CAMARGO--Alexandre-de-Paiva-Rio.-Sociology-of-statistics--possibilities-for-a-new-field-of-investigation.-História--Ciências--Saúde---Manguinhos--Rio-de-Janeiro--v.16--n.4--p.903-925..md

Rua Antonio Basílio, 123/701 20511-190 – Rio de Janeiro – RJ – Brazil [email protected]

We want to contribute with a brief reflection on the morphology and scientific culture of statistical institutions.

Professor at the Department of History/Universidade Estácio de Sá

Keywords: statistical institutions; information policy; political technologies; classification categories; historical research

The article presents research possibilities revealed by the sociology of statistics. In the dimension of demand, it emphasizes the power for the foundation of the government technologies involved in the national States (political domain). In terms of use, it highlights its role in the formulation of categories of perception of reality (cognitive domain). In the sphere of production (institutional domain), it emphasizes the organization of activity in different temporalities. The tensions between the technical/normative advances recommended by scientific associations and the pragmatic demands of public administration are analyzed. The sociology of statistics: the possibilities of a new field

of investigation

Approved for publication in April 2009.

Sociology of statistics: possibilities for a new field of investigation

Received for publication in July 2008.

Sociology of statistics

Abstract

v.16, n.4, Oct.-Dec. 2009, p.903-925

Keywords: statistical institutions; information policy; political technologies; classification categories; historical statistics research.

into statistics.

Sociology of statistics: possibilities for a new field of investigation. História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro, v.16, n.4, p.903-925.

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

Summary

CAMARGO, Alexandre de Paiva Rio.

This article presents the possibilities for investigation unveiled by the sociology of statistics. Of particular importance in the area of demand is the power to provide the fundamentals used in government technologies in nation states (political domain). In terms of the use of statistics, the role in forming the categories of perceptions of reality (cognitive domain) is highlighted. Within the scope of production (institutional domain), it is important to emphasize the organization of the activity into different temporal categories. The tensions between the technical/normative advances recommended by scientific associations and the pragmatic requirements of public administration are also examined. This article seeks to provide a brief reflection on the morphology of statistical institutions and their scientific culture.

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Machine Translated by Google This complex relationship between the pragmatic and scientific poles was well understood by Simon

Schwartzman (2004), renowned sociologist and former president of the Brazilian Institute of Geography

and Statistics (IBGE):

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Statistical information is of special interest to the sociologist of science because it is produced by institutions that are, at the same time, research centers – involving, therefore, scientific and technological values, as well as perspectives and approaches typical of their fields of investigation – and public institutions or official, subject to the rules, values and restrictions of the public service. Published in the press, its products – numbers related to population, income, national product, urbanization, employment, birth rate, poverty and many others – are used both to support government policies and to evaluate their results, and can create or limit rights and legal and financial benefits for specific groups, institutions and individuals. This plurality of roles, contexts and perspectives associated with public statistics is at the very origin of this field (p.69).

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

Numbers that are, without reducing them, statistics mediate the formulation of public policies. But

they also support the hypotheses of academic research and shape our categories of perception of

reality, as we can see ourselves in the other, thanks to the comparative equivalences created by

statistical classifications. This is the meaning of Nelson de Castro Senra's statement (2005, p.16): “the

process of preparing statistics deconstructs the individualities that are part of previously idealized

collectivities, in order, in the end, to rebuild them as individualizations: one in the other.” Immersing in

everyday life, statistics referring to employment, inflation, income, fertility, among others, support the

descriptions of economic situations, the denouncement of social injustices and the justification of

political actions. We tend to determine the safety conditions of a country's highways from the number

of accidents that occur on them, especially on holidays.

The sociology of statistics, a fairly recent approach in academia, has

Increasingly, statistics focus on subjective assessments and personal choices.

as a research horizon the production, dissemination and use of public statistics by the broadest

sectors of society and the State. The expression is not always commonly used among scholars, who

often prefer to use just the term 'public statistics'. In any case, research is also inspired by this principle

and this approach. Taking statistics as an object of study, and not as a means of analysis (the most

common one), these studies seek, in the first place, to recognize the plurality of roles assumed by

public statistics. Plurality that extends from the political demands of planning and coordination, which

found and adjusted the offer of the statistical program, to the irreducible procedural and conceptual

autonomy, present in the methods and techniques of elaboration of statistics, as well as in the values

that integrate a scientific culture shared by statisticians, economists, demographers, cartographers,

educators, sociologists and anthropologists – professionals involved in the production and analysis of

statistics.

How many people must have already hesitated to go to various social events, considering the latest

news report, vulgarizing crime statistics, measurements of urban violence and public safety? More

than ever, statistics weigh on

Machine Translated by Google It becomes possible, therefore, to think about the construction and performance of national states in terms of

statistical knowledge, understood not in epistemological terms, but as a vast network comprising people (scientists,

politicians and intellectuals), institutions, instruments and equipment. . The analysis of this network, we insist, must

always consider the specificity of statistical activity, pressed by the domain of pragmatism and technoscience.

In fact, the frontier position between the political-administrative scope of the State and the scientific field is

perhaps the characteristic that most distinguishes public statistics. In this sense, they bear witness to both the state

of a country's social disciplines (its themes, concepts, objects and approaches), and the state's political options,

thanks to a logic that determines the attribution of material means (the censuses are the most expensive operation

that a country can carry out in times of peace), for defining priorities and for resolving institutional conflicts. On the

other hand, the scientific field offers the theoretical substrate on the modes of measurement and on the formalized

representations of the social world. It is precisely because of this relative autonomy of the State apparatus that

statistical information, once produced, escapes the objectives of its creator and allows its reuse by other users, who

can even reinsert it into networks of uses very distant from the theoretical universe in question. that was conceived

(Otero, 2006, p.25).

Sociology of statistics

In these terms, the study of the sources, procedures and uses, both intellectual and political, of statistical

production operations is the ultimate goal to which the sociology of statistics aspires. This analytical care can be

observed in what is considered one of the pioneering studies of the approach. In The sociology of official statistics,

which, if I am not mistaken, names the field, Paul Starr (1983, p.8) already distinguished two structural organizations

of the statistical system: the “social organization”, which, for the author, consists of the social relationship and

economic among the agents involved in the analysis, distribution and use of statistical information (interviewees,

State agencies, private companies, professional associations, international organizations); and “cognitive

organization”, which consists of the process of

assessment of the risks involved in the most different situations. The example of Anthony Giddens (1991, p.49)

should suffice: “Anyone in a western country who decides to get married nowadays knows that the divorce rate is

high... . Knowledge of the high divorce rate can affect the decision to marry itself, as well as decisions about related

considerations – the regime of property, etc.”.

