ABSTRACT
Lies, Damn Lies, and StatisticsSpurred by the establish ent of the Société Royale de Médecine (1776) and the later Bureau de Statistiques (1800), and encouraged by the secular and humanitarian spirit of the Enlightenment, individuals such as Jakob Bernoulli (1758-1789), Marie Jean De Condorcet (1743-1794), and Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749-1827) sought to illuminate knowledge with the more exacting methods of mathematics.1 Enhanced by the Napoleonic legacy of data collection to support the administrative fabric of the First Empire, Europe’s savants sought through quantification a more reassuring basis for their political, scientific, and philosophical thinking. Beginning with classifications in botany and mineralogy, and moving into other fields of natural history, they introduced a whole new way of looking at the world. Opinions, however extreme or inarticulate, rested more comfortably behind the surety of numerical expression.
