Emile Waxweiler

Who was Emile Waxweiler?

Emile Waxweiler was a Belgian engineer and sociologist. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium as well as the International Institute of Statistics.

Waxweiler was born in Mechelen, Belgium, 22 May 1867, and died in a street accident in London, where he was attached to the London School of Economics, in late June 1916.

Waxweiler’s education included taking the “highest degree” in engineering from the University of Ghent, and then spending a year in the United States, where he studied labor questions and industrial organization. In 1895, he was appointed head of the statistics section of the Belgian Office of Labor, and from 1897 on, Waxweiler taught courses in political and financial economics, statistics and demographics, as well as descriptive sociology, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. These teaching obligations did not prevent him, however, from serving, beginning in 1901–1902, as director of the Solvay Institute of Sociology.

In addition to his career-long emphasis on the importance of statistics as an analytical tool for all of the life sciences, Waxweiler’s major scientific contribution was his conception of sociology as a subfield of biology, in particular, ethology. In his Esquisse d’une sociologie of 1906, Waxweiler defined sociology, as “the science, one could almost say, the physiology of reactive phenomena caused by the mutual excitations of individuals of the same species, without distinctions of sex”.