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For Bruno Latour, the power of statistics resides in their being government technology, bringing people, objects

and situations to the tables of those who are responsible for making political decisions, in the form of tables, graphs

and cartograms. By doing so, they distinctly contribute to making distant and/or absent realities known, making

them thinkable and, therefore, potentially manageable (Senra, 2005, p.15). The progressive imposition of matrices

and statistical tables opened up the possibility of: (a) creating spaces of equivalence, from which the comparison

between phenomena and units of analysis of different natures is guaranteed1; (b) summarize information based on

synthetic indicators (averages, position measures and index numbers); and (c) laying the foundations of a technology

of distance that seeks to analyze social reality from a continuous process of objectifying the social discourses at

stake (Otero, 2006, p.46).

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Machine Translated by Google As for cognitive organization, research in history can investigate the decision-making processes regarding the

emergence or abandonment of statistical series2 on a technological platform,

of this or that concept corpus, which constitutes a historical study on information policy.

For all that has been said so far, the intimacy of statistics and statisticians, who think and formulate

statistics, with national States and sciences prevails. It is this intimacy that we will be dealing with from now

on.3

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the adoption of this or that

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

Political Statistics and Technologies

,

structuring of information, that is, the intellectual construction of assumptions, rules, classification categories

and measurement methods present in the production of information by statistical institutions.

Ever since the formation of the first great states of antiquity, statistics have been desired. Early censuses

proved to be valuable instruments of administration, helping the State to understand its territory and its

population. In today's eyes, technical resources such as averages and sampling may seem overly simple,

familiar as we are with complex measurement concepts. Military conscription, the regimentation of warriors,

proved to be the most immediate function of the censuses and, certainly, it would not have been easy to carry

out. Especially when we think of societies like the Greek and Roman ones, for which war was an endemic

phenomenon, and the social mobilization required by 'waging war' occupied a large part of the productive life

of its citizens.

Borrowing the words of Alain Desrosières (1996, p.6; emphasis in the original),

With regard to social organization, the use of historical research allows us to reveal the social foundations

of the measurement process. There is the issue of setting up the population counting infrastructure (institutional

innovation), related to the creation of the material means of domination of the national State, including the

alliances established between the elites and the territorial pacts that promote the physical extension of central

power.

It would be necessary for state monopolies of a military and tributary order to advance, at the dawn of the

Modern Age, for population surveys to grow in importance in the administrative structure. A pedagogical

function would emerge for statistics, through the great descriptions of the territory and the subjects, destined

to educate and guide the absolute sovereign. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, statistics assumed the role

of 'the prince's mirror', showing him the greatness, in the form of his kingdom – the metaphorical extension of

his body (Desrosières, 1998, p.26). In addition to the descriptive tables, quantified and periodic information,

reserved for administrators, was added. After all, statistics were the basis of fiscal control of mercantilist

policies. The world's wealth, it was believed, was limited, and expressed in favorable trade balances. The

activities

the joint evolution of the role of the State and its more material cognitive technologies provides a common thread for reading the history of statistics. There we find, for example, a crucial distinction between State activities that aim to deal with singular cases (courts, for example) and those that organize general policies, valid for the entire community.

Machine Translated by Google Armed with civil lists, the States began to assert civil status, meaning that they alone would be responsible for

enunciating the status of people, regardless of the religion adopted (Senra, 2005, p.59).

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The relationship between the administrative centralization of the national State and the increase in the desire

for statistics is undeniable. However, for a patrimonial state, in which goods and people are managed privately, as

dependent on a sovereign lord, statistics would be seen as a prerogative of the monarch and, as such, a state

secret. They did not inform a civil society distinct from the State, much less an autonomous public opinion. In this

administrative framework, statistics were supposed to reveal not only the powers but also the weaknesses of states.

Outwardly, so much the better if they were hidden from enemies, made confidential. Domestically, statistics would

remain a material instrument of State power and surveillance. They were situated in the dimension of the coercive

relationship between the sovereign and his subjects. Very different, therefore, from the contemporary meaning of

statistics, marked by the environment of cooperation between citizens and their representatives, by the principle of

credibility in carrying out census surveys, promoted by the policy of publicity of information and confidentiality of

informants.

Sociology of statistics

Locating the historical origins of this profound change implies investigating the development of a 'statistical

reason', in the wake of a 'reason of modernity'. We understand the latter as the advent of an acute historical

awareness, in which man recognizes himself as an exteriority in relation to the domain of nature, which means the

loss of the hegemony of metaphysical ideologies and the transformation of space-time conditioning into a kind of

blank page. In the words of Michel de Certeau (1996, p.225), “a cut is made in the traditional cosmos, where the

subject was possessed by the voices of the world. An autonomous surface is placed under the gaze of the subject

who thus gives himself the field of his own doing”, circumscribing his own and distinct production space, in which he

executes his will and action. The author continues, stating that “the revolution itself, this 'modern' idea, represents

the scriptural project at the level of an entire society that has the ambition to constitute itself as a blank page in

relation to the past, to write itself, as its own system, and to remake history by the model of what it manufactures (it

will be 'progress')” (p.226-227; emphasis in the original).

economic and financial sectors should submit themselves in toto to the State, aiming for the increasing increase of

their power, under the control of the figure of the king. Only in secondary terms, was it aimed at improving the

standard of living of the subjects, over whom the monarch had the right of life and death. For a world whose

extension was expanding with the formation of colonial empires, it was essential to increase tax collection, create

and apply taxes. More than anything, the numbers referring to subjects expressed the power and wealth of a

national State, giving prestige to its sovereign, projecting it in competition with rival monarchies.

In fact, the experience of the political revolution, like the French one, seems to have entirely re-dimensioned the

attitude of the western portion of humanity. The rupture of modernity

For all this, census records were not stopped, progressing in the making and innovative use of several others,

including customs records on imports and exports, used to a large extent for taxation. They would be joined by birth,

marriage and death records, separating them from religious records.

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Machine Translated by Google The embryo of this rationale was perhaps already contained in what, since the 17th century, has been

conventionally called 'state reason'. Michel Foucault (2006) was one of the first to relate the evocation of this reason

to the reinvention of the notion of government, based on the perception of the exteriority of the political phenomenon:

“the doctrine of reason of State tried to define in what ways the principles and methods of government state differed,

for example, in the way in which God governed the world, the father, his family, or a superior, his community” (p.373).

At that time, a rationality emerged about the art of governing States, separated from the sphere of nature, from

respect for the general order of the world, from the Christian and judicial tradition, which intended that the government

be profoundly fair. Contractualist philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, who sought the ethicalpolitical origins of the State in the notion of a social contract, can be considered the forerunners of this doctrine. They

thus depersonalized the exercise of power. Unlike Machiavelli, who was concerned with defining what maintains or

reinforces the bond between prince and State, not with the existence and nature of the latter. Machiavelli was still

concerned with the exercise of the sovereign's power over his territory; he did not see in the movements of the

population the inexhaustible resources for the production of wealth.

