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On the Uses of Russian Statistics: A Response to Alessandro Stanziani’s “European Statistics, Russian Numbers and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 May 2017
Extract
The central argument of Alessandro Stanziani’s article “European Statistics, Russian Numbers and Social Dynamics, 1861–1914”—that statistical data is socially constructed, and that the ways in which it is socially constructed should be an object of historical inquiry—helps to answer the question of why an archival researcher with literary inclinations should take note of the mass of statistical material produced throughout the nineteenth century and especially in its final decades. Statistical reports were regularly published in overtly literary publications such as Faddei Bulgarin’s Northern Bee (Северная пчела) from the 1820s onward. Vissarion Belinskii, one of the preeminent Russian literary critics of the 1830s–1840s, reviewed statistical works alongside literary fiction, poetry, and theater. In a review of a theory of statistics, he weighed in on the importance of the discipline and its place among other sciences
- Type
- Critical Forum on Statistics
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2017
References
1. Translation from Belinskii, Vissarion, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii (Moscow, 1953), 3: 229–31Google Scholar. Original: “Что знание статистики государства необходимо для знания источников его силы—это несомненно, но из этого следует только то, что статистика есть вспомогательное знание для политической экономии…. Развитие народа и развитие человечества есть феноменология духа, развивающегося вследствие непреложных, априорных законов и чуждаго всего случайного и внешнего, тогда как в статистике моровая язва, скотский падёж, засуха и подобные тому случайности имеют важное значение.”
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