At the borders of the average man: Adolphe Quêtelet on mental, moral, and criminal monstrosities

Abstract

This study examines Adolphe Quêtelet's conception of deviance. It investigates how he identified social marginalities and what actions he recommended governments to undertake. To get a close understanding of his views, this paper examines three cases of “monstrosities,” namely mental alienation, drunkenness, and criminality. My main thesis is that Quêtelet provided scientific authority to a conception of deviance as sickness, immorality, and cost thus encouraging legislators to use statistics for containing social marginalities. The case of alienation shows that Quêtelet viewed insanity as a pathology of civilization to be understood through phrenology. The case of drunkenness demonstrates how Quêtelet conflated the notion of statistical mean with moral decency. The case of criminality illustrates Quêtelet's major concern with the cost of criminals for the state. While advocating for the perfectibility of mankind, Quêtelet urged governments to take actions against what he considered the monstrosities of society.

Adolphe Quetelet and the legacy of the “average man” in psychology.

“…Rather, he often used this idea to confirm his own population groupings based on the regularity observed in distributions of scores within those populations (e.g., Galton 1879, 1892a). This concept is again not lost with the adoption of the Neo-Galtonian model (nor with the correlational approach to mental testing that would also flourish in the 20th century; see Sposini, 2020). Indeed, regularities observed in distributions of scores (in particular, the assumption of a bell-shaped curve) is taken as evidence that such scores can be grouped appropriately, with deviations from the mean often taken as a representation of random error.…”