ABSTRACT
By 1856 Pierre Guillaume Frederic Le Play the technologist had become Le Play the social scientist; he himself never used the word 'sociologist', being suspicious of Comte. He had resigned his professorship, and been appointed to the Conseil d'Etat. The actual method that Le Play did adopt was to study a culture through a representative family. This method involved two presuppositions – one that the family was the basic social unit, and the other that it was possible to devise means of discovering a representative family. Le Play's case studies are almost all about working-class families. Although he writes about management and, as a matter of fact, land ownership, he uses his monograph technique only for workers. The nature of primitive society, according to Le Play, was largely determined by geographical situation. There were three different habitats in which society grew – the field, the shore and the forest. Each had its typical social and family structure.
