1990 Volume 32 Issue 3 Pages 1-15
The French Revolution finally disorganized the "corps intermediaires" of the former society which had subsisted since the medieval age. As the result, there was born a social system consisting of the "civil society and the modern state". Many of the pre-marxist socialists and the sociologists in 19th century France considered this situation as a "disorganization of society" or a "crisis of human beings". Then they built the new social theories, which aimed the "reorganization or the reestablishment of society". The common characteristic of these theories is that they focussed on the intermediate social groups. It is the school of F. Le Play (1806-1882) that developed the most systematic and comprehensive group-theory in those social thinkers. Le Play systematized for the first time his theory of groups in one of his principal writings: The Social Reform in France (1864). But before that, he had to carry out about 300 monographs of workers' famillies in various districts in Europe, which resulted in the work entitled The European Workers (1855). This is the monumental writing in the history of social researches. In this repport, I will confirm first the signification of the latter in the history of social sciences. Next, I will make clear the feature of the theory cencerning the private groups and the public groups in The Social Reform in France. And finally, I will examine the social theories of Le Play's followers, i.e. the "Social Science" group and the "Social Reform" group. In short, Le Play and his followers, in search of the strategic strongpoint for the social reorganization, widened their perspective from families to the communities and made the foundation of regionalism in France.