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

In these terms, the need to increase the power of the State and to know its strength, resisting the onslaught of

others, creates an entirely new normative reality:

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

the government could not, therefore, limit itself to the sole application of the general principles of reason, wisdom, and prudence. A knowledge is necessary: a concrete, precise and measured knowledge referring to the power of the State. The art of governing, characteristic of the reason of State, is closely linked to the development of what was called statistics or political arithmetic – that is, to the knowledge of the respective strengths of the different States. Such knowledge was indispensable to good government (Foucault, 2006, p.376; emphasis in the original).

with the 'traditional cosmos' knew no precedent. In defense of this idea, it is worth remembering the historian Ciro

Flamarion Cardoso (quoted in Moraes, Rego, 2002, p.232):

In the previous passage, Foucault makes reference to two distinct traditions – German Statistik, literally conceived

as 'science of the State', and English political arithmetic – that developed between the 17th and 18th centuries. In

common, both claimed a specific domain of State action, endowed with its own intelligibility, dedicating themselves

to expanding its power and visibility in the international community. From the beginning, the Germanic current strived

for the synthetic understanding of social activities and human groupings. This tradition focused on the study of

communities, in states, regions, cities or professions, understood as a whole, endowed with particular powers and

only described by the combination of numerous aspects: climate, natural resources, economic organization,

a stable, recent universe (with around 6 thousand years of existence), where a humanity considered

as inhabiting the center of this universe, created separately by God and placed ahead of other living beings on the planet, would organize itself in an also immutable way, has been giving way place, since the seventeenth century, to a different universe, as well as to a different perception of the human. Contemporary social and political revolutions – from the French one of 1789, to those of 1830 and 1848, with their trajectories very variable depending on the case – demonstrated, when victorious, that human societies are changeable.

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Machine Translated by Google Sociology of statistics

According to Alain Desrosières (1998, p.23), the administrative use of written records, their arrangement

according to spatial clippings and their interpretation in terms of “numbers, weights and measures” makes political

arithmetic the birth of material procedures of

population, laws and customs. Gottfried Achenwall (1719-1772), credited with inventing the term statistik, was its

greatest exponent. With a strongly descriptive character, at first it was not involved with the collection and analysis

of numbers any more than history and geography did. Its task was description, and the use of numerical tabulations

was limited to the convenience observed by its creator, as the case may be. It is not difficult to predict that, given

the low operational level of these contributions, their authors would develop a solid academic background, without

achieving, however, great practical application.

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Even more surprising was the warning he addressed to the king that the funds spent on combating the plagues

would bring greater rewards than the most profitable investments, while preserving part of the large sum spent on

lives that, if abandoned to the plagues, would perish (Porter, 1986 , p.19). In order to calculate the number of

subjects, which determined the power of the State, men like Petty, the merchant John Graunt (1620-1674) and the

officer Davenant (1656-1714) created maxims of ethical virtue based on the desideratum of maximizing of the

population. As 'apostles of procreation', they condemned alcohol consumption, gambling, prostitution, urban life,

priestly celibacy and even war, which could be avoided by removing obstacles to natural demographic growth

(p.19-20). It is easy to see how different he is from the German statisticians. They were not academic theorists

constructing panels and logical descriptions of the State in general, but men from different backgrounds and

backgrounds, who had forged a certain practical knowledge in the course of their activities, eager to offer it to the

government. They were the first to resort to mathematics as an indirect method to estimate population growth, based

on regularities observed in vital facts. They dealt a decisive blow to religious conceptions of death, until then seen

as the result of chance or divine punishment, by conceiving the phenomenon as capable of being known and

measured by universal laws.

We must not underestimate the argumentative force of statistics as a true discourse, capable of silencing

controversies in the face of reason, which was already perceived by these men. If, nowadays, statistics remove part

of the legitimacy of its official status, in the moments that followed its invention, they proved to be indispensable to

the foundation of the State's domination. In the second half of the 17th century, English political arithmeticians

already had a clear understanding of the situation, and this is the reason for the term 'politics' that they affixed to the

expression 'arithmetic'.4 Applying arithmetic operations in the use of administrative records (especially civil ones –

birth , marriage and death), the physician William Petty (1623-1687) perhaps did not know that he was founding the

calculation of statistics, a term that, as seen, would only be coined a few decades later, by Achenvall. But he was

already aware of the value of numbers in official speeches, which he considered indispensable to the art of

governing. In his book Political Arithmetic, only published in 1690, he talks about the creation of a specific method

for the elaboration of statistics. Unfortunately, preoccupied with the task of advising the king, he symptomatically

values his political ends more than he explains the means, that is, the method itself.5

Machine Translated by Google a set constituted by the institutions, procedures, analyzes and reflections, calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this specific and complex form of power, which has the population as its main target, political economy as its dominant form of knowledge and essential technical instruments. security devices..., provoking, on the one hand, the development of a whole series of specific government apparatuses and, on the other hand, the development of a whole series of knowledge (p.291-292).

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

If the great challenge of the statesman becomes the government of the economy (hence the great success

known by political economy), statistics become vital, since they 'build' the public spaces that the statesman must

know and act upon:

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

statistics will gradually reveal that the population has its own regularity: numbers of dead, sick, accidents, etc.; statistics also reveal that the population has its own characteristics, which are irreducible to those of the family, such as the great epidemics, endemic mortality, the spiral of work and wealth. Finally, it reveals that through its displacements, its activities, the population produces specific effects (Foucault, 2000, p.288).

objectification. The accumulation of biographical traits of individuals in writing enables statistical aggregation, which

is a way of thinking about the collective based on and from the individual. And here we find the limits of statistical

activity, under the framework of absolute monarchy. Social differentiation in the hierarchical structure of the Ancien

Régime was severely restricted by the more general principle that subjects could be freely manipulated according to

the will of the sovereign. In no case were we dealing with individuals or autonomous persons, but with members of

orders and states. The basis of statistics, comparative equivalences could not be considered a measurement premise

while the notions of personality and universality did not depose naturalized differences, based on privileges and

corporations. Although political arithmetic and the German tradition were already, each in their own way, “a response

from modern states in operational terms, ambition for knowledge inseparable from a will to manipulate men” (Furet,

Ozouf, 1977, p.360) 6 , the constitution of a 'social mechanics', in which individuals are made comparable and

interchangeable units, defined by what they have to be identical in terms of behavior and role, would only be possible

after the French Revolution, in the midst of the liberal revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

In spite of previous innovations, only from the 19th century onwards did censuses begin to record and count at

an individual level, no longer referring exclusively to houses as the minimum enumeration unit, which occurs pari

passu with publicity and the wide dissemination of information. . Even more significant is the separation of statistical

agencies

In any case, the 'consequences of modernity' have a very wide reach and have been felt since the 17th century.

This is the case, for example, of the changes in political technology that occurred in the 18th century, which led to

the overcoming of the family management model as the ideal of good government. This is when the notion of

population is conceived, understood as a fundamental resource of State power, whose movements and composition

must be known and controlled by specific knowledge, by State sciences. The rationalization of the exercise of power

as a practice of government is defined by Michel Foucault (2000) as governmentality. According to the author, this is

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Machine Translated by Google Cultivated in this new environment, Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), a mathematician who studied astronomy,

would become one of the main founding fathers of statistics, especially if we consider the legacy he left for the

formalization of social sciences. His intellectual activity began to stand out in the effervescent 1830s, when the

revolutionary uncertainties of a changing society were experienced more than ever. The climate of insecurity led

young Quetelet to dedicate himself to statistics, seeking in them a science of stability and forecasting. He was the

first to see true scientific laws in numerical regularities, beyond the simple revelation of objective facts. Anticipating

Comte, he coined and consecrated the expression la physique sociale, the title of his greatest work, to designate

statistics. It remained for the precursor of positivism to baptize the study of the mechanics of social relations as

sociology. Quetelet advocated the adoption of a single method for all sciences.

