i find this article intriguing in light of current events and the times we live in

The Regularity of the Moral World

^{Henry Thomas Buckle} ---- history being a science?

Those readers who are acquainted with the manner, in which in the physical world the operations of the Laws of nature are constantly disturbed, will expect to find in the moral world disturbances equally active.

Such aberrations proceed, in both instances, from minor laws, which at particular points meet the larger laws, and thus alter normal actions.0f this the science of mechanics affords a good example in the instance of that beautiful theory called the parallelogram of forces: according to which the forces are to each other in the same proportion as the diagonal of their respective parallelograms.

This is a law pregnant with great results; it is connected with those important mechanical resources, the composition and resolution of forces; and no one acquainted with the evidence on which it stands, ever thought of questioning its truth. But the moment we avail ourselves of it for practical purposes, we find that in its action it is warped by other laws, such as those concerning friction of air, and the different density of the bodies on which we operate, arising from their chemical composition, or, as some suppose, from their atomic arrangement.

Perturbations being let in, the pure and simple action of mechanical law disappears. Still and although the results of the law are incessantly disturbed, the law itself remains intact. Just in the same way, the great social law, that the moral actions of men are the product not of their volition, but of their antecedents, is itself liable to disturbances which trouble its operations without affecting its truth.

And this is quite sufficient to explain those slight variations which we find from year to year in the total amount of crime produced by the same country. Indeed, looking at the fact that the moral world is far more abundant in materials than the physical world, the only ground for astonishment is, that these variations should not be greater; and from the circumstances that the discrepancies are so trifling, we may form some idea of the prodigious energy of those vast social laws which, through which constantly interrupted, seem to triumph over every obstacle, and which when examined by the aid of large numbers, scarcely undergo any sensible perturbations,        nor is it merely the crimes of men which are marked by this uniformity of sequence.                                                                                

Even the number of marriages annually contracted is determined, not by the temper and wishes of individuals, but by large general facts, over which individuals can exercise no authority. It is now known that marriages bear a fixed and definite relationship to the price of corn, and in England the experience of century has proved that, instead of having any connection with personal feelings, they are simply regulated by the average earnings, of the great mass of people: so that the immense social and religious institution is not only swayed, but is completely controlled by the price of food and the rate of wages. In other cases, uniformity has been detected, though the causes of uniformity are still unknown.

Thus to give a curious instance, we are now able to prove that even the aberrations of memory are marked by this general character of necessary and invariable order.

@birdy

Buckle is doing something quite bold here, and he does it with a kind of Victorian confidence that’s half exhilarating, half hair-raising: he wants history to behave like physics. 

Or at least he wants human conduct, when viewed in bulk, to show the same kind of statistical regularity that physical phenomena show when you average out local noise.

His analogy is clever and rhetorically effective. In mechanics, you have an elegant law (parallelogram of forces) and then you discover that the world you actually touch includes friction, turbulence, density differences, measurement error​, so the pure result doesn’t show up cleanly. But that doesn’t refute the law; it just means the law is operating in a messier system.

He’s trying to import that structure into moral and social life: individual will looks like “noise,” but really the “major law” is antecedent conditions producing actions, while the little contingencies merely perturb the surface pattern.

If you read him with modern eyes, his most defensible point is not the sweeping denial of volition, but the observation that large populations generate stable rates for many behaviors. 

That’s not crazy; it’s the basic intuition behind demographic regularities, actuarial tables, and a lot of quantitative sociology.

​In that sense Buckle is anticipating (or riding alongside) the 19th-century discovery that “moral” facts​, crime, suicide, marriage​, have regularities in the aggregate. 

The shock of that discovery is part of the period’s intellectual drama: it feels like it demotes individual agency.

And it’s genuinely interesting that he treats year-to-year variation as “perturbation” rather than “refutation.” That’s a recognizably scientific posture.

Here’s the leap: even if crime totals are stable, it doesn’t follow that an individual’s choice is illusory or causally inert. You can get stable macro-patterns from micro-level choice plus constraints.

Example: If wages drop and food prices rise, more people may postpone marriage. That can be explained without denying volition; it just says choice is conditioned. People still decide, but within a field of pressures.

So Buckle’s rhetoric (“determined… not by the temper and wishes of individuals”) is doing philosophical work that the empirical observation alone doesn’t warrant. 

A softer, more tenable version would be: individual motives matter, but population-level regularities reveal structural constraints and incentives.

The corn/wages ​:marriage relationship is a classic kind of social-science finding: a correlation that looks like a lever. Buckle writes as if it “completely controls” the institution, which is strong language.

Even if the correlation is robust, “control” is too simple a picture. 

Buckle’s style here is very much: find one big driver and crown it King. That’s part of the 19th-century appetite for master-causes.

Physical laws, as used in mechanics, are intended to be universal and time-invariant.​ Social laws ?

 That last point matters: once people know a pattern exists, they may try to game it, resist it, legislate it away, moralize it, or exploit it. 

That reflexivity makes the social world different in kind, not just in complexity.

Buckle gestures to complexity (“more abundant in materials than the physical world”), but he still wants the same basic model.

That final flourish​, memory errors showing “necessary and invariable order”​, is a tell. It’s Buckle’s appetite for extending regularity everywhere. 

Today you can talk about systematic biases in memory (primacy effects, recency, false memories, schema-driven recall), but Buckle’s phrasing  suggests more certainty than his evidence likely warrants in context. 

It’s a classic move: end with a provocative example to make the program feel unstoppable.

Buckle’s passage is a manifesto for a certain kind of historical science: not a narrative about great individuals, but a search for structural determinants and regularities in masses.

Then his analogy strains. History can be evidence-driven and systematic without pretending that Caesar and friction belong to the same category of law.

​He gives us three angles....(a) the determinism/free will issue, (b) the history-as-science debate, or (c) the specific claims about crime/marriage statistics

​Could Buckle ​ be at his best when he’s pointing out something uncomfortable but real: individuals feel free, yet societies exhibit stubborn regularities. 

He’s at his worst when he treats that discomfort as a proof that volition is basically nothing, and when he writes “law” with a capital L and a triumphant tone that outruns what social evidence can carry.

Sarge

Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862) was a 19th-century English historian and philosopher who advocated that history could and should be elevated to a science by discovering the, largely environmental, laws that govern human progress

note:At University I had this individual as a project : per discussion.