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All Souls College Oxford, OX1 4AL The Sixth Lee Lecture in Political Science and Government Professor Alain Desrosières is a distinguished historian and sociologist of statistical conventions. For forty years up to 2005 he was a leading figure in INSEE, the French Statistical Office, and is now a member of the Centre Alexandre Koyré d’histoire des sciences in Paris. His work explores how statistics are produced and used in society and science. His best-known publication in English is The Politics of Large Numbers : A History of Statistical Reasoning (Harvard University Press 1998), which argued that statistical conventions can be understood as ‘institutions’ and develop in similar ways. Statistics and Governmentality: An Historical Approach In his first presentation of his ideas in Oxford, Alain Desrosières will argue that statistics are a central part of the instruments that characterise successive forms of state, reflecting the Foucauldian conception of governmentality. He will distinguish five historical forms of the state, namely the ‘engineering state’, the liberal state, the welfare state, the Keynesian state and the neo-liberal state, and will identify the underlying view of society and the economy, major policy instruments and forms of statistics and social modelling bound up with each of those types. He will pay particular attention to the so-called neo-liberal state and its ‘new public management’, asking whether a new form of statistics can be identified that corresponds to that form of state and public management. Old Library, 5:00 pm