French social-science thinking redirected blame for poverty onto environments and germs

Evidence

Finally, new ways of thinking about social problems in France were also part of the general push for a more rational approach to colonization. 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. — Alice L. Conklin, A Mission to Civilize_ The Republican…, 148

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s goal: the same rationalist, state-centered worldview that reshaped metropolitan social problems was exported to West Africa as mission civilisatrice. — connects to: Elite economists blamed poverty on the supposed deficiencies of the poor themselves — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 226; Italian economists blamed poverty on working-class moral defects rather than economic causes — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1141; Anti-Third-Worldist NGOs redirected blame for poverty onto postcolonial states themselves — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 391
• DEFINE: Explains the epistemological shift from moral depravity to environmental and microbial causes that underpins mise en valeur ideology.