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Combining the administrative vocation of statistics with the techniques of astronomers and mathematicians, it denied

the competence of social reformers (doctors and hygienists) in the matter. The astronomer's love for the natural

order would provide the foundation of statistical science.

Sociology of statistics

Until the 19th century, statistical regularities, such as the ratio between the births of men and women and the

uniformity of murders, robberies and suicides, were explained in natural and theological terms, indicating the divine

will, expressing the general order of the world. Quetelet proposed an alternative interpretation, based on cosmology

that made regularity a natural process expected for all domains. In the words of Theodore Porter (1986, p.51-52),

“Quetelet interpreted the regularities of crime as proof that statistical laws were true when applied to entire groups,

even if they were false in relation to a particular individual. Furthermore, he believed that the obliteration of the

particular by the collective was responsible for the very preservation of society.

institutions responsible for tax collection and law enforcement, freeing these spaces from their former role of

surveillance. In 1800, in Napoleonic France, the Bureau Statistique de la Republique is created. Endowed with

institutional and administrative autonomy, the first official space dedicated exclusively to statistics emerges, an

indispensable condition for the development of research methodologies and techniques, until then somewhat

announced – as Petty did –, but very little effective.

In this reasoning, society became independent of the idiosyncrasies of its constituent individuals. He stated the “law

of large numbers”, in which he advocated that great social phenomena are produced by general causes, given that

chance and accident cannot have an influence on facts considered collectively. He developed the notion of the

average man, an abstract being, defined by the average of all human attributes in a given country, considered a

'national type', representative of a society. Deviations would be canceled out by the resulting average. Responsibility

for crimes and deviations could then be distributed to the entire community considered. Its great objective was to

measure the changes experienced by the average man over time, in order to reveal the general law of development,

discovering the forces that act on the social body, to predict its future course (p.54).

Statistics and scientific concepts: brief considerations

v.16, n.4, Oct.-Dec. 2009, p.903-925

Machine Translated by Google As historian Peter Gay (1995, p.461) once wrote,

Since the second half of the 19th century, pleasures, vices, violence and, more

Decades before Durkheim, Quetelet plunged the bibliography into sociology. Once the social physicist had gathered enough solid information, it would be possible to show the probability of an 'individual choice' between embracing a life of crime or committing suicide, between becoming addicted to drink or remaining teetotal. But this determinism, protested Quetelet, a little defensively, did not make him fatalistic. The kind of collective knowledge he wished to propagate extends, rather than reduces, the sphere of freedom of the human soul.

Alexandre de Paiva Rio Camargo

912 In the incessant struggle for recognition of the scientific status of history and sociology, at a time when the paradigm of the natural sciences prevailed, authors such as Marx and Durkheim did not hesitate to resort to Quetelet's postulates of social physics.

Quetelet's contribution to history and sociology was immense. It is worth dwelling on it, because among our

purposes is to reveal the richness of the relationship between statisticians and the sciences, in the very

constitution of their knowledge and their practice. Historian Henry Thomas Buckle, for example, in his History

of civilization in England, denounced the importance given to corporate institutions by historiography, such as

the State and the nobility, and religious institutions such as the Church, enshrining in their place the relationship

between science and society. Eschewing the presentation of history as a chronicle of kings and battles, Buckle

was one of the first and fiercest voices against traditional political history. The substance of history would not

reside in politics but in society, in the slow and continuous diffusion of knowledge. An incorrigible enthusiast of

material progress, Buckle took pleasure in the English liberalism of the 1850s. The fact is that the regularities

of statistical science proved to the historian that the natural order of the universe did not admit exceptions,

applying to the set of social phenomena (Porter, 1986 , p.63). Deviation is reduced to a minimum; the freedom

and will of individuals are denied when considered collectively.

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

They built the methodologies of their disciplines, based on borrowings from statistics, then the social science

par excellence.

A similar influence can be seen in Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim. The first used Quetelet's theory of the

average man to define a uniform and universal category of work and to interpret the theory of the value of work.

Durkheim's study of suicide also pays tribute to the master of statistics, as does his notion of a social fact, an

objective phenomenon with its own regularities, isolated from the world of nature. This is the meaning of his

assertions: “social force does not determine one individual more than another, it only requires a defined number

of certain types of action”. And yet: “any phenomenon composed of independent facts must exhibit an

impressive regularity when taken as a whole” (Durkheim, quoted in Porter, 1986, p.70).

In addition to the obvious appropriation, there is a fundamental structural transformation, more obscure to

our perception, albeit more diffuse and subtle. At least since Quetelet's formulations and the institutional

organization of activity, which will be seen in the next section, statistics has built primacy in the conceptual

classification of social experience. The consecration of probabilism by statistics raised to an extreme degree

the demand for its ability to forecast and intervene in the movements and composition of society.

Machine Translated by Google The strength of such encodings lies in the realism of the aggregations, whereby the conventional becomes real. This is the basis of the individualizing power of statistics. It is present in the appreciation of individuals in general on issues such as race, religion, health, inflation, income, unemployment, poverty, among many, referenced by statistics, which, thus, provide the terms of the public debate on all the problems they face. related. They promote descriptions of economic situations, denunciations of social injustices, justifications for political actions, organization of interest groups. In this way, they support truth discourses, which serve as support for decision-making by different agents (academies, governments, social groups, international organizations, etc.), interfering in the spatial distribution of public and private resources, a fact which results in clashes around what will be researched and the appropriate methodology. As references, the definitions and criteria that govern the classifications can be discussed and contested, but they themselves and their objects remain indisputable. Such is the realism of aggregations.

Within the categories, individuals see themselves in the face of others no longer in their individualities, but in their individualizations. In this way, statistics uniquely express the subtlety with which power is exercised, as they do so in the symbolic order, as they build a homogeneous conception (a truth) about the things they enumerate and announce, which ends up making it possible to an agreement between intelligences. Regularities become perceived in their connections with deviant conduct: suicide, crime, prostitution, madness, illness are some of the phenomena that then begin to be codified and measured, fed by the notion of expanding control over the deviant population, from of its enumeration and classification (Hacking, 1990, p.3).

recently, intimate issues such as sex, sleep, friendship and even public fears have been relentlessly tabulated.

This first-order reality, which organizes the conceptual classification of social experience, also permeates all scientific production, constituting its true frame of reference. Since the mid-nineteenth century, and increasingly so, the construction of scientific concepts has been based on interpretations arising from the analysis of categories for classifying activities and social groups, as we can see in Ian Hacking's (1990) insightful commentary. , p.3): “Marx attentively read the drafts of official statistics and the reports of factory inspectors. Someone may ask: who exercised

At the pole of normalization/individualization, statistics found subject positions.

