“A phobia of numbers?” the labour movement and social surveys in the German Empire

ABSTRACT

Historians have long studied how statistical offices and parliamentary bodies made use of surveys to explore the lives of workers, and, in so doing, how they produced new social categories and strategies for political intervention in the process. Less attention has been paid to the role that surveys played in the history of the early labour movement. Drawing on extensive discussions in socialist and trade-union periodicals, this article explores how the labour movement in the German Empire perceived, responded to, and used social surveys. The article is divided into three parts. The first part discusses labour’s critical response to the growing number of surveys on working-class life by middle-class reformers, social researchers, and the state. The second part studies what appeared to be the only logical consequence of their critique, namely the independent gathering and analysis of data. The third part finally analyses why, despite the large number of independent surveys launched by party functionaries and local trade unions, participation among ordinary workers remained strikingly low. In the conclusion, the article shows that this might have stemmed not only from disinterest and inertia but also from how the labour leadership conceived of and presented the benefits of social surveys.

KEYWORDS:

• Social surveys
• labour movement
• German empire
• working-class life
• counter-surveys
• labour statistics

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude for comments and suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers as well as the participants of the workshop “Global Histories of the Social Survey in the Long Nineteenth Century,” which took place on the 18^th and 19^th of February 2020 at the Centre Marc Bloch in Berlin.

Autobiographical sketch

Philipp Reick is a historian of work and social mobilization in Western Europe and North America. Among his most recent publications are ‘American Labor and the Working Day,’ which appeared in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History in 2022, and ‘From Hatred to Hope: Emotions, Memory and the German Labour Movement in the late Nineteenth Century,’ which appeared in 2023 (online first) in Memory Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the Centre Marc Bloch Berlin, the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754513, and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.

Notes on contributors

Philipp Reick

Philipp Reick is a historian of work and social mobilization in Western Europe and North America. Among his most recent publications are “American Labor and the Working Day,” which appeared in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History in 2022, and “From Hatred to Hope: Emotions, Memory and the German Labour Movement in the late Nineteenth Century,” which appeared in 2023 (online first) in Memory Studies.