Early Social Science Research Articles

Research on Temporal and Spatial Distribution Pattern of the Night-Time Economy Supported by Multi-Source Data—A Case Study of Xiamen City, Fujian Province, China

The increasing proportion of night consumption in the total daily consumption means the night economy has become an indispensable part of national economic development. However, early social science research on alcohol in the night economy and social science research on the night leisure industry dominated our understanding of the night city. Few researchers have built effective mathematical statistical models to explore the spatio-temporal distribution and regional interactions of the night economy. This paper presents a method to analyze the spatial and temporal distribution pattern of the night economy based on multi-source data. Firstly, K-Means++ and DBSCAN were used to cluster OD points to identify the gathering areas of night activities. Then, the local L-function in “flow space” was used to extract the aggregated flow of each aggregation area and analyze the regional interactions. Finally, the correlation between night activity and night service facilities was calculated by using geographic detector, and night activity and lighting were coupled by the profit and loss value. The research shows that this method can identify the main areas of night activity, dig out the interrelationships at the community level, and find the new night activity gathering points and night economic growth areas in the future. This study extends the current situation that the night economy is limited to theoretical research and research in central urban areas, provides the temporal and spatial distribution of night activities and night lighting supplies from the perspective of big data, and provides a basis for future night economy research, urban planning, and relevant policy issuance.

Three Versions of Social Science in Late Eighteenth-Century France

The term science sociale was first employed by Mirabeau père in 1767, not Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in 1789, as historians until now believed. Taking this discovery as its starting point, this article examines the ways in which the idea of a science of society was successively conceptualized in the late eighteenth century by Mirabeau, Sieyès, and Nicolas de Condorcet. Situating their ideas in the context of evolving discussions over the reform of the French state, it argues that they developed three different versions of social science, and that these reflected different attempts to answer the question of how to achieve collective prosperity, justice, and happiness under modern conditions. This article further highlights the changing modes of historical temporality that informed those approaches, which shifted from a focus on the social forms of a mythical past, to a concern with the prevailing norms of the present, to an emphasis, finally, on the likely developments of an ever-perfecting future. In doing so, it shows that the history of early French social science is best understood not as a process of gradual advancement, but rather as one of serial reinvention.

The regional survey movement and popular autoethnography in early 20th-century Britain

This article’s subject is the theory and practice of ‘regional survey’, the method of social and environmental study associated with Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Despite being overlooked or dismissed in most accounts of early 20th-century social science, regional survey had a wide influence on the development of the nascent disciplines of anthropology, sociology, and human geography. Emerging from late 19th-century field biology, the regional survey came to typify a methodological moment in the natural and social sciences that favoured the holistic analysis of geographically delimited areas. By the interwar period, the kinds of projects that went under its name can clearly be seen as forerunners of the post-Second World War tradition of community studies. Additionally, in its self-presentation as a civic, participatory exercise, the regional survey can be read as a form of popular autoethnography that contrasts with other, more familiar social-scientific ventures in the first half of the 20th century, and defies the dichotomy between ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘technical’ modes of social science. As a result, this article argues, the regional survey provides an alternative point of departure for thinking about the origins and development of the modern social sciences in Britain.

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

Florence Kelley: Pragmatist, Feminist, Socialist

From Harmony to eHarmony: Charles Fourier, Social Science, and the Management of Love

This essay examines techniques of amorous matching in the work of the “utopian socialist” Charles Fourier (1772–1837), recovering the practices and the institutions he proposed for the management of love, as well as his political arguments for their centrality in a perfected society. In doing so, it argues more broadly for the need to position the management of love at the origin of early social science. Much as early defenses of capitalism had at their core a discourse of the passions, so too was Fourier’s socialism invested in exploring how problems of political economy were those of passional economy. To rectify the latter, Fourier attempted to articulate both a mathematical system—a calcul des passions—and a centralized information system for the gathering and sorting of personal data. The recovery of his vision thus has the potential to inform critically a radical politics of algorithmic matching through Big Data—the province today not of utopian socialism but of online dating apps.

