Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
4 - Bureaux
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The argument
- 2 The doctrine of necessity
- 3 Public amateurs, secret bureaucrats
- 4 Bureaux
- 5 The sweet despotism of reason
- 6 The quantum of sickness
- 7 The granary of science
- 8 Suicide is a kind of madness
- 9 The experimental basis of the philosophy of legislation
- 10 Facts without authenticity, without detail, without control, and without value
- 11 By what majority?
- 12 The law of large numbers
- 13 Regimental chests
- 14 Society prepares the crimes
- 15 The astronomical conception of society
- 16 The mineralogical conception of society
- 17 The most ancient nobility
- 18 Cassirer's thesis
- 19 The normal state
- 20 As real as cosmic forces
- 21 The autonomy of statistical law
- 22 A chapter from Prussian statistics
- 23 A universe of chance
- Notes
- Index
- Ideas in Context
Summary
Potsdam, 12 November 1805 [In statistical work] the main requirement is order, completeness and reliability. To achieve these ends, German diligence, laboriousness and perseverance are more to the point than brilliant talent, so long as they do not actually destroy the latter.
Numerical amateurs became public administrators. Sir John Sinclair came to town in 1793 to found the Board of Agriculture, establishing one of numerous bureaucracies whose tasks were in part statistical. A great landowner and a public man, caught up in the vibrant movement for agricultural reform in Scotland, he had been convinced in Europe that facts and numbers were the handmaiden of progress. Nothing was known of his country: he would change that. 1799 saw the completion of the 21-volume Statistical Account of Scotland that he had started directly after the European tour, 1788. He wrote to each minister of the Church of Scotland requesting a detailed schedule of facts about his parish. Some were obliging, some recalcitrant. He begged, bullied, made jocular threats. ‘Large parties of the Rothsay and Caithness fencibles are to be quartered upon all the clergy, who have not sent their statistical account, on or before the term of Martinmass, so that the ministers have it in their choice, either to write to the Colonel, or to treat his soldiers.’ When at last only six of the 938 parishes were deficient, he wrote in blood-red, to suggest by ‘the Draconian colour of his ink’ what would attend the delinquents.
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- The Taming of Chance , pp. 27 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990
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