Statistics, History of

Alain Desrosieres, INSEE, Paris, France

2001 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 22, pp. 1508015085, 2001, Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract

The history of statistics can be told in several ways: as a quantitative description of the social world, or as a branch of applied
mathematics making it possible to build models in any area featuring large numbers. There are many historical connections
between these narratives. This history began in the eighteenth century, with German Statistik and English political arithmetic.
In the nineteenth century Quetelet established a relation between the probabilistic theory of the average man and the
gathering of ofcial statistics by governments, with a large use of the Gaussian distribution and of the relative stability of
macrosocial phenomena. In the 1890s, Francis Galton and Karl Pearson created a mathematical theory of statistical distri-
bution, and introduced the ideas of variance, regression, correlation, and chi-square test. That theory was then developed by
Ronald Fisher, Jerzy Neyman, and Egon Pearson, with the inferential statistics theory, giving a strong probabilistic foundation
to estimation, tests, maximum likelihood, and sampling theory. Simultaneously, ofcial statistical bureaux, compiling
administrative statistics, and organising censuses and sampling surveys, were also developed. These institutions, often
perceived only as suppliers of data assumed to reect reality, are also places where this reality is instituted through co-
constructed operations of social representations, public action, and statistical measurement.

The word statistics today has several different meanings. For
the public, and even for many people specializing in social
studies, it designates numbers and measurements relating to
the social world: population, gross national product, and
unemployment, for instance. For academics in Statistics
Departments, however, it designates a branch of applied
mathematics making it possible to build models in any area
featuring large numbers, not necessarily dealing with society.
History alone can explain this dual meaning. Statistics
appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century as
meaning a quantied description of humancommunity
characteristics. It brought together two previous traditions: that
of German Statistik and that of English political arithmetic
(Lazarsfeld, 1977).
When it originated in Germany in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Statistik of Hermann Conring
(160681) and Gottfried Achenwall (171979) was a means
for classifying the knowledge needed by kings. This science of
the state included history, law, political science, economics,
and geography, that is, a major part of what later became the
subjects of social studies, but presented from the point of view
of their utility for the state. These various forms of knowledge
did not necessarily entail quantitative measurements: they were
basically associated with the description of specic territories in
all their aspects. This territorial connotation of the word
statistics would subsist for a long time in the nineteenth
century.
Independently of the German Statistik, the English tradition
of political arithmetic had developed methods for analyzing
numbers and calculations, on the basis of parochial records of
baptisms, marriages, and deaths. Such methods, originally
developed by John Graunt (162074) in his work on bills of
mortality, were then systematized by William Petty
(162787). They were used, among others, to assess the pop-
ulation of a kingdom and to draw up the rst forms of life
insurance. They constitute the origin of modern demography.
Nineteenth-century statistics were therefore a fairly
informal combination of these two traditions: taxonomy and
numbering. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it further
became a mathematical method for the analysis of facts (social
or not) involving large numbers and for inference on the basis
of such collections of facts. This branch of mathematics is
generally associated with the probability theory, developed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which, in the nineteenth
century, inuenced many branches of both the social and
natural sciences (Gigerenzer et al., 1989). The word statistics is
still used in both ways today and both of these uses are still
related, of course, insofar as quantitative social studies use, in
varied proportions, inference tools provided by mathematical
statistics. The probability calculus, on its part, grounds the
credibility of statistical measurements resulting from surveys,
together with random sampling and condence intervals.
