Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Percentages and the Emergence of Statistical Objectivity
- 2 The Republic of Numbers: Robert Gourlay and the Art of the Statistical Account
- 3 Adolphe Quetelet and the Expanded Reproduction of ‘Statistism’
- 4 Form as Content: The Establishment of National Statistical Systems
- 5 Immigration and Population Growth: An American Statistical Controversy
- 6 The Epitaph of Imperial Statistics
- 7 Statistical Expertise and the Twilight of Liberal Italy
- 8 Politics of the Sampling Revolution
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
3 - Adolphe Quetelet and the Expanded Reproduction of ‘Statistism’
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- List of Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Percentages and the Emergence of Statistical Objectivity
- 2 The Republic of Numbers: Robert Gourlay and the Art of the Statistical Account
- 3 Adolphe Quetelet and the Expanded Reproduction of ‘Statistism’
- 4 Form as Content: The Establishment of National Statistical Systems
- 5 Immigration and Population Growth: An American Statistical Controversy
- 6 The Epitaph of Imperial Statistics
- 7 Statistical Expertise and the Twilight of Liberal Italy
- 8 Politics of the Sampling Revolution
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quetelet (Ghent 1796–Brussels 1874) has been aptly described as ‘the one-man band of nineteenth-century statistics’. This happy turn of phrase conveys the diversity of Quetelet's professional and intellectual activities throughout his life and it nicely fits with the image of him elaborated by his biographers. For instance, according to Belgian theologian Joseph Lottin, writing in 1912:
Quetelet's life is one of the fullest and most complex we know. A literary hack in his adolescence, he began by devoting his talents to poetry. Trained as a mathematician, he devoted his youth abilities to geometry and mathematical physics. Soon, he abandoned geometry in favour of probability calculus applied to statistical research and published, on this topic, numerous writings that earned him, later, nomination as President of the Central Commission of Statistics.
His American biographer, Frank H. Hankins, had already insisted in 1908 on the variety of Quetelet's pursuits, distinguishing between the mathematician, the astronomer and the statistician, as well as between the administrative, methodological and moral statistician. The prestige of Quetelet enduring well into the early twentieth century can further be illustrated by the fact that in 1914, Italian statistician Corrado Gini, who had just been elevated to the famous Padua chair in statistics, had entitled his inaugural lecture ‘L'uomo medio’, after Quetelet's well-known ‘average man’, to which French Durkheimian sociologist Maurice Halbwachs had also devoted his complementary dissertation the year before.
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- Statistics, Public Debate and the State, 1800–1945A Social, Political and Intellectual History of Numbers, pp. 49 - 62Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014