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E-book States and statistics in the nineteenth century : Europe by numbers

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Penilaian

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Tis book is a history of an illusion. It is also a history of the dream that preceded the illusion. The dream was of the progressive utility of statistical knowledge, and was shared by many a nineteenth-century statistician. Their dream would be fulfilled in three phases. First, data about society would be gathered in every country, employing uniform methods and categories. Then, the data would be compared and governments would base their policies on the knowledge thus acquired. And finally, all of humanity would experience greater happiness and prosperity. The belief in progress had no truer, more faithful or more ambitious proponent than the statistician. He calculated, classified and concluded, until every law that governed society seemed to materialise from the numbers spontaneously. As obvious as it is to us that this was an illusion, the statistician had no doubt that his ideal was achievable. Statistics in the nineteenth century is a far cry from the science we know today. Power and numbers had not yet acquired the inextricable and obvious connection they would in the twentieth century. During the Enlightenment, an academic elite had already determined that knowledge was power, but although the notion of ‘statistics’ had cropped up here and there, it had not yet entered the mainstream. There was no consensus about the meaning of the concept in the eighteenth century.In the Napoleonic Age, statistics became an established part of the administrative repertoire. Good government and statistics were practically synonymous. This applied not only in the states that had been absorbed into Napoleon’s empire, but also in Prussia and Russia, where the institutional foun-dations were laid for government statistics in the first decade of the nineteenth century. Nineteenth-century governments clung to the idea that solutions to social problems could be derived from systematic, empirical observation of a quantitative and qualitative nature. How this idea was put into practice differed from state to state. In the same way that statistics did not develop linearly as a branch of knowledge, no uniform European model of statistics as a branch of government emerged. A speaker at the third international congress on statistics held in Vienna in 1857 called statistics ‘the science of the century’.1 While not everyone would have shared that opinion, statisticians themselves were certain they were right and fully convinced of the necessity of their mission. They wrote books, estab-lished journals, organised congresses and, when called upon, were tireless servants of the state. In their fervour, however, they failed to unify their science. Statistics was a repository of various sciences and disciplines, which enjoyed short- or long-lived popularity. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the dividing lines between scientific disciplines were still vague, or positioned differently than we would expect today. The fate of statistics would be tied to political economics one day and geography or ethics the next. If statistics was not the science of the century, then at least it was the chameleonic manifesta-tion of a procession of sciences that emerged and disappeared throughout the nineteenth century. Statistics was a field with as many practitioners as definitions. Statisticians all shared a desire for factual knowledge, but there the similarities ended. At the universities, statistics initially found a home with the legal disciplines or politi-cal sciences. There was little interest in numbers or calculations. In the first half of the nineteenth century it was barely conceivable that statistics would end up as merely an auxiliary science. This development progressed through various stages and was unpredictable. After counting 62 definitions, Gustav Rümelin hypothesised in his Zur Theorie der Statistik (1863) that ‘there had to be a hidden enticement and it brought to mind the suitors in Gozzi’s fable who, undeterred by the bloodied heads of their unfortunate predecessors, sought to solve Turandot’s riddles over and over again’.2 Ernst Engel, director of the Prussian Office of Statistics, identified 180 definitions in 1869. In his view, this demonstrated that there was nothing to be gained from searching for a defini-tion on which everyone could agree.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

351 RAN s

Penerbit

London : Manchester University Press., 2020

Deskripsi Fisik

215 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781526147530

Klasifikasi

351

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Public Administration

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

-

Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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