The diversity of meanings of the word statistics, main-
tained until today, has been heightened by the massive devel-
opment, beginning in the 1830s, of bureaus of statistics,
administrative institutions distinct from universities, in charge
of collecting, processing, and transmitting quantied infor-
mation on the population, the economy, employment, living
conditions, etc. Starting in the 1940s, these bureaus of statistics
became important data suppliers for empirical social studies,
then in full growth. Their history is therefore an integral part of
these sciences, especially in the second half of the twentieth
century, during which the mathematical methods developed by
university statisticians were increasingly used by the so-called
ofcial statisticians. Consequently the history of statistics is
a crossroads history connecting very different elds, which are
covered in other articles of this encyclopedia: general problems
of the quantication of social studies (Theodore Porter),
mathematical sampling methods (Stephen E. Fienberg and
J. M. Tanur), survey research (Martin Bulmer), demography
(Simon Szreter), econometrics, etc. The history of these
different elds was the object of much research in the 1980s

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 23 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.03050-6 423
424 Statistics, History of
and 1990s, some examples of which are indicated in the
Bibliography. Its main interest is to underscore the increasingly
closer connections between the so-called internal dimensions
(history of the technical tools), the external ones (history of
the institutions), and those related to the construction of social
studies objects, born from the interaction between the three
foci constituted by university research, administrations in
charge of social problems, and bureaus of statistics. This co-
construction of objects makes it possible to join historiogra-
phies that not long ago were distinct. Three key moments of
this history will be mentioned here: Adolphe Quetelet and the
average man (1830s), Karl Pearson and correlation (1890s),
and the establishment of large systems for the production and
processing of statistics.
Quetelet, the Average Man, and Moral Statistics
The cognitive history of statistics can be presented as that of the
tension and sliding between two foci: the measurement of
uncertainty (Stigler, 1986), resulting from the work of
eighteenth-century astronomers and physicists, and the reduc-
tion of diversity, which will be taken up by social studies.
Statistics is a way of taming chance (Hacking, 1990) in two
different ways: chance and uncertainty related to protocols of
observation, chance and dispersion related to the diversity
and the indetermination of the world itself. The Belgian
astronomer and statistician Adolphe Quetelet (17961874) is
the essential character in the transition between the world of
uncertain measurement of the probability proponents (Carl
Friedrich Gauss, Pierre Simone de Laplace) and that of the
regularities resulting from diversity, thanks to his having
transferred, around 1830, the concept of average from the
natural sciences to the human sciences, through the construc-
tion of a new being, the average man.
As early as the eighteenth century, specicities appeared
from observations in large numbers: drawing balls out of urns,
gambling, successive measurements of the position of a star,
sex ratios (male and female births), or the mortality resulting
from preventive smallpox inoculation, for instance. The radical
innovation of this century was to connect these very different
phenomena thanks to the common perspective provided by the
law of large numbers formulated by Jacques Bernoulli in
1713. If draws from a constant urn containing white and black
balls are repeated a large number of times, the observed share
of white balls converges toward that actually contained by the
urn. Considered by some as a mathematical theorem and by
others as an experimental result, this law was at the crossroads
of the two currents in epistemological science: one hypothet-
ical deductive, the other empirical inductive.
Beginning in the 1830s, the statistical description of
observations in large numbers became a regular activity of
the state. Previously reserved for princes, this information
henceforth available to enlightened men was related to the
population, to births, marriages, and deaths, to suicides and
crimes, to epidemics, to foreign trade, schools, jails, and
hospitals. It was generally a by-product of administration
activity, not the result of special surveys. Only the pop-
ulation census, the showcase product of nineteenth-century
statistics, was the object of regular surveys. These statistics
were published in volumes with heterogeneous contents,
but their very existence suggests that the characteristics of
society were henceforth a matter of scientic law and no
longer of judicial law, that is, of observed regularity and not
of the normative decisions of political power. Quetelet was
the man who orchestrated this new way of thinking the
social world. In the 1830s and 1840s, he set up adminis-
trative and social networks for the production of statistics
and established until the beginning of the twentieth
century how statistics were to be interpreted.
This interpretation is the result of the combination of two
ideas developed from the law of large numbers: the generality
of normal distribution (or, in Quetelets vocabulary: the law
of possibilities) and the regularity of certain yearly statistics. As
early as 1738, Abraham de Moivre, seeking to determine the
convergence conditions for the law of large numbers, had
formulated the mathematical expression of the future
Gaussian law as the limit of a binomial distribution. Then
Laplace (17491827) had shown that this law constituted
a good representation of the distribution of measurement
errors in astronomy, hence the name that Quetelet and his
contemporaries also used to designate it: the law of errors
(the expression normal law, under which it is known today,
would not be introduced until the late nineteenth century by
Karl Pearson).
