Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play

Frédéric le Play
Born	Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play (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 One-nation Paleo- Social Traditionalist
Concepts Conformity Familism Free markets Limited government Social norms Patriotism Private property Protectionism Rule of law Tradition
People Edmund Burke Giambattista Vico Justus Möser Joseph de Maistre Louis de Bonald Adam Müller Friedrich von Gentz Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Novalis Karl Ludwig von Haller Pope Pius X Pope Pius IX Lucas Alamán 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 Friedrich Julius Stahl Aleksey Khomyakov Ivan Kireyevsky John C. Calhoun Pyotr Stolypin Miguel Miramón Benjamin Disraeli Otto von Bismarck Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach Friedrich Carl von Savigny Frederick William IV of Prussia Hippolyte Taine Francisco Rolão Preto Alexis de Tocqueville Orestes Brownson Louis Veuillot Marcel Lefebvre Ivan Aksakov Frédéric le Play Joseph Alexander von Hübner François-René de La Tour du Pin Tirso de Olazábal y Lardizábal Juan Vázquez de Mella Ramón Nocedal Romea Félix Sardà y Salvany Heinrich Leo Konstantin Leontiev Nikolay Danilevsky Mikhail Katkov Maurice Barrès Robert Frost Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo William Hurrell Mallock John Henry Newman Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet Alexander III of Russia Konstantin Pobedonostsev John of Kronstadt Lev Tikhomirov Vladimir Purishkevich George Santayana Gertrude Himmelfarb Othmar Spann Charles Maurras Jacques Bainville Léon Daudet Ivan Ilyin Edgar Julius Jung Oswald Spengler Anthony Ludovici Arthur Moeller van den Bruck Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly Léon Bloy Fyodor Dostoyevsky Ernst Jünger Winston Churchill Carl Friedrich Goerdeler Henri Massis Robert A. Taft Enoch Powell William F. Buckley Jr. Ronald Reagan Samuel P. Huntington Margaret Thatcher Carl Schmitt Ramiro de Maeztu Eugenio Vegas Latapie José Calvo Sotelo T. E. Hulme T. S. Eliot Pope Benedict XVI Víctor Pradera Larumbe Salvador Abascal Eric Voegelin Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn Michael Oakeshott Antonin Scalia G. K. Chesterton Hilaire Belloc Robert Bork C. S. Lewis Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho Francisco Elías de Tejada y Spínola Richard M. Weaver Leo Strauss Robert P. George Tony Abbott John Howard Peter Viereck Russell Kirk Thomas Molnar Christopher Dawson Eugeni d'Ors Álvaro d'Ors Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira Narendra Modi Nicolás Gómez Dávila Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Robert Nisbet Roger Scruton
Organizations International Democrat Union (IDU) Democrat Union of Africa (DUA) Asia Pacific Democrat Union (APDU) Caribbean Democrat Union (CDU) Union of Latin American Parties (UPLA) European People's Party|EPP Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE) List of conservative parties
Religious Christian right Christian fundamentalism Jewish right Conservative Islam Hindutva State Shinto Traditionalist Catholic
National variants Australia Canada China (PRC) Colombia Germany South Korea Serbia Turkey United Kingdom United States
Related topics Agrarianism Aristocracy Capitalism Carlism Center-right Corporatism Conservative Revolution Counter-revolutionary Fascism Libertarian Republican Monarchism Neoliberalism New Right Radical centrism Radical right (Europe) Reactionary Reaganism Right-wing politics Small government Social hierarchy 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.^[1] 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.^[2] 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.

Notes

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). "^{article name needed}". 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

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play.

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