The statistician's role in society: The institutional establishment of statistics in France

Abstract

IN The Scientist's Role, Joseph Ben-David took "as a case in point" the development of statistics as an academic field in the United States after the 1920s. Great Britain constitutes in this respect a paradox: although British mathematics was far superior at that time to mathematics in the United States, the creative powers of highly innovative mathematicians in Great Britain who were interested in statistics did not give rise to a comparable growth of statistics because of insufficient flexibility in academic organisations. 1 In the nineteenth century, statistics was not generally cultivated in universities as a subject of research and teaching. 2 In fact, statistics was then a twofold activity; it was "a field of mathematics, and a tool which could be applied to a great variety of problems"; in the latter form, "statistics had a venerable history, going back to the seventeenth century", i.e. to political arithmetic. 3 I wish to examine here a particular episode in the "important professional movement . . . initiated and led by Quetelet for the improvement and propagation of statistics". 4 This particular episode partly antedated Quetelet's endeavours, and even created some of the pre-conditions for their eventual success. The main figures were Laplace--then the towering figure of Europe in the mathematical theory of probability; Fourier, active