Quetelets daring intellectual masterstroke was to bring
together two forms: on the one hand the law of errors in
observation, and on the other, the law of distribution of certain
body measurements of individuals in a population, such as
the height of conscripts in a regiment. The likeness of the
Gaussian looks of these two forms of distribution justied the
invention of a new being with a promise of notable posterity in
social studies: the average man. Thus, Quetelet restricted the
calculation and the legitimate use of averages to cases where the
distribution of the observations had a Gaussian shape, analo-
gous to that of the distribution of the astronomical observa-
tions of a star. Reasoning on that basis, just as previous to this
distribution there was a real star (the cause of the Gaussian-
shaped distribution), previous to the equally Gaussian distri-
bution of the height of conscripts there was a being of a reality
comparable to the existence of the star. Quetelets average man
is also the constant cause, previous to the observed controlled
variability. He is a sort of model, of which specic individuals
are imperfect copies.
The second part of this cognitive construction, which is so
important in the ulterior uses of statistics in social studies, is the
attention drawn by the remarkable regularity of series of
statistics, such as those of marriages, suicides, or crimes. Just as
series of draws from an urn reveal a regularity in the observed
frequency of white balls, the regularity in the rates of suicide or
crime can be interpreted as resulting from series of draws from
a population, some of the members of which are affected with
a propensity to suicide or crime. The average man is therefore
endowed not only with physical attributes but also moral
ones, such as these propensities. Here again, just as the average
heights of conscripts are stable, whereas individual heights are
dispersed, crime or suicide rates are just as stable, whereas these
acts are eminently individual and unpredictable. This form of
statistics, then called moral, signaled the beginning of soci-
ology, a science of society radically distinct from a science of the

individual, such as psychology (Porter, 1986). Quetelets
reasoning would ground the one developed by Durkheim in
Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1897).
This way of using statistical regularity to back the idea of the
existence of a society ruled by specic laws, distinct from those
governing individual behavior, dominated nineteenth-century,
and, in part, twentieth-century social studies. Around 1900,
however, another approach appeared, this one centered on two
ideas: the distribution (no longer just the average) of obser-
vations, and the correlation between two or several variables,
observed in individuals (no longer just in groups, such as
territories).
Distribution, Correlation, and Causality
This shift of interest from the average individual to the distri-
butions and hierarchies among individuals, was connected to
the rise, in late-century Victorian England, of a eugenicist and
hereditarian current of thought inspired from Darwin
(MacKenzie, 1981). Its two advocates were Francis Galton
(18221911), a cousin of Darwin, and Karl Pearson
(18571936). In their attempt to measure biological heredity,
which was central to their political construction, they created
a radically new statistics tool that made it possible to conceive
partial causality. Such causality had been absent from all
previous forms of thought, for which A either is or is not the
cause of B, but cannot be so somewhat or incompletely. Yet
Galtons research on heredity led to such a formulation: the
parents height explains the childrens, but does not entirely
determine it. The taller fathers are, the taller are their sons on
average, but, for a fathers given height, the sons height
dispersion is great. This formalization of heredity led to the two
related ideas of regression and correlation, later to be exten-
sively used in social studies as symptoms of causality.
Pearson, however, greatly inuenced by the antirealist
philosophy of the physicist Ernst Mach, challenged the idea of
causality, which according to him was metaphysical, and
stuck to the one of correlation, which he described with the
help of contingency tables (Pearson, 1911: Chap. 5). For him,
scientic laws are only summaries, brief descriptions in mental
stenography, abridged formulas, a condensation of perception
routines for future use and forecasting. Such formulas are the
limits of observations that never perfectly respect the strict
functional laws. The correlation coefcient makes it possible
to measure the strength of the connection, between zero
(independence) and one (strict dependence). Thus, in this
conception of science associated by Pearson with the budding
eld of mathematical statistics, the reality of things can only
be invoked for pragmatic ends and provided that the
perception routines are maintained. Similarly, causality can
only be insofar as it is a proven correlation, therefore
predictable with a fairly high probability. Pearsons pointed
formulations would constitute, in the early twentieth century,
one of the foci of the epistemology of statistics applied to
social studies. Others, in contrast, would seek to give new
meaning to the concepts of reality and causality by dening
them differently. These discussions were strongly related to
the aims of the statistical work, strained between scientic
knowledge and decisions.
