The meaning of ‘social science’ for the mid-Victorians may be analysed further by examining the history of organisations which were consciously modelled on the SSA – the pan-European Association Internationale pour le Progrès des Sciences Sociales, founded in Brussels in 1862, and the American Social Science Association, organised in Boston in 1865. The comparison may be extended to the German Verein für Sozialpolitik, founded in 1872–3, which also shared certain features with the Social Science Association in Britain. In the 1860s there was briefly in existence something like an international ‘social science movement’ in western Europe, the United States, and outposts of empire, though several of the organisations were evanescent.

The very existence of these institutions invites comparison; their exchange of papers, publications, and members necessitates it. Research on the interplay of educational theories and debates that passed between the British and the American Social Science Associations in the 1860s and 1870s has shown their importance as conduits for ideas. But there is a more compelling reason for undertaking such a comparative analysis. Any argument contending that social science or sociology ‘failed’ to develop in nineteenth-century Britain must be predicated on an implicit (if not an explicit) comparison with cultures where it was institutionalised ‘successfully’. This is the form of Anderson's argument and of subsequent attempts to explain this ‘peculiarity of the English’.