The Lost Doctrine:Suggestion Theoryin Early Media Effects Research

This monograph examines the history of the “suggestion doctrine,” a theory of communicative influence that arose in social psychology at the turn of the 20th century and was applied to the study of media effects before World War II. During that period, suggestion theory was one of the foremost psychological explanations of opinion change and a dominant theory of media influence. Despite its long prominence in early social science and media studies, the doctrine has been largely ignored in contemporary histories of mass communication research. Although writers debate the origins and nature of early media effects scholarship, few of the contending parties address the role of the suggestion doctrine, and those who do offer but a passing reference. My purpose here, therefore, is to recover an important but forgotten part of the intellectual history of the field.

New Healthy Settlements Responding to Pandemic Outbreaks: Approaches from (and for) the Global City

The essay critically addresses several solutions and strategies for tackling urban inequalities to uphold the recent “right to the ‘healthy’ city” spatial paradigm based on early social science works by Emily Skinner and Jeffrey R. Masuda (2013) and then developed as a urban planning component by the interdisciplinary research group Barcelona Lab for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (2019). The authors propose a transdisciplinary approach in dealing with city renewal-regeneration and the safer use of its spaces. The interrelation between urbanism and architecture, including environmental design, mobility, and social relations, among others, would merge to imagine a more ecologically and socially balanced urban milieu. The paper analyses four specific case studies assumed as proper approaches in dealing with the pandemic, critically reflecting on the application of “Superblocks,” “Tactical Urbanism,” and “15-minute City” concepts by illustrating and comparing their application in three global cities (respectively Barcelona, Beijing, and Milan). In a nutshell, the authors demonstrate that these policies have their crucial feature in being effective applications formulated for different contexts, proposing successful strategies to overcome health, environment, and mobility issues in all the contemporary global cities.

Historical Roots of Chicago’s Contemporary Violence: An Interpretation of Chicago’s Early Sociologists’ Texts on Black Assimilation

Early 20th-century Chicago witnessed an in-migration of foreign-born immigrants and Black American migrants fleeing slavery. As the Black Americans’ population increased and dispersed across urban neighborhoods, Whites’ anti-Black aggression and violence intensified. This article outlines the mechanisms that account for this discord through an examination of sociological texts. We propose that, first, contemporary racial discord has diachronic origins; second, 21st-century synchronic analysis of racial discord, absent of historical insight, cannot adequately account for a century of racial violence by attributing it to poverty and employment going overseas; and, third, a century of racism cannot be mitigated by replacing personnel in administrative agencies, retraining law enforcement personnel, and tightening police oversight. Mitigation of systemic law enforcement violence toward Black Americans must first recognize the contemporary effects of the history of law enforcement agencies’ institutionalized racism documented by sociologists a century ago. A synchronic account of the origin of that racism lays deeply buried in the intellectual history of early 20th-century social science when decades of social researchers misinterpreted the influence of culture and biology on racial behavior.

Review article: A systematic literature review of research trends and authorships on natural hazards, disasters, risk reduction and climate change in Indonesia

Abstract. Indonesia is one of the most vulnerable countries to disasters and climate change. While there has been a proliferation of academic publications on natural hazards, risks and disasters on Indonesia, there has not yet been a systematic literature review (SLR) to determine the progress, key topics and authorships. SLR is important so researchers can build upon existing works, avoid bias, determine major research topics and the need for further research, and strengthen research capacity in the future. The author conducts a SLR of publications indexed within the Scopus database from 1900 to 2016 on topics related to disasters and climate change in Indonesia. Two major findings are outlined. The first is related to major research topics: (1) natural hazard, risk and disaster assessments (HRD); (2) disaster risk reduction (DRR); and (3) climate change risks, vulnerability, impacts and adaptation (CC). More than half are related to HRD and focus on volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. Publications on DRR are related to governance, early-warning systems, and recovery and reconstruction. Those on CC discuss carbon emission, forestry, governance and sectoral impacts. The author calls for future research on different hazards, different locations, and impacts of disasters and climate change. Risks and vulnerability assessments from hydro-meteorological and geophysical hazards are needed. Other locations beyond Sumatra and Java islands are to be examined. Urban risk assessments and the economic and social impacts of disasters and climate change on vulnerable places and communities are equally important. Risk governance at the national, local and community level is to be strengthened to increase resilience. The second finding examines the roles of Indonesian researchers and organizations. Findings show limited progress in research, publication and collaboration. International/non-Indonesian authors dominate the literature, and only half of the publications are co-authored by Indonesians. International collaborations have been conducted by very few Indonesian organizations. This could be due to limited experience in academic collaboration, power play amongst researchers, lack of research capacity, weak English academic writings skills and limited provisions within higher-education systems. The author recommends more funding and incentives for collaborations; training on English academic writing and journal article publications; capacity building especially for early careers, female and social science researchers; encouragement of multi-disciplinary collaborations; and strengthening of science communication in social media and science-policy advocacy.

