Article by Olivier Zunz: “The age of the average emerged from the engineering of high mass consumption during the second industrial revolution of the late nineteenth century, when tinkerers in industry joined forces with scientists to develop new products and markets. The division of labor between them became irrelevant as industrial innovation rested on advances in organic chemistry, the physics of electricity, and thermodynamics. Working together, these industrial engineers and managers created the modern mass market that penetrated all segments of society from the middle out. Thus, in the heyday of the Gilded Age, at the height of the inequality pitting robber barons against the “common man,” was born, unannounced but increasingly present, the “average American.” It is in searching for the average consumer that American business managers at the time drew a composite portrait of an imagined individual. Here was a person nobody ever met or knew, merely a statistical conceit, who nonetheless felt real.
This new character was not uniquely American. Forces at work in America were also operative in Europe, albeit to a lesser degree. Thus, Austrian novelist Robert Musil, who died in 1942, reflected on the average man in his unfinished modernist masterpiece, The Man Without Qualities. In the middle of his narrative, Musil paused for a moment to give a definition of the word average: “What each one of us as laymen calls, simply, the average [is] a ‘something,’ but nobody knows exactly what…. the ultimate meaning turns out to be something arrived at by taking the average of what is basically meaningless” but “[depending] on [the] law of large numbers.” This, I think, is a powerful definition of the American social norm in the “age of the average”: a meaningless something made real, or seemingly real, by virtue of its repetition. Economists called this average person the “representative individual” in their models of the market. Their complex simplification became an agreed-upon norm, at once a measure of performance and an attainable goal. It was not intended to suggest that all people are alike. As William James once approvingly quoted an acquaintance of his, “There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important.” And that remained true in the age of the average…(More)”