ABSTRACT
Pierre Guillaume Frederic Le Play's social thought was compounded of a sense of danger, a sense of tragedy and a sense of the future. The first puzzling element in that thought is where he stands with regard to the fundamental distinctions between realism and nominalism, and between the organic and mechanistic approaches. These distinctions have been discussed with great force and clarity by Werner Stark in his Fundamental Forms of Social Thought. Most of Le Play's social theory can be seen in his six elements of social change. The first was the perversity of human nature. In the first edition of the Workers of Europe, Le Play wrote with great confidence of the possibilities of applying the principles of the natural sciences to social science. In his studies of the family, Le Play developed his scale of family types – from the patriarchal on the one hand through the stem family to the unstable family on the other.