Statistics, History of 425
Current mathematical statistics proceed from the works of
Karl Pearson and his successors: his son Egon Pearson
(18951980), the Polish mathematician Jerzy Neyman
(18941981), the statistician pioneering in agricultural exper-
imentation Ronald Fisher (18901962), and nally the engi-
neer and beer brewer William Gosset, alias Student
(18761937). These developments were the result of an
increasingly thorough integration of so-called inferential
statistics into probabilistic models. The interpretation of these
constructions is always stretched between two perspectives: the
one of science, which aims to prove or test hypotheses, with
truth as its goal, and the one of action, which aims to make the
best decision, with efciency as its goal. This tension explains
a number of controversies that opposed the founders of
inferential statistics in the 1930s. In effect, the essential inno-
vations were often directly generated within the framework of
research as applied to economic issues, for instance in the cases
of Gosset and Fisher.
Gosset was employed in a brewery. He developed product
quality-control techniques based on a small number of
samples. He needed to appraise the variances and laws of
distribution of parameters calculated on observations not
complying with the supposed law of large numbers. Fisher,
who worked in an agricultural research center, could only carry
out a limited number of controlled tests. He mitigated this
limitation by articially creating a randomness, itself
controlled, for variables other than those for which he was
trying to measure the effect. This randomization technique
thus introduced probabilistic chance into the very heart of the
experimental process. Unlike Karl Pearson, Gosset and Fisher
used distinct notations to designate, on the one hand, the
theoretical parameter of a probability distribution (a mean,
a variance, a correlation) and on the other, the estimate of this
parameter, calculated on the basis of observations so insuf-
cient in number that it was possible to disregard the gap
between these two values, theoretical and estimated.
This new system of notation marked a decisive turning
point: it enabled an inferential statistics based on probabilistic
models. This form of statistics was developed in two directions.
The estimation of parameters, which took into account a set of
recorded data, presupposed that the model was true. The
information produced by the model was combined with the
data, but nothing indicated whether the model and the data
were in agreement. In contrast, the hypothesis tests allowed this
agreement to be tested and if necessary to modify the model:
this was the inventive part of inferential statistics. In wondering
whether a set of events could plausibly have occurred if
a model were true, one compared these events explicitly or
otherwise to those that would have occurred if the model
were true, and made a judgment about the gap between these
two sets of events.
This judgment could itself be made according to two
different perspectives, which were the object of vivid contro-
versy between Fisher on the one hand, and Neyman and Egon
Pearson on the other. Fishers test was placed in a perspective of
truth and science: a theoretical hypothesis was judged plausible
or was rejected, after consideration of the observed data. Ney-
man and Pearsons test, in contrast, was aimed at decision
making and action. One evaluated the respective costs of
accepting a false hypothesis and of rejecting a true one,
426 Statistics, History of
described as errors of Type I and II. These two different aims
truth and economy although supported by close probabilistic
formalism, led to practically incommensurable argumentative
worlds, as was shown by the dialogue of the deaf between
Fisher on one side, and Neyman and Pearson on the other
(Gigerenzer et al., 1989: pp. 90109).
Official Statistics and the Construction of the State
At the same time as mathematical statistics were developing,
so-called ofcial statistics were also being developed in
bureaus of statistics, for a long time on an independent course.
These latter did not use the new mathematical tools until the
1930s in the United States and the 1950s in Europe, in
particular when the random sample-survey method was used
to study employment or household budgets. Yet in the 1840s,
Quetelet had already actively pushed for such bureaus to be set
up in different countries, and for their scientication with the
tools of the time. In 1853, he had begun organizing meetings of
the International Congress of Statistics, which led to the
establishment in 1885 of the International Statistical Institute
(which still exists and includes mathematicians and ofcial
statisticians). One could write the history of these bureaus as an
aspect of the more general history of the construction of the
state, insofar as they developed and legitimized a common
language specically combining the authority of science
and that of the state (Anderson 1988; Desrosires 1998;
Patriarca 1996).