The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry

Reviewed by: The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood by Tommy J. Curry Ronald B. Neal Tommy J. Curry. The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2017. 298 pp. $34.95. Tommy J. Curry's The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood is a groundbreaking work that argues for a new field of intellectual labor: black male studies. In this work, Curry argues from the standpoint of history, sociology, and philosophy that a comprehensive research program focusing on black men and boys is needed. Such a program is called for in light of a persistent condition of death, social and mortal, that plagues black men and boys in the United States. The Man-Not represents a departure from standard race, class, and gender theory where black men and boys are rendered criminal, predatory, savage, and evil. In The Man-Not, such theory is insufficient in conceptualizing and addressing the precarious existence of black males in the U. S. In articulating this deviation from standard race, class, and gender theory and forwarding the theoretical lens and logic behind such an endeavor, Curry states the following: Man-Not (ness) is a term used to express the specific genre category of the Black male. Genre differs from gender by this distance Black males share with Western man a priori, and, by consequence, patriarchy. . . . The Man-Not is a theoretical formulation that attempts to capture the reality of Black maleness in an anti-Black world. . . . The Man-Not is the denial not only of Black manhood but also of the possibility to be anything but animal, the savage beast, outside of the civilizational accounts of gender. (6-7) The Man-Not engages black males as objects of child abuse, neglect, rape, incarceration, unemployment, and death. Concerned primarily with trauma and vulnerability with respect to the black male existence in the U. S., The Man-Not seeks to overcome the historical, methodological, institutional, and ideological obstacles with which a [End Page 246] study of this sort must contend. The Man-Not addresses an entrenched prohibitive morality in academia, particularly among humanities scholars, that limits inquiry into black men and boys to a certain criminal and predatory terrain. With staggering research and effective argumentation, The Man-Not implicates academia as an ally in black male trauma and death and charges that contemporary academics participate in a long intellectual history—over more than a century—that offers fodder and justification for the policing, containment, and punishment of black males. Overall, how black men and boys are imagined in academia is an extension of how they are perceived, policed, and contained as bogeymen in American society. In each chapter, Curry effectively delineates how black men and boys have been rendered as mythological creatures and pathogens in the American imaginary. As such, accounts of black males from nineteenth-century ethnology, to early twentieth-century social science, to proponents of eugenics to government-funded public health initiatives, to the writings of gender theorists, have obscured black males' lived realities. In light of such misrepresentation, popular accounts of black manhood, from the antebellum period to Jim Crow and the civil rights/Black Power eras to the present, are questioned and reassessed. In this rethinking of black men and boys, Curry breaks new ground on subject matter not covered in previous scholarship. Their sodomization in American history, the connections between poverty and intimate partner violence, and the condition of black male death as a bioethical problem are among the underexamined areas taken up in The Man-Not. The book's overarching achievement is that it goes beyond standard accounts and offers a mode of inquiry that is empirical and theoretical, and insists upon new methods for engaging the condition of black maleness. Curry's work extends upon his already substantial documentation of a peculiar racial chauvinism regarding the study and interpretation of black men and boys in the United States from previously published articles and book chapters. Starting from the earliest accounts of black men studied by social scientists like Lawrence Gary, Robert Staples, and Clyde Franklin, Curry expands upon the idea that black...

Spatialized Communication: Future Research Perspectives on Urban Youth Violence and on Terrorism

Violence is one of the biggest threats to urban societies. Since the advent of mass urban societies during the nineteenth century, towns and cities have been at the center of heated debates about urban decay, vice, crime and violence. Insecurity and urban conflicts even shaped early social science definitions of cities. In a pioneering characterisation Louis Wirth defined cities “as a relatively large, dense, and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals”, but added that the ...

