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
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