CHAPTER 2 FROM THE MACRO-MICRO OPPOSITION TO MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS IN DEMOGRAPHY

If educational science, examined in the previous chapter, was the first social science to develop a fully multilevel approach, one must also bear in mind that it is one of the most recently constituted social sciences. It was only in the late 1960s (Travers, 1969) that education emerged from the prevailing earlier discipline of pedagogy, whose focus was on the adjustment of teaching practices rather than on studying the processes linking teacher to student—the goal of education as a social science (Filloux, 2001). Demography, in contrast, has a far longer history. It traces its origins back to the “political arithmetic ” of the late seventeenth century, illustrated by the work of John Graunt (1662/1977); in the nineteenth century, it pulled away from the other social sciences derived from the same source. The present chapter adopts a long-term perspective in order to discern the links between those historical stages and the aggregation levels—and to show the place of multilevel analysis in demography’s evolution over the centuries. We will show the privileged position of analysis at the aggregate level—most often, an individual country—from the inception of demography to the mid-twentiet