Evaluation and Assessment in Early Social Science

Authenticity is an important element in the newer models of teaching, evaluation and assessment. Due to the fact that it is quite unclear how authentic evaluation and assessment should be implemented into practice, teachers still cling too much to traditional forms of knowledge evaluation and assessment. First, some basic theoretical facts on evaluation and assessment with an emphasis on authentic evaluation and assessment are listed. Next, an outline of empirical research findings on the characteristics of evaluation and assessment in the subject Social Science in Year 4 is presented. Data were obtained by a web questionnaire on a representative sample of teachers who were teaching the subject Social Science in Year 4 at various primary schools in Slovenia. We discovered that teachers very commonly use summative knowledge evaluation and assessment form. Among the authentic and alternative forms research and simulation are predominant.

Early social science research about Big Data

Recent emerging technology policies seek to diminish negative impacts while equitably and responsibly accruing and distributing benefits. Social scientists play a role in these policies, but relatively little quantitative research has been undertaken to study how social scientists inform the assessment of emerging technologies. This paper addresses this gap by examining social science research on ‘Big Data’, an emerging technology of wide interest. This paper analyzes a dataset of fields extracted from 488 social science and humanities papers written about Big Data. Our focus is on understanding the multi-dimensional nature of societal assessment by examining the references upon which these papers draw. We find that eight sub-literatures are important in framing social science research about Big Data. These results indicate that the field is evolving from general sociological considerations toward applications issues and privacy concerns. Implications for science policy and technology assessment of societal implications are discussed.

The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature by Jamie Cohen-Cole (review)

Jamie Cohen-Cole, Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 368 pp.It seems safe to say that in contemporary America, is a fairly ecumenical concept. We are told to keep an open mind to the cultural practices of others, to new technological innovations, to difference in all forms. However, open-mindedness cuts both ways: we can also hear frankly racist denunciations of mainstream unwillingness to consider the evidence for the hereditary bases of intelligence as a form of close-mindedness. Indeed, the very obviousness of the metaphor and its seeming lack of ideological specificity lend the concept a certain air of timelessness. open mind, however-at least in its specifically American form-is a surprisingly recent invention. Jamie Cohen-Cole's meticulously researched monograph does an excellent job of excavating the political and intellectual context in which the idiom emerged, demonstrating convincingly the powerful role that it played in shaping the intellectual landscape of post-war America. Indeed, its contemporary idiomatic ubiquity-however attenuated its positive content may appear-only serves to demonstrate how successfully it has infiltrated American ways of thinking about thinking. Open Mind lucidly charts the history of the concept, showing how it sutured creativity, rationality, autonomy, and willingness to embrace alternative viewpoints to a politically centrist, technocratic understanding of science and governance. Open-mindedness was used as both an evaluative standard for and scientific description of human activity in a surprisingly wide range of venues.Cohen-Cole argues that this open mind emerged as a quilting point for a whole host of projects and strategies within the ideology of a newly ascendant class of problem-oriented, interdisciplinary, Cold War intellectuals. These intellectuals found in the open mind the perfect expression of, and justification for, their particular experiences and understandings. Their participation in war-time working groups and policy planning, designed to rapidly mobilize America's intellectual capital to solve concrete problems, had forced them to learn to work together with experts from radically different disciplinary traditions and social locations. As they transitioned back to civilian life, they were faced with the dual challenges of transforming the networks of patronage and collegiality forged during World War II into durable institutions for the conduct of Cold War science, and-with millions of returning soldiers entering universities and the work force-of designing an educational system adequate for training a productive and cohesive citizenry. In Chapters 1 and 2 (Democratic Minds for a Complex Society and The Creative American, respectively), Cohen-Cole convincingly demonstrates how open-mindedness came to serve as perhaps the chief ethical virtue guiding each of these ventures, as the creativity, receptivity to alternative viewpoints, and problem-solving orientation required for success in intellectuals' earlier undertakings came to be held as a model for both academic and civic life more generally. As World War II turned into the Cold War, these elites used their particular war-time experiences to develop a new ethics and a new way of understanding their own practices as intellectuals. These self-understandings became the basis for a series of practical interventions into the way that all Americans learned, worked, and understood themselves both as citizens and human beings.Of course, the problems of coordination in complex organizations and societies were hardly novel. Indeed, Cohen-Cole also traces how the open mind presented a solution to longstanding fears in the educational establishment and early social sciences about the corrosive effects of the division of labor and stratification of society on national unity. In the Cold War context, however, these fears took on new urgency when dovetailed with the political concerns of a centrist, technocratic elite-fears of both an insidious international communism, as well as the home-grown specters of racism and reactionary paranoia. …

