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Statistics and the Modern State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Stuart Woolf
Stuart Woolf
Affiliation:
University of Essex
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Extract

“Lies, damned lies,” the possibly apocryphal comment of a British political leader on statistics about the unemployment consequences of his economic policy in the 1920s, sums up the impotent, frustrated acceptance of the ubiquitous presence of this tool of modern administration. We have slipped into living with statistics as we have with television or computers, even into accepting the assertions of value-free neutrality of its more brash exponents. The study of statistics is integral to the development of the modern state and modern society. Hence the relative paucity of studies of how statistics became what they are today is somewhat surprising, not least because its history offers insights into so many aspects of modern life, from the self-perception of society to the internal history of the exact and medical sciences, from the relationship between state and citizen to the social implications of the production of knowledge.

Type
The Reasonable State
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , July 1989 , pp. 588 - 604
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

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