Events for December 12, 2008
December 12, 2008
Clifford Rosenberg, City College of New York
“Between France and Algeria: TB and TB Control, c. 1890-1940”
Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University | Visit site ยป
Time: 10:15 a.m.
Place: 311 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Commentator: Helen Tilley, Princeton University
Copies of the paper are available by contacting Jennifer Houle at jhoule@princeton.edu one week before the date of the seminar.
Clifford Rosenberg is Associate Professor of History at CCNY. He specializes in the social and political history of modern Europe, especially France, and on the relationship between the continent and its colonial hinterlands. He has recently published a book on immigration control and the transformation of citizenship in interwar France and is currently working on a study of the spread of tuberculosis from France to North Africa and back, and efforts to combat it, from 1830 to the present.
December 12, 2008
John Tresch, Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania
Auguste Comte in Paradise: The Ecole Polytechnique, Temporal Series, and the Birth of Sociology
Philadelphia Area Center for History of Science
Time: 4:00 - 5:30 p.m., followed by social hour and light dinner
Location: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street
Directions: http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=137
Accessibility: http://www.hsp.org/default.aspx?id=171
Please download and read the paper in advance. (John has heroically reconstructed this paper after a catastrophic computer crash and sends apologies for residual typos. If readers are pressed for time, he suggests skimming section 4 on the Nebular Hypothesis. John will summarize this paper in an extended introduction when we meet.)
Auguste Comte’s sociology was based on an organic conception of the “great being” of humanity; his work has been seen as a turning point
in the development of a qualitative social science. Nevertheless, Comte’s sociology emerged from many of the same sources as the quantitative, “astronomical” approach to society of Quetelet and others. At the Ecole Polytechnique, where Comte and other social prophets were trained, students learned to map and choreograph flows of various phenomena operating at different rates; such techniques, this paper suggests, underwrote many of the schemes of historical development and social engineering in early socialism. Comte’s Religion of Society made the intersections among mathematics, engineering, human history and cosmology strikingly visible. Rather than a scheme of formalist reductionism, positivism was a revolutionary project for the coordination of series, operating at multiple rates, on a cosmic scale; the new “spiritual power” Comte announced was a power of temporalization.