The tabulation of England: how the social world was brought in rows and columns

Abstract

This article chooses a historical approach to examine the influence of media practices in the constitution of sociological knowledge. Starting from the assumption that processes of technical mediation are more disputed and hence more visible in the beginnings of a science than in their state of maturity, it delves into the prehistory of sociological knowledge. From a genealogical viewpoint it becomes quite clear that the birth of a scientific knowledge about society in the seventeenth century is a birth from the spirit (or better: from the medium) of the table. Focusing on John Graunt's Observations on the Bills of Mortality (1662) which is not only a book about tables but itself an eminent example of tabular thinking, this text tries to explore the epistemological effects which are implied in the use of forms, lists, and tables. The problem addressed can be outlined by the question: What happens to the knowledge of the social world (and what happens to this world itself) when it is brought into a tabular grid?