Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London by Vic Gatrell

Abstract

issues of social justice by inaccurately grouping all Galton’s work with eugenics as part of a political narrative, criticizing Galton as a conservative moral failure, who emphasized the differences among people, unlike the earlier liberal Quetelet who grouped populations and ignored divisive variation. A more accurate view would appreciate Galton’s theoretical demonstration of how the heritable variation in individuals is consistent with the stability of species. A narrative different from Goldman’s would celebrate Galton’s reconciliation of the harmony between inclusion and diversity. Contrast that with Quetelet, who once likened individual differences to the result of errors and came close to questioning the existence of free will by invoking an unavoidable budget of crime or suicide. Galton, however, provided a way to measure statistical associations and relationships, issues that Quetelet’s averages could not address. Galton did not pretend to solve the problem of causation statistically. A few years later, he and Karl Pearson called conspicuous attention to dangers in inferring causality from correlation, with caveats associated with their aptly named phenomenon of “spurious correlation.” Goldman’s book has much of value in the earlier parts. His insistence on the importance of Babbage to the statistical movement is idiosyncratic but only a minor distraction. His neglect of W. Stanley Jevons, Alfred Marshall, Francis Edgeworth, and most of later Victorian economics seriously limits the book as a general study of the topic of its title. The discussion of the final part misfires by joining other recent writers in “rushing to justice,” attributing motives in support of a currently attractive social narrative that is contrary to what a reading of the sources reveals. Much about eugenics deserves condemnation, but it falls after the Victorian era, by no means the inspiration for work in the 1880s.