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The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet's Statistics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Theodore M. Porter
Theodore M. Porter
Affiliation:
Corcoran Department of History, Randall Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903, USA.
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Extract

“Let us apply to the political and moral sciences the method founded upon observation and upon calculus, the method which has served us so well in the natural sciences.” The social sciences have known no truer follower of Laplace's dictum than Adolphe Quetelet. His mécanique sociale, later physique sociale, was conceived as the social analogue to Laplace's mecanique celeste, and embodied the results of an unswerving commitment not only to the presumed method of celestial physics, but even to its concepts and vocabulary. It is too weak to say that Quetelet's goal was the transmission of the achievements of celestial physics into the social sphere. He aspired to nothing less than imitation.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , March 1985 , pp. 51 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1985

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References

This work was supported by a graduate fellowship from Princeton University, an Andrew Mellon postdoctoral instructorship at the California Institute of Technology, and the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung der Universität Bielefeld. I am grateful for comments and criticisms received on earlier versions of the manuscript from Diane Campbell, I. B. Cohen, Lorraine Daston, C. C. Gillispie, Ian Hacking, Donald MacKenzie, John Servos, Stephen Stigler, Geoffrey Sutton, and Norton Wise.

The following abbreviations will be used: NMB: Nouveaux mémoires de l'académic royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Bruxelles (after 1840, de Belgique); AO: Annuaire de l'observatoire de Bruxelles; BCC: Bulletin de la commission centrale de statistique (of Belgium).

Translations from works cited in French are my own.

1 de Laplace, Pierre Simon, Philisophical Essay on Probabilities, 2d ed., New York, 1917, pp. 107–8.Google Scholar

2 Quetelet, , “Notice sur Pierre-Joseph Braemt,” Annuaire de l'académie royale des sciences et belles-lettres de Belgique, 23 (1867), 108–120, p. 108.Google Scholar The colleague of whom this was written was born just a few months after Quetelet in the same Belgian city, Ghent.

3 Quetelet, , Histoire des sciences mathématiques chez les Belges, Bruxelles, 1864, p. 312.Google Scholar

4 Cannon, Susan Faye, “Humboldtian Science,” in Science in Culture: The Early Victorian Period, New York, 1978.Google Scholar On Quetelet's scientific ambitions, see Quetelet, , Sciences mathématiques et physiques chez. les Belges au commencement du XIXe siècle, Brussels, 1866, p. 9Google Scholar; Histoire (n. 3), pp. 375–6Google Scholar; Physique sociale, ou essai surle développement des facultés de l'homme, 2 vols., Brussels, 1869, t. 2, 446 ff.Google Scholar

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9 Quetelet, , “Notice scientifique,” written for his own book, Sur l'homme (n. 49), and published in AO, 7 (1840), 230–247, p. 230.Google Scholar

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21 Quetelet papers in Bibliothèque royale de Belgique, folder 2561, letter of 18 Feb., 1846.

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25 Quetelet, , Popular Instructions on the Calculation of Probabilities, (Beamish, Richard, trans.), London, 1839, p. 108.Google Scholar French ed., 1828.

26 See Quetelet, “Aperçu” (n. 5); Histoire (n. 3), passim.; and various biographies in Sciences (n. 4).

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34 Quetelet, , “De l'influence de libre arbitre de l'homme sur les faits sociaux,” BCC, 3 (1847), 135–155, p. 136.Google Scholar

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39 Quetelet, , “libre arbitre” (n. 34), p. 136.Google Scholar

40 See, for example, Quetelet, , “Recherches” (n. 37), p. iiGoogle Scholar, a typical bit of rhetoric in which statistical research is applauded for ridding us “of the idea that events whose causes we cannot directly perceive are produced by chance.”

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42 See Daston, Lorraine J., The Reasonable Calculus: Classical Probability Theory, 1650–1840, PhD. dissertation, Harvard, 1979, 443–466.Google Scholar

43 Quetelet, , “penchant au crime” (n. 18), p. 4.Google Scholar

44 Quetelet, , Du système social (n. 35), p. 104.Google Scholar

45 Quoted in Shoen, Harriet H., “Prince Albert and the Application of Statistics to Problems of Government,” Osiris, 5 (1938), 276–318, pp. 286–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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49 Quetelet, , Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés, ou essai de physique sociale, 2 vols., Bruxelles, 1836, t. 2Google Scholar; Cousin, , Cours (n. 48), Cours, 10me Lecon, pp. 6–7.Google Scholar

50 Quetclet, , Théorie des probabilitiés, Brussels 1853, p. 49Google Scholar; Du système social (n. 35), p. 197.Google Scholar

51 Quetelet, , Sur l'homme (n. 49), t. 1, p. 237.Google Scholar

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59 Quetelet, , Lettres à S. A. R. le duc régnant de Saxe-Coburg eí Gotha sur la théorie des probabilités, appliquées aux sciences morales et politiques, Brussels, 1846Google Scholar, lettre XX; also Quetelet, , “Sur l'appréciation des documents statistiques, et en particulier sur l'appréciation des moyennes,” BCC, 2 (1844)Google Scholar. See also Gillispie, C. C., “Intellectual Factors in the Background of Analysis by Probabilities,” Crombie, A. C., ed., Scientific Change, New York, 1963, 431–453Google Scholar; Buck, Peter, “From Celestial Mechanics to Social Physics: Discontinuity in the Development of the Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century,” in Jahnke, H. N., Otte, M., eds., Epistemological and Social Problems of the Sciences in the Early Nineteenth Century, Dordrecht, 1981, 19–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

60 Quetelet, , Anthropométrie, ou mesure des différentes facultés de l'homme, Brussels, 1871, p. 253.Google Scholar

61 The problem of homogeneity was often raised, e.g. by Say, J. B., “De l'objet et de l'utilité des statistiques,” Revue encyclopédique, 35 (1827), 529–553, p. 548.Google Scholar The best-known critique of the coherence of the idea of l'homme moyen is Cournot, A. A., Exposition de la théorie des chances et des probabilités, Paris, 1843, p. 214.Google Scholar Stephen Stigler discusses these matters in “The Measurement of Uncertainty in Nineteenth-Century Social Science,” Heidelberger, Michael et al. , eds., Probability Since 1800: Interdisciplinary Studies of Scientific Development, Bielefeld, 1983, 131–138.Google Scholar

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63 Quetelet, , Du système social (n. 35), p. 17.Google Scholar

64 Porter, , Calculus of Liberalism (n. 41).Google Scholar