ABSTRACT
The relation between administrative and scientific quantification can by no means be reduced to a one-way borrowing of the methods and techniques of science. Some of the most fundamental ideas of statistics, for example, originated in the social sciences and in insurance studies rather than in mathematics, physics or biology.' Moreover, the push for quantitative rigor in accounting manipulations, social policy, and causal inference was not necessarily the result of a desire to become more scientific, but often was an adaptation to bureaucratic or political demands for orderly and non-subjective procedures. That is, strategies for managing populations and economies have also helped to define what it means to be scientific. In a variety of ways, then, the drive for social quantification in the twentieth century has been closely allied with a scientific impulse. The hugely
increased role of numbers and of quantitative rules in the management of society is in its way as impressive and as important as is the well-known reliance on mathematics in science and engineering.
