Quantifying National Populations: A Comparison of Adolphe Quetelet and Francis Galton’s Approaches to Simple Statistical Techniques

• In Event: State Numerology: Conceptual and Ethnographic Engagements with Numbering Practices and Ontologies

Abstract

The late-18th century disciplinary field that initially bore the name ‘statistics’⁠ was until the late 19th century a very vague and overwhelmingly qualitative ‘science of the state’ most closely related to geography⁠ (Porter, 1986, 25; Desrosierès, 2002, 19). Throughout the 19th century and 20th centuries, the introduction of probabilistic mathematical techniques transformed the field of statistics into the overwhelmingly mathematical one we see today (Porter, 1986; Hacking, 2006; Gigerenzer et al., 1989). Despite this, statistics are often understood in both popular and academic debate as a neutral arbiter that outfit the user with a “set of procedures that would, as it were, move nature to the page through a strict protocol” (Daston and Gallison, 2007, 121; Porter, 1995, 4). In this article, I problematize this understanding by comparing the early interpretations of Adolphe Quetelet and Francis Galton to the same simple statistical techniques: national population averages and the Gaussian error curve. My analysis will draw from the STS literature in order to examine how the evidential practices, personal ambitions and broader scientific, political and philosophical contexts (particularly the influence of astronomy and Darwinian evolution) informed their interpretation of these techniques. Further, I will show how the statistical aggregate generated through these different techniques influenced ideas not just of who belonged to a given national population but also of the forces that acted on these ‘national aggregates’ as well as ideas of individual free will.

Author

• Kathryn Barber