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  • Figuring Authority: Statistics, Liberal Narrative, and the Vanishing Subject
  • Kirstie M. McClure (bio)

For many concerned with the political fate of the present, the stakes of contemporary literary and philosophical debates over the historicity of the individual, the demise of the ‘subject,’ and ‘the death of the author’ may seem arcane. For social scientists, and perhaps political scientists in particular, such debates may appear little more than the professional squabbles of disciplines that—focussing as they do on the ephemera of texts—have little to do with real politics in the real world. 1 The problem, however, doesn’t flee so easily at the dismissive command of disciplinary authority, for in significant respects it is precisely this authority that such debates put in question. But even this is put much too simply. Even in the narrowly academic sense disciplinary authority is far from static. Disciplinary regimes, like Machiavelli’s republics, are achievements in time, complete with cycles and patterns of rise and decline, resurgence and fall. Historically, what has authorized the production of political discourse, what has rendered writing about politics true or false, valid or questionable, persuasive or disputable, has itself been subject to change. Over the last century and a half, however, it has changed in ways that bring contemporary literary and philosophical questions about the status of the ‘subject’ into sharp relief.

This essay is concerned with one of those changes: the rise of statistical science as an element of political knowledge and judgement. Although most of what I shall say here is in reference to a nineteenth century English statistical text, it is about rather more than this. The question I wish to consider has to do with the political significance of statistics as a way of representing knowledge of the political world—or, put more precisely, with the authority underlying ‘the facticity of the facts’ of statistical data. For most contemporary social scientific disciplines—and particularly those that contribute to legislation and policy—it is fair to say that the dominant mode of authorizing the production of statements about the political world is the appropriate use of statistical methods. Indeed, in most academic programs in such disciplines, coursework in statistical methodology is considered an essential element of the curriculum proper to professional training. And such professional training, in turn, is increasingly considered essential to employment in the public sector, in both governmental and non-governmental institutions.

Recent perspectives in the history and historical sociology of science have tracked the historical development of statistical methods from tabular and descriptive techniques of simple numeration to the powerful engines of mathematical probability that have come to characterize their modern forms. 2 My concern here, however, is not with the elaboration of mathematical sophistication, but with a question that necessarily precedes that of technical elaboration and the development of methods. Its short form is simple: “What is it that authorizes the production of statistics?” What is it, in other words, that authorizes the numerical representation of the body politic in the first place? And, as counting came to count as a mode of political knowledge, what did this imply for the figure of the knowing subject? What I propose to do here is engage this question by exploring an earlier historical moment in the relationship between statistics and political knowledge—a moment at which that relationship was explicitly justified rather than taken for granted as a matter of course—by reading the first issue of a major statistical journal as a political manifesto of statistical science.

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Consider, for instance, the following characterizations of ‘statistics’ and ‘statistical science’ in the inaugural issue of the Journal of the Statistical Society of London. The year is 1839:

The word Statistics is of German origin, and is derived from the word staat, signifying the same as our English word state, or a body of men existing in a social union. Statistics, therefore, may be said ... to be the ascertaining and bringing together those “facts which are calculated to illustrate the conditions and prospects of society;” and the objects of Statistical Science is to consider the results which they produce, with the view to determine those principles upon which the well-being of...

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