 5, 1882) was a French engineer, sociologist and economist.

Life

The son of a custom-house official, Le Play was educated at the École Polytechnique and the École des Mines. In 1834, he was appointed chairman of the permanent committee of mining statistics. In 1840, he became engineer-in-chief and professor of metallurgy at the École des Mines, where he became inspector in 1848.

For nearly a quarter of a century Le Play travelled around Europe, collecting a vast amount of material bearing on the social and economic condition of the working classes. In 1855, he published Les Ouvriers Européens, a series of 36 monographs on the budgets of typical families selected from a wide range of industries. This work was crowned with the Montyon prize conferred by the Académie des Sciences. In 1856, Le Play founded the Société internationale des études pratiques d'économie sociale, which has devoted its energies principally to forwarding social studies on the lines laid down by its founder. The journal of the society, La Réforme Sociale, founded in 1881, is published fortnightly.

Napoleon III, who held him in high esteem, entrusted him with the organization of the Exhibition of 1855, and appointed him counsellor of state, commissioner general of the Exhibition of 1867, senator of the empire and Grand Officer of the Légion d'honneur.

Initially an atheist, Le Play gradually became convinced of the need for religion. In 1864, he published an essay defending Christianity against Darwinism and Scepticism. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1879, three years before his death. Blum (2004) included Le Play in his anthology of French counter-revolutionary thinkers.

Gallery

• 

  Statue of Frédéric Le Play, by André-Joseph Allar, at the Jardin du Luxembourg (Paris, 1906).

• 

  Le Play, by L. Rousseau, 1879.

• 

  Bust of Frédéric Le Play, by Chapu, 1869.

Works

• (1864). La Réforme Sociale.
• (1871). L'Organisation de la Famille.
• (1875). La Constitution de l'Angleterre. (in collaboration with M. Delaire)

In English translation

• (1872). The Organization of Labor in Accordance With Custom and the Law of the Decalogue. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.
• (1962). "Household Economy." In: Parsons, Talcott et al., editors, Theories of Society. The Free Press of Glencoe, Inc.
• (1982). Frederic Le Play on Family, Work, and Social Change. Silver, Catherine Bodard, editor and translator, University of Chicago Press.
• (2004). "Social Reform in France." In: Blum, Christopher Olaf, editor and translator, Critics of the Enlightenment. Wilmington DE: ISI Books, pp. 197–258.

Sources

• Brooke, Michael Z. (1970). Le Play, Engineer and Social Scientist: The Life and Work of Frederic Le Play. Harlow UK: Longmans.
• Herbertson, Fanny Louisa Dorothea (1950). The Life of Frédéric Le Play, Ledbury, Herefordshire: Le Play House Press.
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

Further reading

• Beaver, S. H. (1962). "The Le Play Society and Field Work," Geography 47 (3), pp. 225–240.
• Beum, Robert (1997). "Ultra-Royalism Revisited," Modern Age 39 (3), pp. 290–322.
• Healy, Mary Edward (1947). "Le Play's Contribution to Sociology: His Method," The American Catholic Sociological Review 8 (2), pp. 97–110.
• Herbertson, Dorothy (1920). "Le Play and Social Science," The Sociological Review 12 (2), pp. 108–110.
• Higgs, Henry (1890). "Frédéric Le Play," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 4 (4), pp. 408–433.
• Pitt, Alan (1998). "Frédéric Le Play and the Family: Paternalism and Freedom in the French Debates of the 1870's," French History 12 (1), pp. 67–89.
• Rousiers, Paul De (1894). "La Science Sociale," Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science 4 (4), pp. 128–154.
• Sorokin, Pitirim A. (1928). "Frederic Le Play's School." In: Contemporary Sociological Theories, New York: Harper, pp. 63–98.
• Swinny, S. H. (1921). "The Sociological Schools of Comte and Le Play," The Sociological Review 13 (2), pp. 68–74.
• Zimmerman, Carle Clark (1935). "Le Play Theories." In: Family and Society. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., p. 71.

External links

• Reforming Vision: The Engineer Le Play Learns to Observe Society Sagely