More precisely, every period of the history of a state could
be characterized by the list of socially judged social questions
that were consequently put on the agenda of ofcial statistics.
So were co-constructed three interdependent foci: representa-
tion, action, and statistics a way of describing and interpreting
social phenomena (to which social studies would increasingly
contribute), a method for determining state intervention and
public action, and nally, a list of statistical variables and
procedures aimed at measuring them.
Thus for example in England in the second third of the
nineteenth century, poverty, mortality, and epidemic
morbidity were followed closely in terms of a detailed
geographical distribution (counties) by the General Register
Ofce (GRO), set up by William Farr in 1837. Englands
economic liberalism and the Poor Law Amendment Act of
1834 (which led to the creation of workhouses) were consistent
with this form of statistics. In the 1880s and 1890s, Galton and
Pearsons hereditarian eugenics would compete with this
environmentalism, which explained poverty in terms of the
social and territorial contexts. This new social philosophy was
reected in news forms of political action, and of statistics.
Thus the social classication in ve differentiated groups used
by British statisticians throughout the twentieth century is
marked by the political and cognitive conguration of the
beginning of the century (Szreter 1996).
In all the important countries (including Great Britain) of
the 1890s and 1900s, however, the work of the bureaus of
statistics was guided by labor-related issues: employment,
wages, workers budgets, subsistence costs, etc. The modern idea
of unemployment emerged, but its denition and its measure-
ment were not standardized yet. This interest in labor statistics
was linked to the fairly general development of a specic labor
law and the rst so-called social welfare legislation, such as
Bismarcks in Germany, or that developed in the Nordic coun-
tries in the 1890s. It is signicant that the application of the
sample survey method (then called representative survey) was
rst tested in Norway in 1895, precisely in view of preparing
a new law enacting general pension funds and invalidity
insurance: this suggests the consistency of the political, tech-
nical, and cognitive dimensions of this co-construction.
These forms of consistency are found in the statistics systems
that were extensively developed, at a different scale, after 1945.
At that time, public policies were governed by a number of
issues: the regulation of the macroeconomic balance as seen
through the Keynesian model, the reduction of social inequal-
ities and the struggle against unemployment thanks to social-
welfare systems, the democratization of school, etc. Some
people then spoke of revolution in government statistics
(Duncan and Shelton 1978), and underscored its four
components, which have largely shaped the present statistics
systems. National accounting, a vast construction integrating
a large number of statistics from different sources, was the
instrument on which the macroeconomic models resulting
from the Keynesian analysis were based. Sample surveys made
it possible to study a much broader range of issues and to
accumulate quantitative descriptions of the social world, which
were unthinkable at a time when the observation techniques
were limited to censuses and monographs. Statistical coordi-
nation, an apparently strictly administrative affair, was indis-
pensable to make consistent the observations resulting from
different elds. Finally, beginning in 1960, the generalization of
computer data processing radically transformed the activity of
bureaux of statistics.
So, ofcial statistics, placed at the junction between social
studies, mathematics, and information on public policies, has
become an important research component in the social studies.
Given, however, that from the institutional standpoint it is
generally placed outside, it is often hardly perceived by those
who seek to draw up a panorama of these sciences. In fact, the
way bureaus of statistics operate and are integrated into
administrative and scientic contexts varies a lot from one
country to another, so a history and a sociology of social
studies cannot omit examining these institutions, which are
often perceived as mere suppliers of data assumed to reect
reality, when they are actually places where this reality is
instituted through co-constructed operations of social repre-
sentation, public action, and statistical measurement.
See also: Estimation: Point and Interval; Galton, Sir Francis
(18221911); Neyman, Jerzy (18941981); Pearson, Karl
(18571936); Probability and Chance: Philosophical Aspects;
Quantication in History; Quantication in the History of the Social
Sciences; Quetelet, Adolphe (17961874).
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