As a government instrument, statistics technically underpin normalization policies and the individualization of deviant elements. At the pole of population regulation, of “power over life” (the expression is from Michel Foucault), they favor interventions that target the social body, a political anatomy focused on the body, on biological processes: propagation, births and deaths, state health, life expectancy and longevity. In contemporary capitalist society, they adjust the spatial distribution of men to the accumulation of capital, link the growth of groups to the expansion of productive forces and the differential distribution of profits. They compartmentalize and rank the space, in which individuals can be isolated, easily accessed and located.

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On the one hand, they [statisticians and related professionals] will specify that measurement depends on conventions relating to the definition of objects and objectivation procedures. On the other hand, they will add that the measurement reflects a reality. The paradox is that, although both statements are incompatible, it is impossible to conceive of a different answer.

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

Following the orientation proposed by Desrosières, we defend here the idea that statistics

are situated in the plane of duality. A constitutive duality, which, it seems to me, runs through its

entire production circuit, in conceptual, associative and procedural aspects. Going back to the

beginning of this article, we see this perspective as a result of the double insertion of statistical

activity, in the sociopolitical sphere, which founds and adjusts the statistical program, and in the

techno-scientific domain, which formalizes the stability of its language and its references.

Reading the section that follows may clarify my point of view.

greater impact on class consciousness, Marx or the authors of the official reports, who created

the classification by which people recognized themselves? If, as Buckle wanted, the substance

of history resides in the gradual growth of the production and diffusion of knowledge,

historiography should not dispense with the analysis of the procedures for objectifying statistics.

Let us register the alert to historians of science, and even to scholars of reading practices.

The cognitive duality that we have been dealing with already transpired at the time of

creation of the Bureau Statistique de la Republique, in Paris in 1800. Knowing the departments

and their municipalities was the imperative that fell on the body. Faced with the formation of the

republican State, statistics would have to represent the nation in electoral terms, no longer

being reduced to a 'mirror of the prince'. This was the horizon that justified the creation of the

Bureau, its stability and relative institutional independence. We can imagine that your

It would be up to the analyst to think of the objects of statistics simultaneously in their real

existence and in their conventional character, a position in which the reality of the object is a

methodological attitude: “the simultaneity of these interpretations underscores the linkage space

between technical languages and their uses in the field”. social debate, reintegrating statistical

reason into reflective scientific culture” (Desrosières, 1998, p.2).

For all these reasons, numbers, tables, cartograms and classifications are taken as the

reality of the picture they describe, which is essential for the discourses of truth they support,

including the construction of scientific concepts. Thanks to the very stable and widely recognized

language of statistics, reality and convention are confused. Reality consecrated by the strength

of social representation, which imposes itself to the researcher as a fundamental problem to be

investigated. It is present in the academic discussions of statisticians, as well as in the

discourses of official statistical bodies with different social instances. These seek to reduce the

conventional foundations of their production as much as possible, since the 'realism of the

aggregates' is the source that attributes legitimacy to their activity, in addition to establishing

agreement between intelligences, stabilizing social interactions.7 We have an impasse here ,

noted by Alain Desrosières (1998, p.12; emphasis in the original):

The institutional organization of statistical activity

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While the first promoted written descriptions that facilitated narratives and memorization, criticizing the reductionist nature of tabulations, the second appreciated numerical precision and its laws, represented by equations. Duvillard thought that the information sent by departments and municipalities would only be accurate if their administrations preserved the records, as a prototype of codification procedures. They disapproved of each other, one disqualifying the other's premise: “dry tables” and “hermetic calculations” competed with the “elegant style of seductive politeness” (Desrosières, 1998, p.35-40).

Peuchet and Duvillard had diverse followers, in France and around the world; compulsory disciples, who did not know their names, but who acted constrained by this fundamental duality of statistical activity. Its emphasis now falls on the conventional character

The controversy itself already appears to us as a resource to provoke cultivated minds, drawing attention to the importance and need for statistics. Inviting a fraction of the intellectual elite to take sides in the debate, choosing between argumentative strength and numerical precision, these men sought to make their craft notable.

of statistical knowledge, visible in the need to communicate/translate realities to the politicalpragmatic field, is sometimes based on the 'realism of aggregates', when the primacy is the formalization of its technoscientific space. It is true that the opposition between the parties was somewhat softened as the process of institutionalizing this knowledge accelerated. Once again, we rely on the lucid pen of Alain Desrosières (1998, p.39-40):

However, perhaps unknowingly, they fermented a field of discussion and analysis from which, years later, Adolphe Quetelet, among other notables, would emerge. The accusations that Peuchet and Duvillard exchanged in the Bureau's memos and reports are the first official record of a tension constitutive of statistical activity.

leaders, statisticians avant la lettre, would seek to surrender to the world of their activity, where almost everything remained to be done, identifying and asserting themselves through it.

The defense of descriptive and didactic frameworks, of the adoption of a more accessible and literary language, practiced by Peuchet, can be associated with the administrative role of statistical activity, as an instrument of government. Translating languages and communicating realities to government officials is an indispensable task for formulating public policies. It should not be lost sight of the fact that the legitimacy of statistics rests on their official character. In the microcosm of Peuchet's actions, the struggle for visibility insinuates itself, always based on the State's ex ante demand , on the sociopolitical dimension of statistics.

In this process, two radically opposed strategies prevail, assumed by Peuchet, director in charge of the organ between 1800 and 1805, and Duvillard, who replaced him in 1806.

Duvillard was at the opposite pole. It underlined the technical component and professionalism involved in producing and interpreting the results. In other words, he was concerned with formalizing the activity, using the scientific parameters of his time to provide statistics with a stable language. This is the meaning of the relationship established between the records and the procedures necessary for codification.

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Over time, the expression of these two modes of discourse became more refined, and the opposition between them less brutal than that of Peuchet and Duvillard. However, this basic tension is inherent to the nature of statistical institutes, whose credibility depends as much on their visibility as on technical aspects. The way in which this double requirement

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To give unity to official works, it is necessary to relate them to a common center; it is necessary that the main officials, responsible for presenting the different segments of general statistics, can see and understand each other together, accepting the same divisions, adopting, after careful examination, the same names and the same numbers to represent the same objects, not leaving no gaps in the general tables and avoiding, on the other hand, duplications. The safest way to achieve the desired unity seems to be the creation, in each State, of a central statistical commission, or a similar institution, formed by representatives of the main public administrations, to which would be added some people who, for their part, studies and special knowledge, can illuminate practice and resolve essentially scientific difficulties.

is approached and transformed, according to the era and country in question, is one of the main topics in the history of these institutes.

The intended target, when organizing the Congress, was especially to promote the unification of official statistics that governments publish, promoting comparable results. Specific works will be easier when general bases are established that associate them and uniform nomenclatures and tables are adopted in different countries: this kind of universal language, simplifying the works, would ensure them more importance and solidity.