Touched by Le Roy: Teens, Tourette’s, and YouTube in the Twilight of Neoliberalism

In early 2012, a story swept across broadcast and cable television, newspapers, the New Yorker, Slate, the Hujfington Post, and the Atlantic: in October 2011, roughly fifteen teenage girls in the town of Le Roy, New York, had begun exhibiting mysterious Tourette's syndrome-like symptoms, including spasms and verbal and nonverbal vocal outbursts. Some had also begun posting about their condition and experiences on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.1 Relating an isolated occurrence among a statistically insignificant group of people, the story went viral, thanks in no small part to aggregators such as the Hujfington Post and Gawker. Most coverage circled around questions of diagnosis. It also portrayed the young womens use of social more as a pathogenic vector-a means by which thenillness spread-and less as a tool in their efforts to share their situation with the world.That illness was eventually identified as collective conversion disorder, more commonly called mass hysteria. The questions that drove mass reporting on the story, beyond what caused that outbreak, included: What caused the outbursts and spasms? Were these symptoms psychosomatic? Were they caused by environmental factors, or perhaps faked? And what drove the women to perform them online and on television? Concern about the root cause of the outbreak also bracketed the young womens own quest for an explanation for their circumstances. Faced with a diagnosis of conversion disorder, they, along with their parents, rebelled, accusing the school district, their local health system, and the state of failing to locate an organic cause for the outbreak.Popular and professional concerns about regulating adolescence have lately expanded to include anxiety around what I refer to here as adolescence-a biosocial event/process that unfolds across a range of social and mass media. These concerns are often articulated through neoliberal discourses about social media's effects on personal competitiveness and success, less often in terms of a politics of intermediated social life. Intermediation weaves through this event and its reportage, raising further questions about the role that both mass and social played in its circulation, transmission, and containment. This essay explores the event's etiology and symptomatology by examining how it articulated the circumstances of these young women as adolescents, as women, and as members of an aspirational middle class in structural and institutional conditions increasingly hostile to that class, generation, and gender. Because effects theories also address these questions, it compares the general premises of dominant effects models to newer, decentered theories of insect media and virality in analyzing this intermediated event. The essay also considers how the Le Roy, New York, outbreak may offer a lens through which to examine the ways we model, regulate, and theorize the intermediated and gendered adolescent's passage from childhood to adulthood as a social good.A durable narrative in studies and communication since the early twentieth century has been that popular media, when consumed by developing children, have effects on those children that may negatively or positively alter their futures.2 Rich in data, but poor in syntheses that support its basic premises, this narrative has origins in early twentieth-century social sciences and persists to this day. A profound popular investment in this belief has also abetted the development of industries and products that purport to be good for children.3 Both effects research and the industries defined in relation to it depend upon that initial premise: that developing children, as subjects in formation, consume the messages and affective experiences that offer and from them create the adult subjectivities they eventually occupy. During the Depression, studies by the Payne Fund framed moviegoing as a significant factor in children's eventual success as adults. …

The Disappearance of Emily G. Balch, Social Scientist

Emily Greene Balch is probably best known as the second American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize—a tireless pacifist and feminist who served as the first secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the early 1920s. But she was, before that, an innovative social scientist whose scholarly contributions were only later overshadowed by her activism and by formalist tendencies in sociology, which subsequently ignored her critical work on immigration. Balch started her career espousing the “objectivity” of science, but her experience as a researcher of immigration and as a pacifist in search of an understanding of the social psychology of war moved her closer toward a methodological hermeneutic that made formalist sociological principles anathema. Where she blended theory-development with social practice, her male colleagues attempted to conceal political purpose behind disinterested discipline. After 1918, women sociologists were transferred into other fields, namely, back into social work. In Balch's case, she turned to international organizations and the gritty practice of reconciliation, but her profile as a social scientist disappeared altogether. The fate of her intellectual work provides a glimpse of the affinities between gender and certain forms of disciplinary knowledge in the early social sciences.

