Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statitics in France and England, 1830–1885 (review)

Schweber examines the history of "discipline" formation for what became the fields of vital statistics and demography in the mid-nineteenth century in Britain and France. She organizes the book as a comparison of the processes in the two countries, using that counterpoint to illustrate the similarities and differences between the two nations. Her work adds to a growing body of literature about the origins of the new social sciences in the nineteenth century, and their relationship to other sciences, the state, and public-policy formation.

"Statistics" is a remarkably slippery discipline to examine historically since the boundaries of the field reach from mathematics and astronomy to accounting, social welfare, and public policy. Moreover, like the emergence of other social and natural sciences in the nineteenth century, the development of the field or fields took place in many countries, involving many different languages, educational systems, and forms of scientific organization. Schweber's close reading and analysis of the British and French cases therefore is a significant contribution to the histories of the two nations, to the history of the social sciences, and to the study of knowledge formation in general.

The work is a closely argued, careful, and detailed reading of the organizational forms, intellectual debates, and scientific practices created by the men who defined, literally named, and built the new population sciences. As Schweber notes, what looks at first blush to be similar processes in the two nations are actually remarkably different trajectories of development. To pick just one thread of her argument, although the British state was fundamentally stable and prosperous at the time because of rapid industrialization, Victorian society was confronting horrific problems of poverty. Vital statistics was about "public health"; the debates and institutions focused on developing and deploying data and methods to deal with infant mortality, cholera epidemics, and class differences in living standards. In France, the July Monarchy gave way to the 1848 Revolutions and the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Franco Prussian War and the Commune, and the Third Republic. Within this political turmoil, demography was concerned with how to conceptualize a "population"—as a "body," an aggregation of individual parts, or something in between—and how to understand the problem of "depopulation" and the health of the nation. Nor surprisingly, the "disciplines" of "statistics" acquired different understandings and organizations in the two nations.

Schweber has a good deal to say about the literature about discipline formation, boundary work, and the history of statistics more generally. She provides careful reviews and analysis of the relevant secondary literature, acknowledging her debts to Hacking, Porter, Desrosieres, and Stigler, to name just a few of her predecessors, while also trying to clarify and sharpen a perspective on discipline formation and the history of science.¹ Finally, she uses the nine meetings of the International Statistical Congress between 1853 and 1886 and the emergence of the International Statistical Institute (in 1886) to examine how vital statisticians and demographers in the two nations, along with "statisticians" from other fields and other nations, confronted the construction of a unified international "discipline." That very worthy and difficult enterprise continues, and so do the debates that Schweber chronicles.²