Fin-de-siecle social science shifted blame from morality to environment

Evidence

Metropolitan “experts” of all kinds, armed with improved medical and social knowledge, were reassigning blame for poverty, worker discontent, and poor health from moral depravity to hostile environments, physical fatigue, and invisible micro-organisms, and turning to the state for scientific solutions to these problems. This was the period when the bacteriological revolution seemed to prove the interdependence of all members of society-and the need for greater regulation of individual and public hygiene. The emerging discipline of sociology suggested that the breakdown of social cohesion produced by industrialization could be stemmed through the scientific study of social phenomena. Modern urban planners now emphasized the need for long-range rational planning of cities and towns, to promote maximum efficiency. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Explains the republican rationalizing ethos that colonial administrators would carry to West Africa — a causal root of the ‘civilizing mission’ ideology.