‘Statistics therefore appeared to be the means by which the study of social facts is made as objective and as precise as the study of physical facts, and the means by which social science, like physical science, uncovers general laws.’ Such ideas provided hope for those who believed that ‘the competitive system…must be reconstructed for the general welfare’, that there should be state intervention to cushion at least some of the damage inflicted by raw industrialism.53 This was one of the core beliefs of the Fabian Society, founded in London in 1883–1884, and of the London School of Economics
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