Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-n2sc8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-03-07T03:22:35.816Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

31 - Managing the Economy

from PART IV - SOCIAL SCIENCE AS DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Alain Desrosières
Edited by
Theodore M. Porter  and
Dorothy Ross
Theodore M. Porter
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Dorothy Ross
Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University
Get access

Summary

Since the eighteenth century, economic science has been punctuated by debates on the relation between state and market. Its history has been marked by a succession of doctrines and political constellations, more or less interrelated. They have usually been understood historically in relation to dominant ideas and institutional practices: mercantilism, planism, liberalism, the welfare state, Keynesianism, and neoliberalism. Whatever their dominant orientations, the various states gradually constructed systems of statistical observation. Yet the development of these statistical systems has generally been presented as a sort of inevitable and univocal progress, having little relation to the evolution of the variegated doctrines and practices of state direction and guidance of the economy. The historiography of economic thought, or more precisely, historical works dealing with the reciprocal interactions between the state and economic knowledge, has placed little emphasis upon the modes of statistical description specific to various historical configurations of state and market. In a word, these two histories, that of political economy and that of statistics, are rarely presented, much less problematized, together.

The reason for this gap in economic historiography is simple. Statistics has historically been perceived as an instrument, a subordinate methodology, a technical tool providing empirical validation for economic research and its political extensions. According to this “Whig” conception of the progress of science and its applications, statistics (understood as the production both of information and of the mathematical tools used to analyze that information) progresses autonomously relative to economic doctrine and practice. It is for this reason that the historical specificity of statistics is neglected in the historiography of economic science, and left unproblematized.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 553 - 564
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Margo, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
Begg, D. K. H., The Rational Expectations Revolution in Macroeconomics: Theories and Evidence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982)Google Scholar
Bodkin, Ronald, Klein, Lawrence, and Marwah, Kanta, eds., A History of Macroeconometric Model-Building (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991).Google Scholar
Caldwell, Bruce, “Hayek and Socialism,” Journal of Economic Literature, 35 (December 1997).Google Scholar
Davidson, Roger, Whitehall and the Labour Problem in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain: A Study in Official Statistics and Social Control (London: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar
Desrosières, Alain, The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Duncan, Joseph and Shelton, William, Revolution in United States Government Statistics, 1926–1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, 1978)Google Scholar
Fourquet, François, Les comptes de la puissance: Histoire de la comptabilité nationale et du Plan (Paris: Encres, 1980).Google Scholar
Furner, Mary O. and , Barry Supple, The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
Hirschman, Albert O., The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Kendrick, John W., “The Historical Development of National Income Accounts,” History of Political Economy, 2 (1970).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lacey, Michael J. and Furner, Mary O., The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
Mackenzie, Donald, Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Ménard, Claude, “Three Forms of Resistance to Statistics: Say, Cournot, Walras,” History of Political Economy, 12 (1980).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morgan, Mary, The History of Econometric Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Nelson, Robert, “The Economics Profession and the Making of Public Policy,” Journal of Economic Literature, 25 (March 1987).Google Scholar
Patinkin, Don, “Keynes and Econometrics: On the Interaction between the Macroeconomic Revolutions of the Interwar Period,” Econometrica, 44 (1976).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar, 1944).Google Scholar
Porter, Theodore, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×