Adolphe Quetelet, Social Physics and the Average Men of Science, 1796–1874

The inventor of the concept of “the average man” is a subject of more than average historical interest. Adolphe Quetelet (1796–1874)—one acceptable answer to the pub-quiz question to “name six famous Belgians”—is among the more fascinating figures of nineteenth-century science. The last attempts at a focused biography of him, however, are more than a century old. The Belgian savant is known among modern historians of science through the notion of “l’homme moyen” and of the related program of “social physics” (la physique sociale). Yet Quetelet’s project to build a lawful, quantified social science on the model of the natural sciences has often been subsumed into the ambitions of such Enlightenment and early nineteenth-century predecessors as Nicolas de Condorcet and Pierre-Simon Laplace, and his successors, notably Emile Durkheim, were rude about what they took as his deterministic conception of moral behavior. That is to say, Quetelet has...