... it is desirable, on the other hand, for central institutions from different countries to interact by promoting the exchange of their publications and table models used to gather documents, classify them and summarize them (Rapport..., 1983, p .4).

History, Science, Health – Manguinhos, Rio de Janeiro

We will find a similar duality again in the context of international statistics congresses, during

the second half of the 19th century. A capital moment in the process of institutionalizing the activity,

the structure of these events was designed by Quetelet, thus revealing himself to be the main

organizing agent in the area. The first congress was held in Brussels, in 1853, and had the

president of Belgium's central statistics commission, Quetelet himself, as its great advisor. In the

minutes of its final report, we can read:

In this long section, the organized attempt to consolidate and expand the international scientific

community centered on statistical activity stands out. The main effort focuses on establishing the

normative foundations (conceptual and operational) that should govern it, unifying numbers,

nomenclatures and tables in the representation of objects. Quetelet and his consorts were, then,

aware of the need to stabilize statistical language to promote another central objective of the

congresses: creating equivalences that would allow comparison between the activities and wealth

of nations. It is worth mentioning that a centralizing organization was being considered to give unity

to the commissions in each country, each of which holds administrative records. Thus, coordination

is thought of, in the development of coordination instruments (Senra, 2005, p.83). Among the

inflection points of the congresses, there is the formation of the discipline. Special attention is given

to professional training, which includes the basic knowledge that should make up the 'specialist'

curriculum.

We want to stimulate the development of national commissions, offering them technical support

and a prestigious membership. But, to achieve this, it was necessary to fulfill another fundamental

objective of the congresses: to win over the governments of the national states, convincing them

that it would be advantageous to provide autonomy to their statistical commissions (to create, when

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In fact, the problem of political viability was presented, at the same time, as a horizon and an

obstacle to the success of congresses. The short journey of these events would come to an

end in the ninth edition, held in Budapest in 1876, two years after the death of its inspirer,

Adolphe Quetelet. Nelson Senra's diagnosis (2005, p.86; emphasis in the original) is succinct:

Let us now move on to the analysis of the theoretical and procedural intimacy of statistical institutes, according to their techno-scientific profile. In Bruno Latour's line, these entities are 'calculation centers'. They bring near and present distant and/or absent realities to the State, making them thinkable and, therefore, potentially governable. Thus, they constitute technologies of government, through action at a distance. They build social collectives, useful for regulation, by making them available on the decision-makers' desks, in the form of tables, graphs and cartograms.

as the case may be) and spend large sums of public money on them. This intimacy with the

politics of the States weighed on the deliberations of congresses. It was expressly

recommended that national commissions be composed of “representatives of the main public

administrations”, which meant bringing together prominent politicians, alongside intellectuals

enlightened in statistical matters. In addition, several representatives of national governments

attended the congresses, which gave an official character to the contests.

Once again we are faced with the duality of a need. With the congresses, the technical formalization of the activity became more sophisticated, reaching new levels, in points such as standardization of codifications, disciplinary methodology, professional training, development of formal associations and dissemination of knowledge. At the same time, the congresses functioned as the embryo of a world body, capable of dialoguing directly with national governments. However, political visibility, present in the form of representation by national commissions and official delegations, was not enough to implement most of the scientific community's achievements. Yet another example of the tense and dynamic relationship between the sociopolitical translation/reception of public statistics and the technical formalization of its disciplinary field.

This production takes place at the level of supply to national States, ex post demand , in

Nelson Senra's expression. Dimension that does not reveal, in itself, the technical and operational complexity of the network in which statistical knowledge is produced. To analyze it, it is necessary to bring out the intimacy of the calculation center. There is, above all, a cycle of accumulation of inscriptions, thanks to which a relational coexistence is established between two

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The fact is that the Statistical Congresses were never able to equate the controversial representation controversy. Representation at congresses should be public and official, that was the intention, precisely the source of the controversy. So, to what extent did participants actually represent their countries? To what extent could they deliberate and assume unequivocal commitments? To what extent, when they returned, with folders full of resolutions, were they able to implement them? By no means, without mincing words, that is, the representations, although official, were fragile, occasional, bureaucratic, often ignoring the daily routine of statistical preparation, hence the reduced application of resolutions. In addition to the resolutions being quite generic, even to reach consensus, which made practical applications difficult.

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918 The dynamic relationship between the centers and their peripheries constitutes what

Latour (2000a) called “the logistics of immutable furniture”. These are scientific objectification procedures, such as templates, totalizations, lists, graphs and tables, which enable the complementary processing of registrations by the calculation centers. In this sense, statistics are particularly effective in expanding the scope of inscriptions, when they use averages, and in controlling their dispersion, since the invention of variance and sampling (p.385-386). This cycle of capitalization of inscriptions transforms them into manageable information for governments, stable references for society and means of analysis for researchers.

Again, a constitutive duality is scrutinized. Yes, because the scientific space of statistics is essential to meet the demand, which guides the statistical program. It guarantees the credibility of your products, stabilizing referrals from a series of social interactions. However, this argument favors the recurring illusion that such institutions are sufficiently distant, if not even isolated, from political and scientific networks, which, in fact, permeate their own production circuit.

Let us examine a rather special example: the so-called delegate gaze postulate.

places: a center (the coordinating agencies) acting at a distance on many other peripheral points (the survey and research zones). In this movement, it is absolutely necessary that there is portability and stability in the transmission of registrations (the forms distributed to field agents), so that it is possible to 'bring them back', and subsequent envoys can accumulate new registrations. Thus, a technology of distance over events, people and places is configured, based on three conditions: the calculation center must “invent means that (a) make them mobile so that they can be brought; (b) keep them stable so that they can be brought in and out without distortion, decay or deterioration; and (c) they are combinable in such a way that, whatever the material from which they are made, they can be accumulated or aggregated, shuffled like a pack of cards” (Latour, 2000a, p.362; emphasis in the original).

Once the statistical program is carried out, the complexity of accumulation/capitalization cycles and the networks that move them emerge, formed by institutions, instruments, equipment and people, including scientists (economists, demographers, anthropologists and sociologists), but also by a bureaucracy branched out in states and municipalities, supervisors and field agents, collectors with various backgrounds, in addition to the informants themselves. In the eyes of the main users of statistics – governments, social organizations, academies – the complexity of their scientific network disappears. A fact undoubtedly corroborated by the widely recognized argument of the techno-scientific autonomy of statistical institutions.

A dangerous representation, shared by most of those involved in the elaboration and use of public statistics.

This foundation intends that the actions of the collection network are standardized by the research conception instance, the calculation center. It considers the uniformed procedures acquired in personnel training as the only reference for field agents, alongside the normative body of agent instruction manuals. Any possibility of interaction with the interviewees is formally denied, in view of the eventual

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Given that inscriptions must be mobile, stable and combinable, the delegation of the gaze

serves statistical research very well, allowing the expropriation of relativism from its observers.

