Retranging the emergence of public statistics in the United States, Emmanuel Didier tells how professional groups have produced new concepts and new methods to produce knowledge on their society, in the context of the great depression.
This book is the fruit of very ambitious work. Through three parts devoted respectively to agricultural statistics of the 1920s, polls and unemployment statistics carried out in the 1930s, the author explains how America’s statisticians recomposed by resting a new method of investigation, the random sample. It is a Sociology of Science Sociology Investigation in line with Bruno Latour and Alain Desrosières and it is in this sense that it is necessary to understand the title: it is neither a history of the United States nor even of the New Deal, but of the way professional groups of individuals have produced new concepts and new methods to produce knowledge on their society, in the context of the great depression.
Thanks to a very fine level of detail, which combines cognitive analysis, history of statistical concepts and description of gestures, procedures and objects, as well as rich commented illustrations, the reader can see the new statistics emerge. Criticizing the internalist perspectives that tell the inevitable triumph of just science, Emmanuel Didier mobilizes the methods and concepts of French sociology of science to give a sociological analysis of these changes, showing the role of the young generations trained in modern theories in universities as well as the context of the important development of the administration during the New Deal. Thus, he made statisticians the counterparts of the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, individuals and organizations who respond to a public request for information but which for that produce more than data, another way of conceiving things.
From this subject, which one would have believed Arid, Emmanuel Didier gives a very alive story, describing the long wooden pliers used by agricultural statisticians to keep their data bundles and adding them together, an operation that goes without saying, that the fierce debates between supporters of the judicious and supported sample, ultimately victorious, of the stratified random sample. The reader may be disconcerted by writing bias: the various agents whose archives have been exploited are melted in the story in a unique character whose wanderings we follow through the American countryside, the “ Statistician “, Or the use of the term” plasma To talk about the land apprehended by the agents before it was translated into statistics. This is a bias claimed by the author who, in his general conclusion, gives a glossary of concepts such that he used them and sometimes modified in a sense that is specific to him.
Because the ambition of the book, perhaps more than telling this turning point in the history of statistics, is to produce theoretical tools, in particular what the author calls a theory of consistency and a theory of expression. The book is therefore aimed at both curious readers to know the prehistory of random surveys and methods and those who will be seduced by the method, by the application, to borrow from the author one of his concepts, from a method to an object. But if the book manages to make us access in a fascinating and extremely documented way to the concrete practices of the statisticians as much as to the logic of their activities and their debates, the fact remains that this very excavated study of these services and these networks seen as laboratories has a cost, that of an overly tenuous link with the historical context. If the idea of America is omnipresent, at least America as the object as statisticians, such as photographers or writers, produce, there are two big absent, which are society and the political.
Political power has of course had its place in the book, but the political logics which, too, made America at the time did not have the one they deserved, where the book poses too schematic opposition between the laissez-faire and the liberalism of the 1920s and the interventionism of the New Deal. The book itself provides the elements which would lead to nuance this chronology, since men, structures and methods are partly the same throughout the period. Above all, to support his demonstration, which however did not need it so much the story built speaks of itself, the author presents the thirst for statistics as a novelty of the years of the New Deal, while Hoover, as Secretary of Commerce and then as President of the United States, played a very important role in their development as a technique of government, making standardization one of the objectives of the action of the federal government. It is true that his political project was radically different but the statistics as a tool for governance have accommodated different contexts and it is not sure that the developments observed here are also explained by the fact that it is New Deal.
The other point on which the book could have articulated more to the social and political history of the New Deal is that of the mobilizations of social actors around the definition of public policies. The most obvious case which shows that one cannot stick to the experts alone who occupy the greatest place here, is that of racial segregation. Emmanuel Didier discusses a long time of the problems posed by the self-selection of farmers as correspondents of the statistical offices, and the question of the selection of agents who conduct the surveys in the field (in particular very interesting developments on the political significance of the recruitment of the unemployed to investigate unemployment) but he does not mention this data which nevertheless structures the property and the qualities From the government, the privileges of being white in the United States of the first half of the century. Many recent works of historians and political scientists on the New Deal public policies put their structurally discriminatory aspect at the center, towards women and especially blacks, because elected Democrats of the South are those who have set the scope and level of social benefits in the law, in particular unemployment insurance. This explains the regionalization of public policies, which the author mentions when he notes that the wages of the investigators are not the same in the “ north “, THE “ center “, And the” south “From the country but without explaining the political reasons. The story tells this book is based on two pillars, science (or university) and administration, but society is missing. Contrary to the idea of a “ America holding “, Statistics and elected officials who in a homologous manner” represent The country, in both senses of the word, is the idea of coalition of contradictory interests which has dominated work on the New Deal for forty years. Emmanuel Didier places himself in another perspective, which one could say, even if he defends himself, still fishing by too much internalism.
Nevertheless, we can admit that inscription in this historiography is not the objective of a book already very rich and ambitious, and that if we read it for what it is, a book of sociology of sciences, and not a history book of the United States, it is very successful. Resolutely inscribed in the perspective of sociological constructivism, he manages to marry with happiness the most abstract concepts and the most harmless facts. It thus shows us the statistical reality not as an artifact to denounce but as the product of a collective work that the sociological analysis exposes by starting from the most concrete, the door to the farm of farm of the agents responsible for tomatoes for example, the construction of a new statistical object, the pickle of Michigan, to the most abstract, the debates on the theoretical and political implications of the sample term taken in its generic sense of survey.
A formula of the author seems to us to summarize his approach and which constitutes a call to read this book for all those who are interested in the roles of statistics in public policies or in our life. They will find there an exciting, living, richly illustrated, educational story on the technical aspects and where the calculations occupy only a peripheral place: “ This duality of the aggregate explains why the methodological appendages of statistical surveys, which everyone abandons while building in advance, are actually fascinating and delight those who know how to read them: it is that they speak as much of the object as the figures themselves ».