Mathematics, Administrative Reform and Social Sciences in France at the End of the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

During the last decades of the Old Regime in France, four areas of knowledge and practices related to the genesis of social sciences were significantly reshaped, if not created. First, 1772 saw the first permanent annual survey organised on a systematic basis by the State administration. Second, the period 1772–1774 can be considered as the beginning of analytical theory of probabilities that was to reshape the understanding of the calculus of probabilities and its application in both social and natural sciences after the publication of Laplace’s treatise forty years later.1 Third, 1770–1780 was a period of intense innovation in differential and integral calculus among the geometers at the Paris Academy of sciences. Fourth, the same period is regarded as one of increased intensity in the publication of works on political economy and population in France.