Central agencies need to overcome the perspectivism of observation and emerge as the only

privileged observer. There is no other meaning in Latour's statement (2000b, p.39): “It is

precisely because observers delegated from afar lose their privilege – relativism – that the

central observer can elaborate his panopticon – relativity – and find himself present at the

same time in all the places where, however, it does not reside”. All positions of the subject

and all positions of the object are equivalent, in favor of the stable transport of information by

the vector institution. From the relativism of the observers we pass to the relativity of the

centers, condition of mobility and immutability of the inscriptions.

Here we have a fundamental contribution that the sociology of science can provide to

public statistics. By investigating the different actors who take part in its production, the

complex translations, changes in meaning, interpretations and responsibilities that take place,

the sociological approach shows to generating and user organisms that there are limitations

and implicit choices present in all statistical procedures, insisting

distortion of the conceptual framework that originated the forms. In short, the determination of

the interview situation is here a predicted and reified data.

The equivalence between positions emerges as the basic support of relativity. Nevertheless,

the basic foundation of the delegation of the look must not obscure the perception of

information networks in which statistical production is inserted. It should not obscure the

recognition of the distances between the levels of the production chain, from the specialized

bureaucracy of the calculation centers to the collection networks. After all, recognizing

distances is already a step towards minimizing them. And here we follow Jean Peneff (1988, p.534):

Amortizing the distances between the spheres of production assumes considering social

interactions and, therefore, the different levels of approximation to the subject of the interview,

variables according to the situations faced. There are empathies, but also antipathies, the

hidden ones and the ones not always well disguised, as it is always a game of approximation

that is at stake (Álvaro, 2006, p.4). This results in the paradox of the social relationship of the

interview, as it demands, on the one hand, that the interviewer remain sufficiently distant from

the interviewee so as not to lose his or her objectivity; on the other, that he gets close enough

to the interviewee to gain his trust. It is therefore necessary to integrate the procedural

dimension of the collection network into the research framework. This means recognizing

symbolic interactions, negotiations, researchers' presentation strategies, adaptations of

practices, procedures and even questionnaires to interview situations, which are always changeable.

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On the one hand, there is bureaucratic control and supervision of routine cabinet work; on the other, almost total autonomy of field agents. This separation is aggravated by the absence of relationships and exchanges of information about the nature of work between the two levels. The top ignores the field and continues to believe in the effectiveness and relevance of standardization, because it is unable to appreciate the practical realities of field interviewers' work. If management began to understand this last job, the entire organization and its hierarchy would be in question.

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On the other hand, there is a serious risk that this approach will be interpreted as a lack of competence of these official spaces, as a need to reinforce the technical and normative foundations, the same ones that remain silent about the uncertainties and tensions of the scientific process of the activity, because before Constituting research centers, these agencies are planning bodies, acting in the political and administrative conformation of the country. This is the reason why they are jealous of maintaining the integrity of their stability at all costs, distancing themselves from debates and polemics, academics included. Hence the imperative to implement and strengthen in these institutes a permanent environment of sociological and historical reflection, directed towards the analysis of knowledge and the practice of statistical activity. Revealing their intimacy, semantics (construction process) and syntactics (construction result), it becomes possible to suppress inconsistencies and translate the academic language of change into an effective gain in legitimacy, without prejudice to the indispensable credibility.

We have therefore seen our hypothesis about the three levels at which the duality of statistical activity operates, each in its own case study. The cognitive aspect reveals the emphasis, on the part of the producers, that their research reflects reality, especially at the end of the capitalization of the information, when they disclose the results to the press, at the time of the ex-post demand .

A particularly important level to analyze the process of institutionalization of the activity, since tensions and negotiations over the implementation of resolutions and advances in the disciplinary field appear there with more evidence.

that it is impossible to offer technical solutions to conflicts of interest that cannot be

accommodated (Schwartzman, 2004, p.98).

The associative plan can be interesting for showing the value of argumentation, representation and political imbrications in the molding of the great international statistical organizations (International Statistical Institute – ISI; Inter-American Statistical Institute – Iasi; United Nations Organization for Agriculture and Food – FAO; International Labor Organization – ILO; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization – Unesco), in its close relationship with the different States.

The procedural duality is the most delicate of all, when dealing with the hidden, or intended to be hidden, face of official public statistics bodies. It refers to the cognitive dimension, as both express the defense of technoscientific autonomy, in fact necessary for the stabilization of social interactions. It highlights the gears of the production process, choices and decisions, such as the preference for certain questions in research, to the detriment of others. In this way, we are taken to Bruno Latour's laboratory life , where hard facts are constructed, involving men, machines, experiences, roles and strategies. It is the locus of irreducible freedom of statistical activity. For this reason, it is the environment in which sociological and historical analysis can first bear fruit, helping statistical institutions to achieve their mission. By recognizing the interdependence of social instances, institutes can better meet demands and diversify supply, to the benefit of their technical autonomy.8

Conclusion: the space of historical research

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This perspective favors the understanding of the technical framework regarding the productive methods of major research, such as the postulate of the delegated gaze, social interactions in interviews, the generation of records, the configuration of classifications of activities and occupations, among many others. The same applies to the trajectories and evolutions of census themes and categories, such as the investigation of their conceptions and uses.

Through historical research, it is possible to recover the trajectories of statisticians and, above all, their contributions to the composition of the main works interpreting nationality. Apparently opaque figures with a technical profile, their great works were devoid of the aura of luminosity and controversy that marked the prolific tradition of essayistic thought and that of representatives of disciplines strongly linked to social control (such as medicine and psychiatry). Located within the State apparatus, they were, to a large extent, marginalized by academic studies, which preferred to prioritize scientists from the university field. Bearing a dry language and strong statistical content, their works suffered the ambivalence of being excessively technical for social historians of ideas and too sociological for statistics scholars. Research must rehabilitate these central agents, focusing on the circularity that exists between, on the one hand, the intellectual discourses that forged the great national projects and, on the other, the material and conceptual procedures that made it possible to objectify the country's realities.9

To this end, it is important to reveal the methodologies, the tensions surrounding technical conceptions, the external relations of statistical institutions, the symbolic disputes of the community of researchers, which characterize the plane of discovery, and not just the plane of justification, shaped in the period of 'normal science', in Thomas Kuhn's understanding. In the words of Gilberto Hochman (2008, p.25),

Inserting public statistics into a broader agenda of reflection in the history of sciences scenario – this is the decisive contribution that the space of historical research can bring to statistical institutions. They make the documents produced and stored by such institutions more available and usable, ordering them according to the requirements of historiography.

In the academic universe, in turn, historical research reveals the processes of intellectual construction of classification categories, as well as the meanings underlying their applications, based on the semantics attributed to them by different social groups. It is worth saying that the historian must start from an understanding of the methodologies applied to statistical productions to think about their meanings in political terms.

More than anything, the new approach constitutes an entirely original field of investigation. In Jean-Claude Perrot's expression, a “concrete history of abstraction” is configured. A history of governing by numbers, in which the construction of the national State is analyzed through the prism of the materiality of policies and the instrumental rationality of

From the 1990s onwards, a prolific and fruitful production emerged on science spaces in Brazil in which the IBGE and statistics were not included. The history of institutionally organized science in Brazil, more concerned with medicine, physics, biology, mathematics and human sciences, did not pay attention to other sciences and institutions that were at the center of the symbolic and material construction of Brazil.

