Wissensproduktion im Staat: Das königlich preußische statistische Bureau 1860–1914

Abstract

Before 1914 the Royal Prussian Statistical Bureau was the most important statistical office in Germany not only because of Prussia’s outsized place in the German Empire but also because the Bureau made many innovations in census work that set standards for other German states and the Imperial Statistical Office. Over the last several years there has been growing interest in how this data was collected and interpreted as a core feature of modern statecraft and as part of a broader story of the rise of statistical thinking in the West. Beyond that, Prussian statistics continue to serve as a major source of data for social and economic historians. For these and other reasons, it is odd that the Bureau has until now not been given a thorough historical treatment using archival sources. Michael Schneider’s revised Habilitation fills this gap most impressively. Schneider focuses on the years between 1860 and 1914, when the Bureau enjoyed the zenith of its influence before it was gradually overshadowed by the Imperial Statistical Office. He is interested not only in the methods and practices of the Prussian census but also in the Bureau’s institutional history as an agency of Prussian Interior Ministry, understood by the author as a ‘state institution of knowledge production’ (p. 24). Schneider thus begins his book with an anatomy of this institution, tracing its development from the Prussian Reform Era until the death of the Bureau’s director C.F.W. Dieterici in 1859, at which point Ernst Engel was lured from Saxony to assume directorship of the Bureau. A man of enormous energy and ambition, with an international reputation and unabashed liberal political convictions, Engel transformed this rather stolid institution into a dynamic centre of research, publication and teaching. From the outset, Engel’s ambition was to increase the scope and accuracy of the Bureau’s statistics in order to press the Prussian state into addressing the societal problems revealed by this data. At the same time, Engel aspired to raising the scientific profile of statistics within the Bureau along the lines of the scholarly professionalization then taking place in many scientific disciplines. Some of the strategies Engel deployed to these ends included coordinating all statistical surveys between the various Prussian ministries in a new Central Statistical Commission, and far more rigorous and detailed survey questionnaires. New survey techniques that involved the public directly in completing questionnaires, centralized control of processing, tabulating and publishing the results of surveys, systematic training of officials in a new statistical seminar, and a larger public profile for the Bureau through its own journal were also part of this programme. Schneider uses the concept of ‘autopoiesis’ from Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory to analyse this process, arguing that it was as much the inherent dynamics of collecting ever more detailed data that drove a process of growth and differentiation within the Bureau—more detailed statistical surveys underscored what was not known, thus driving an ever expanding field of activity and specialization.