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"Libby Schweber addresses both the institutional conditions of scientific change and the actual forms of knowledge produced. And she convincingly rejects the usual teleology of disciplines as what scientific practitioners always want and advanced states always need. She shows how the assertion of a discipline can be a sign of weakness, of inability to shape policy, really a course of action when all else fails."--Theodore M. Porter, author of "Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life"

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DISCIPLINING STATISTICS

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction....................................................................................................................................11 The "Invention" of Demography, 1853-1855......................................................................................................352 The Neglect of Demography, 1855-1867..........................................................................................................493 The Reinvention of Demography, 1867-1878......................................................................................................674 The Invention of Vital Statistics, 1830-1837..................................................................................................935 Vital Statistics as an Instrument of Social Reform............................................................................................1056 Discipline Formation at Last..................................................................................................................1357 Limits to Institutionalization................................................................................................................1578 The Challenge to Vital Statistics.............................................................................................................1799 Institutional Transformations and the Introduction of Disciplinary Specialization.............................................................191Conclusion......................................................................................................................................213Notes...........................................................................................................................................227Bibliography....................................................................................................................................253Index...........................................................................................................................................273

Chapter One

The question "Why establish a discipline in the nineteenth century?" serves to shift the researcher's attention from familiar features of contemporary disciplines, be they intellectual or institutional, to the act of discipline assertion itself. In the realm of demography the question leads to France, to the self-taught botanist and Republican political speaker Achille Guillard and his son-in-law Louis Adolphe Bertillon. The year is 1853, in the early years of the Second Empire, a period of political repression in which citizens, including scientists, need official permission to assemble in a group of more than three. Many outspoken Republicans have fled Paris for fear of imprisonment, leading academics have resigned their posts rather than swear allegiance to the new regime, and practicing social scientists are obliged to temper their words so as to avoid censorship. The occasion is the publication of a book entitled lements de la statistique humaine, ou dmographie compare, in which Guillard announced the birth of a new science, demography.

Very little has been written about Achille Guillard and his role in the founding of demography as a discipline. Those accounts which exist repeat the version presented by his grandchildren in a memorial volume for their father. According to their account, demography was conceived in prison in the early 1850s by Guillard and his future son-in-law. Incarcerated for their support of the Republican cause, the two men supposedly developed demography as a response to the failure of the Revolution of 1848. Curiously, none of the accounts that repeat this founding myth ask about the content of the original project. None attempt to explain what about this first version of demography rendered it a response to the collapse of the Second Republic, and all take for granted the association between intellectual project and disciplinary activity.

This first chapter uses Guillard's attempt to assert the existence of demography as a distinct science to explore three parallel sets of questions. First, what was demography in this initial version? Second, what do Guillard's eorts to establish demography as a discipline and their reception tell us about the institutional structures shaping social statistics at that moment? Third, what was the institutional significance, in this particular case, of explicit disciplinary activity? In other words, what was Guillard asking for when he linked his intellectual program to the recognition of a new discipline? What changes would discipline formation have introduced?

Guillard's Initial Project: Reforming Political Economy

The Intellectual Project

The content of Guillard's original project for statistics can be discerned in two short texts, which he submitted to the Journal des conomistes in 1853. The first was a letter to the editor, Joseph Garnier, entitled "On the need to record the age of death." In his letter, Guillard used the occasion of the creation of cantonal statistical offices to define what he referred to as la statistique humaine (soon to become demography). According to Guillard, statistics was the only science that established with certainty, thanks to its reliance on numbers, the "state of the nation." The aims of la statistique humaine were (1) to identify variations in the state of the population according to sex, age, location, and race; (2) to inquire into the causes of that condition; and (3) to make that information available to legislators and economists in their pursuit of progress.

In some respects, demography was yet another version of the Enlightenment project to use social science, and more specifically statistics, to hold legislators accountable to the "natural" laws governing society. Its audience was the liberal economists who dominated lite social science at the time. More specifically, demography challenged the use of Malthusian arguments to reject state support for the poor. Curiously, responses to Guillard's proposal focused not on the political stakes but on technical issues concerning data, statistical entities, and the limits to statistical manipulation.

Guillard's original project encompassed a campaign to improve official statistics so as to meet the needs of science, extensive discussions of how to use existing data by correcting for known omissions and verifying the data by comparing different sources, and discussions of the choice and use of different statistical measures. Beginning with the state of existing knowledge, Guillard decried the absence of precise knowledge about local population movements (births and deaths) and their cause. In particular, Guillard called attention to the failure of the decennial summaries of civil registries to specify ages of death. These data were essential for establishing the age structure of the population, which in turn influenced mortality rates. Far from being unusual, this focus on administrative practice was characteristic of French nineteenth-century statistics. Mathematicians measured their work by the logic and skill with which they manipulated numbers, but statisticians based...