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1 It is worth highlighting that the possible correlations between the phenomena and the units of analysis foreseen in the space of statistical tables of different temporalities support a central investigation into social representations, political conceptions and scientific concepts, implicitly or explicitly used in the production and use of statistical information. In this sense, warns Hernán Otero (2006, p.47): “it is necessary to read matrices and statistical tables as texts, through their translation into propositions and hypothesis systems, expressible in verbal language. Thus, for example, two tables on mortality levels tabulated according to the season of the year or according to the sociooccupational groups of the deceased refer to two scientific hypotheses and two radically different theoretical universes: mortality as a climatic fact or as a social fact”. This perspective of analysis becomes more important, as it reveals the implicit components of statistical ideology, understood as “a set of pseudoscientific, political and cultural criteria that underlie the selection and definition of variables, values and units of analysis; determine the type of statistical instrument to be privileged (forms of

922 In another direction, the formation of the community of researchers and spaces of symbolic mediation are examples of issues that contemplate the history of sciences. The creation of scientific societies and journals, intellectual influences (theoretical books, dissemination manuals, circuit of authors) and national technical training (schools, courses, curricula) are found in this research perspective. It is about understanding the process of specialization of statistical activity, its transition from a typically administrative profile, when the production of statistics is based on obtaining administrative records (from hospitals, schools, customs, courts), to a profile properly scientific, when sampling techniques and household surveys will be widely adopted by national statistical agencies, on a permanent and systematic basis.

Finally, it was not our responsibility here to list an inventory of themes, approaches and objects appropriate to the historical perspective of statistical activity, still open ground that has only been begun on other occasions.11 Instead, we wanted to present some challenges and possibilities that the universe of public statistics can bring to the sociology of science.

decision-making processes. A history of the uses and translations of statistics, in which their argumentative force as a discourse of truth, present in indicative planning, gradually transforms into the quantitative support of public policies, which guide techno-scientific planning.10 A history of the emergence of statistical mentality as the country's entry into modernity, taking as its starting point the moment in which the desire for statistics became established. Other dimensions to political and social history open up.

These, then, begin to produce their own scientific records, configuring calculation centers – in Bruno Latour’s sense.

History recovers and reveals the power of the documentary collection of statistical institutions to an entire community of academic users, enriching the possibilities of understanding methodologies and using statistics. Sociology, on the other hand, is guided by the prescriptive dimension, pointing to the precarious balance of the dividers of the statistical program: the model of the desirable in the sociopolitical sphere, not always technically executable, and the realism of the possible in the sphere of scientific production, not always understood socially. . In common, the two approaches are committed to the operating space of statistical institutions, so that they can increasingly fulfill their mission.

GRADES

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4

3 It should be noted that several prestigious authors dedicated themselves to reflecting on the relationship between statistical knowledge and the construction of the social order. Among many names, it is worth highlighting those of Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Theodore Porter, Ian Hacking, Alain Desrosières, Laurent Thévenot, Nikolas Rose, Peter Miller, Hernán Otero, Jean-Pierre Beaud. In Brazil, Simon Schwartzman and Nelson Senra made valuable considerations, becoming mandatory references. Taken together, their studies prefigure horizons and tools for the analysis of public statistics, which, however, still lacks better formalization in a field of investigation, especially in Brazil.

6 In this and other citations from texts in other languages, the translation is free.

8 In a pioneering effort, Nelson Senra coordinated the collection History of Brazilian Statistics (1822- 2002). In its four volumes, the work maps the paths taken by the institutionalization of statistics among us. It is also worth checking out the article he authored, “Historical research on statistics: themes and sources”, published in this magazine (Senra, 2008), which recovers documents and suggests essential themes and chronologies for any analysis of statistical activity from a historical perspective . 9 In Brazil, several names must be mentioned that left their personal mark on the organization of statistical activity, at different times, from the Empire to the New Republic. I mention a few, due to their undeniable centrality in the periods in which they worked: Roberto Jorge Haddock Lobo (1817-1864) and Joaquim Norberto de Souza e Silva (1820-1891), authors of reports with important methodological incursions; Sebastião Ferreira Soares (1820-1887), considered the first Brazilian statistician; Manoel Timóteo da Costa (1855-1934), director of the 1890 general census, responsible for introducing statistics into the positivist project at the beginning of the Republic; Aureliano Portugal (1851-1924) and Hilário de Gouveia (1843- 1923), health demographers, main statistics analysts in the First Republic; Oziel Bordeaux

Sociology of statistics

See, in this regard, the interesting work of Senra (2006) on English political arithmetic and its

construction of tables, indicators and measures); they guide the interpretation of results and legitimize their uses, through discursive procedures” (p.50).

A barely visible and vitally important function, statistics work to stabilize social interactions.

appropriation in the administrative framework of imperial Brazil.

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2 On this front, research into the construction and evolution of classification categories is of particular interest. Through the analysis of minutes, reports and opinions of commentators and census teams, it is possible to delimit the scope and meaning of these categories. Demographics, in general, are controversial and discontinuous, as to the scope of investigation adopted in statistical surveys: occupation, income, migration, fertility, education, work. The case of social categories, such as religion and color (color or race, according to the 2000 census) is even more serious. The options left for the census takers to include and classify themselves were rarely the same with regard to these questions, which shows that the research of categories is conditioned to the dominant social discourses and the image of the country that one wants to produce. The oscillation in the investigation of the different statistical categories and the plurality of meanings implied in the historical contexts of their production represent a great challenge to social analysis, demanding close attention from historians. With regard to racial classification, I make a preliminary approach elsewhere, comparing the appearance of the item in the 1872, 1890, 1920, 1940 and 1950 censuses (Camargo, in press).

According to Simon Schwartzman (2004, p.74), “the reasons why conflicts do not remain unresolved forever are the same that explain why other social conflicts are eventually overcome: in the long run, the collective gains of stabilized systems tend to to be greater than the private benefits obtained through conflicts fueled over a long time. Statistical concepts and technical devices play important roles in the process of stabilizing social interaction, a 'moral role' that is not immediately visible from its deceptively simple technical aspects”.

5 In this book one can see the pragmatism resulting from the political concessions of William Petty (1983, p.111): “The method I adopted to do [the calculations presented] is still not very customary; instead of using only comparative and superlative words and intellectual arguments, I have tried (as an example of the political arithmetic that has long been my aim) to express myself in terms of number, weight and measure; to use only arguments based on the senses, and to consider only those causes that have a visible foundation in nature, leaving to the consideration of others those that depend on the minds, opinions, appetites and changeable passions of certain men... . Now, the observations expressed in number, weight and measure, on which I support the speech that follows, are either true, or not apparently false, and if they are not true in a certain and evident way, they may be true by the sovereign power, nam id certum est quod certum reddi potest [for what can be converted into right is certain]”.

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