3 - The logics of statistical description

Summary

We saw in the previous chapter that for the Italian theorists and practitioners of statistics of the early nineteenth century a work of statistics amounted essentially to a description of a state, of a society enclosed in a given territory. As society, according to the predominant organicist metaphor, was a body – the “body social” – statistics was its “anatomy” or “physiology” or even, some said, its “phrenology”. For Gioia it was a “sort of anatomy which dissects the social body … it shows its vividness or its pallor … its health or illness”. Romagnosi pushed the body analogy even further, claiming that in order to build a civil statistics one had to imagine “body, soul, life, functions, age, and thus good health or illness [of a nation] similarly to what one does with respect to an animal”. In his turn Jakob Gråberg remarked that statistics was “the anatomy and the inventory of states, the accurate and detailed examination of the parts constituting the body social and of its particular needs”. The statistical observer himself was construed as a kind of doctor of society, whose task was to investigate the causes of its good health and illnesses and to propose the remedies needed for its cure, and the interventions necessary to prevent any “diseases”.