Abstract
The term ‘statistics’ carries a double meaning. In the eighteenth century, when it was first used, it referred to the study of the state. Until now, statisticians in state bureaucracies (and in the private sector as well) remain occupied with the collection of numerical data pertaining to national territory, population, government, etc. Their data served the state and the ‘enlightened public’. But in the late-nineteenth and twentieth century, the world of academy and science also became an important point of reference for statisticians. The probability calculus in particular has made the development of a highly technical, largely esoteric methodological statistics possible. Statistics now also is a scientific specialization – with its own forums, scientific societies, meetings and conferences, and its own network of publications.
The book under review analyses the emergence of statistics as a scientific discipline or specialization in the first half of the twentieth century in Italy. In line with Bourdieu's work, Prévost focuses on the genesis and structure of a relatively autonomous ‘scientific field’ of statistics. But by choosing Italy and its statistical school as his case, Prévost also aims to contribute to the history and sociology of scientific activity under an authoritarian or totalitarian regime. In Prévost's historical and sociological narrative, much attention is devoted to the political environment of the statistical field during the Fascist ventennio (the twenty years of Fascist rule under Mussolini from 1922 to 1943).
Two other characteristics of early-twentieth-century Italian statistics add to the importance of the Italian case. On the one hand, Italian statisticians made important contributions to the international field of statistics in that era. The scientific and managerial skills of Corrado Gini in particular changed the field in a number of respects – both nationally and internationally. In Italy itself, on the other hand, the scientific prestige of some statistical innovations, such as the Gini coefficient, made it possible to claim a large jurisdiction for the statistical field. During this period, Italian statistics acquired a dominant, if not hegemonic, position vis-à-vis other social sciences, especially sociology and economics. In fact, the book's title seems to refer to this ambition of an integral or total social science rather than to the totalitarian political environment within which the statisticians had to operate during the Fascist ventennio.
The rise of the statistical field preceded the Fascist ventennio by ten to fifteen years. In many respects, for the world of science, the passage from Liberal to Fascist Italy (and then to the postwar era) also meant continuity rather than abrupt change. In the case of Italy (and in contrast to other totalitarian regimes, such as Hitler's Germany or Stalin's USSR), Prévost argues at length, the continuity is quite remarkable. It was the strong orientation towards the scientific field, and the position and prestige already earned there by statistics in the first decades of the twentieth century, which allowed for the weakening of the very close identification of statistica as an intellectual undertaking with its political-administrative acceptance. For most of the era, Italian Fascism did not and could not subject the field to ‘extraneously’ defined, non-scientific criteria.
In tandem with his analyses of the impact of Fascism after the March on Rom (by which Mussolini came to power in October 1922), Prévost devotes much attention to the efforts of the Italian statisticians to develop and establish the discipline within the scientific academy. On the one hand, he focuses upon the creation of increasingly complex structures that sought to ensure the autonomy of statistics vis-à-vis other prestigious disciplines, such as mathematics, in particular in laboratories (a word which connotes the scientific ideal with which its promoters yearned to be identified), institutes, schools, and faculties of statistics. On the other hand, Prévost also dissects the efforts to establish a strong position for the scientific element within government statistics, amongst others thanks to the bureaucratic-scientific activities of many academic statisticians during the Great War and its immediate aftermath. In the last chapters of the book, which are specifically dedicated to the project of a ‘total science’, Prévost adds to this analysis of the statisticians' attempts to seek the ‘annexation’ of the various domains of social and economic inquiry to their field through a massive editorial presence (with journals and book series) and the creation of learned societies dominated by members of the field.
A Total Science does not accommodate those who prefer an easy read. Prévost offers a densely written text, full of references to primary sources. His acquaintance with early-twentieth-century Italian statistics and its institutional context seems impressive. For anyone who is not similarly familiar with the source material upon which this book is based, it will be difficult to evaluate many of the inferences made and the specific conclusions drawn by Prévost. On a more general level, however, the book presents a wide range of interesting and carefully construed arguments about the interaction between cultural and social dynamics, between ideas and structures, between the intellectual development of the statistical field (including its practical applications) and the formation of a specific community and its various institutions. Rather than a work specifically on statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy, this book should perhaps first of all be advertised as a well-researched case study, that uses sociological instruments to trace and clarify the conditions which ‘control’ the historical development of a scientific community and its intellectual project.