The Politics of Large Numbers by Alain Desrosières

It is also now one of a number of recent histories of statistics published over the last fifteen years that offers a critical approach to statistics. “ Desrosières’s discussion of the various translations statistics has been able to achieve is both scholarly and erudite. ” -Charles Camic, American Journal of Sociology Coming at the end of an explosive 15-year period of research, here and in Europe, on the history of statistical thinking, Desrosières’s book is at once a powerful synthesis of recent scholarship and a path-setting effort to extend this research into important areas that have gone relatively unattended… His case for the applicability of the actor-network approach to the historical development of statistical thought is a compelling one, which is very effective at sociologically integrating many of the different currents that formed this broad development. “This is a work of tremendous erudition that is far broader in scope and significance than its title suggests. The social context generates the need to make things countable and to interpret the counts it also conditions the conventions that emerge. The broad theme of is that statistical measures and probabilistic concepts are most usefully seen as matters of convention, rather than of objective reality. Many of these-and some statisticians-would be surprised to discover how often statistics has responded to social developments or even influenced them. It is detested by generations of social-science students, a grim necessity for medical researchers, distrusted by the general public. “Statistics, with its aura of dispassionate dustiness, does not have a good image. ” -Hugh Pennington, The Times Higher Education Supplement “This is a good book… The strength of Alain Desrosières’s account lies in the rich and insightful way he has analysed his subject-statistical reasoning… Anyone interested in the history of science and economics and, particularly, applied mathematics, will be stimulated by this book. ” -Lorraine Daston, London Review of Books The great merit of Desrosières’ study is that it points the way beyond this impasse by showing how statistical entities are simultaneously real and constructed, invented and discovered. It straddles the chasm between the invented and the discovered, the real and the constructed-oppositions that have structured an increasingly sterile debate about the nature of science among historians, philosophers, sociologists, and scientists. “Statistics works in and on the world, simultaneously describing and remaking.

The Politics of Large Numbers by Alain Desrosières