Knowledge as a Weapon. Parisian Workers Quantitative Surveys and Epistemic Theory (1840–1848)

This article examines the characteristics of workers’ knowledge and the role of knowledge in workers’ struggles for better living conditions in the mid-nineteenth century. Based on quantitative surveys published between 1840 and 1848 by two Parisian workers’ newspapers, La ruche populaire and L’atelier, it shows not only that workers produced their own surveys in order to make the deterioration of their situation visible, but also that they used innovative methods. The article will first present the workers tradition of producing quantitative knowledge, which dates at least as far back as the end of the eighteenth century, and was the background to the surveys of the 1840s. Second, it will be argued that the workers’ surveys published in La ruche populaire and L’atelier were used mainly, but not exclusively, to counter the hegemonic discourse and the optimistic rhetoric of the ruling classes, who were claiming that the economic situation of workers was improving. Finally, this article uses the comments made by worker surveyors or members of the newspapers’ editorial boards on their knowledge practices and methodology to prove the existence of a specific workers’ epistemology and philosophy of the sciences. As will be shown, they formalized a ‘standpoint theory,’ thus anticipating Karl Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.