Metabolic exchanges and practices of regulation: The assemblage of environment and society in early social sciences

In this paper I discuss the way in which early sociology addressed the metabolic relationships between society and nature. Father founders of social science such as Comte, Spencer, Marx, Schaeffle, Lilienfeld, Giddings, Ward, Kidd, Geddes and some others shared a physiological vision of metabolism and all were concerned on the problem of social regulation of metabolism. On closer examination, early social sciences had realized that social and natural worlds are deeply interconnected even though they were trapped in the dilemma between mechanism and finalism. A metabolic perspective allows us to understand where the organic interchange between nature and society has problems endangering social reproduction. Yet, metabolism is not only a matter of physical sciences but also of social ones for it is ruled and driven by social agents. Given the set of practices, knowledge, and sociotechnical regimes that enable the metabolism, it is notable the almost entirely absence of a sociology of metabolic exchanges, of the manner in which social systems (towns, firms, households) consume “environment”, i.e. matter, energy, and bio-capacity. The paper suggests that social scientists should investigate in the field of societal metabolic processes in an interdisciplinary perspective for exploring metabolic activators such as organized labor, consumption, and practice regimes as was suggested by early sociologists.

‘Historicising Common Sense’

This essay is an expanded set of comments on the social psychology papers written for the special issue on History and Social Psychology. It considers what social psychology, and particularly the theory of social representations, might offer historians working on similar problems, and what historical methods might offer social psychology. The social history of thinking has been a major theme in twentieth and twenty-first century historical writing, represented most recently by the genre of 'cultural history'. Cultural history and the theory of social representations have common ancestors in early twentieth-century social science. Nevertheless, the two lines of research have developed in different ways and are better seen as complementary than similar. The theory of social representations usefully foregrounds issues, like social division and change over time, that cultural history relegates to the background. But for historians, the theory of social representations seems oddly fixated on comparing the thought styles associated with positivist science and 'common sense'. Using historical analysis, this essay tries to dissect the core opposition 'science : common sense' and argues for a more flexible approach to comparing modes of thought.

Traditions and Transitions in Quantitative Societal Culture Research in Organization Studies

Quantitative societal culture research (QSCR) in organization studies crystallizes a configuration of social science perspectives and methods that became prominent in the 1970s. We consider the qualities of and boundaries around cultural groups that this tradition emphasizes, and other characteristics of cultural groups that it does not emphasize. Current debates surrounding this tradition reflect both recent social science innovations and rediscoveries of early social science perspectives. Our analysis of quantitative cross-cultural societal research in organization studies considers this process of crystallization, innovation and rediscovery. We suggest ways to address current controversies and promote conversations with other research approaches.

The Order of the Prophets: Series in Early French Social Science and Socialism

According to the editors of an influential text in the history of social science, “in the first half of the nineteenth century the expression series seemed destined to a great philosophical future”. The expression itself seems to encourage speculation on destiny. Elements laid out in a temporal sequence ask to be continued through the addition of subsequent terms. “Series” were particularly prominent in the French Restoration and July Monarchy (1815–48) in works announcing a new social science. For example, the physician and republican conspirator J. P. B. Buchez, a former follower of Henri de Saint-Simon who led a movement of Catholic social reform, made “series” central to his Introduction a la science de l’histoire. Mathematical series show a “progression”, not “a simple succession of unrelated numbers”; in human history, we discover two simultaneous series: “one growing, that of good; one diminishing, that of evil.” The inevitability of positive progress was confirmed by recent findings in physiology, zoology and geology. Correlations between the developmental stages of organisms, species, and the Earth were proof that humanity’s presence in the world “was no accident”, and that “labour, devotion and sacrifice” were part of the “universal order”. The “great law of progress” pointed toward a socialist republic in fulfilment both of scripture and of the promise of 1789. For Buchez, as for many of his contemporaries, series both described and predicted. At the same time, they were a call to action. This period gave birth to two closely related neologisms: “sociology”, coined by Auguste Comte, and “socialism”, which entered French in the works of Pierre Leroux. Both terms were shaped by new experiences of time. Michel Foucault offered one perspective on these changes in his archaeology of the human sciences: the modern episteme, he wrote, was defined by the replacement of static series by historical series. At the end of the eighteenth century, the temporal pre-eminence of classificatory tables of differences and identities, including the “animal series” stretching from the simplest organisms up to man, gave way to the temporally oriented series of language, life and labour: philology’s sequences of roots and inflections, Cuvier’s “micro-series” of organs and “macro-series” of organisms, and the “great linear, homogeneous series ... of production” identified by Ricardo. According to Foucault these newly historically-minded disciplines provided models for the “hazy” knowledge in the human and social sciences and shaped the temporal orientation