Accounting Organizations and SocieQ, Vol. 16, No. T. pp. 673-692. 199 1. 0361-3682.91 53.00+.00 Printed in Great Britain Pergamon Press plc

GOVERNING BY NUMBERS: FIGURING OUT DEMOCRACY*

NIKOLAS ROSE GoldsmithS College, University of London

Abstract

This review essay considers the relations between quantification and democratic government. Previous studies have demonstrated that the relation between numbers and politics is mutually constitutive: the exercise of politics depends upon numbers; acts of social quantification are politicized; our images of political life are shaped by the realities that statistics appear to disclose. The essay explores the specific links between democracy, as a mentality of government and a technology of rule, and quantification, numeracy and statistics. It argues that democratic power is calculated power, calculating power and requiring citizens who calculatea&out power. The essay considers the links between the promulgation of numeracy in eighteenth- century U.S. and programmes to produce a certain type of disciplined subjectivity in citizens. Some aspects of the history of the census are examined to demonstrate the ways in which the exercise of democratic government in the nineteenth century came to be seen as dependent upon statistical knowledge and the role that the census had in “making up” the polity of a democratic nation. It examines the case of National Income Accounting in the context of an argument that there is an intrinsic relation between political problematizations and attempts to make them calculable through numerical technologies. And it considers the ways in which neo-liberal mentalities of government depend upon the existence of a public habitat of numbers, upon a population of actors who calculate and upon an expertise of number. Democracy, in its modem mass liberal forms, requires numerate and calculating citizens, numericized civic discourse and a numericized programmatics of government

Numbers have an unmistakable power in modem mechanisms for conferring legitimacy on poli- political culture. The most casual reader of tical authority. Secondly, there are the numbers newspapers or viewer of television is embraced that link government with the lives of the within the rituals of expectation, speculation governed outside the electoral process. Opinion and prognostication that surround the public polls calibrate and quantify public feelings. pronouncement of politically salient numbers. Social surveys and market research try to Of course, there are many sorts of political num- transform the lives and views of individuals into bers in advanced liberal democratic capitalist numerical scales and percentages. Numbers societies. A superficial classification might dis- here act as relays promising to align the tinguish four. Firstly, there are the diverse exercise of “public” authority with the values numbers that are connected with who holds and beliefs of citizens. Thirdly, there are the political power in democratic nations. Electoral numbers that are deployed within the perpetual districts apportion persons according to numer- judgement that today is exercised over political ical criteria. Elections and referenda count authority and its stewardship of national life. votes. Executive powers are related to numerical The balance of payments, the gross national calculations of majorities and minorities. product and the money supply pass in and out Numbers here are an intrinsic part of the of favour as the measure of the success of

’ An essay review of Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People the Spread of Numerary in Early America (1982) and William Alonso & Paul Starr (eds), The Politics ofNum6ers (1987).

673 671 INIKOLAS ROSE government in economic life, but modem knowledgeable pose. Here one could class political argument seems inconceivable with- debates such as that over the relative merits of out some numerical measure of the health of MO, Mi, Ma or Ms as politically salient measures “the economy”. The social economy is also of the money supply. There is a politics of use evaluated through its numericization. Poverty is and abuse, elaborated in particular by civil transformed into a matter of the numbers libertarians. Perhaps the example that has claiming social benefits. Public order is trans- attracted most recent debate concerns the muted into the crime rate. The divorce rate inclusion of questions concerning ethnicity in becomes a sign of the state of private morality the census. There is a politics of privacy, also and family life. The rate of spread of AIDS is an deployed by libertarians and those entranced index of the success of the government of by the vision of a “big brother” state. It seeks to sexual conduct. If sceptical vigilance over place a limit on the public collection of politics has long been a feature of liberal numbers on private persons, and their utiliza- political thought, it is today increasingly con- tion in making decisions about individuals. And ducted in the language of numbers. Fourthly, there is a politics of ethics. This questions the there are all the numbers that make possible morality of making certain political decisions in modern government itself. Tax returns enable terms of numbers, as in the debates over the an administration over individuals and private application of quantification to decisions over enterprises in the light of a knowledge of their resourcing health services and the conflicts financial affairs. Counts of population, of birth, over provision of different types of medical death and morbidity have become intrinsic to treatment, for example hip replacement versus the formulation and justification of govern- heart transplantation. mental programmes. Grants to local authorities In this essay, I wish to consider the contribu- and health agencies are distributed on the basis tion of two books, one recent, the other of complex numerical formulae applied to published some time ago, to our understanding arrays of numbers claiming to represent states of the numericization of politics and the politics of affairs in this or that part of the realm. The of numbers in the U.S. Patricia Cline Cohen’s rates at which pensions or social security study, published in 1982, is entitledA Calculat- benefits are paid, and when or whether they are ing People: the Spread of Numeracy in Early to rise, are calculated according to complex America (hereafter CP). It describes and seeks indices. Paradoxically, in the same process in to account for the relationship between the which numbers achieve a privileged status in growth of “numeracy” in the American popula- political decisions, they simultaneously pro- tion and the change and expansion of what she mise a “de-politicization” of politics, redrawing terms “the domain of numbers”, considering the boundaries between politics and objectivity such diverse episodes as the fad for number, by purporting to act as automatic technical weight and measure amongst a few seventeenth- mechanisms for making judgements, prioritiz- century Englishmen; the inauguration of colo- ing problems and allocating scarce resources. nial censuses; the debates over mortality in the Accompanying this “numericization of politics” eighteenth-century colonies; the history of has been a variety of “politics of numbers”. arithmetic education; the relations of statistics There is a politics of accuracy, perhaps most and statecraft in the early nineteenth century beguiling to political commentators and politi- and the debate over the 1840 U.S. Census. The cians themselves. An obvious example from the 1987 collection edited by William Alonso and U.K. is the debate over the possible “fudging” of Paul Starr entitled The Politics of Numbers the statistics on unemployment under Margaret (hereafter PN) emerges out of this trajectory. It Thatcher’s government. There is a politics of is one of a series entitled “The Population of the adequacy, beloved of specialists and those United States in the 1980s” aimed at “convert- political commentators seeking to strike a ing the vast statistical yield of the 1980 [U.S.] GOVERNING BY NUMBERS 675

Census into authoritative analyses of major with the persons, processes and problems that changes and trends in American life” (PN, p. they seek to govern. Numbers are integral to vii). This volume testifies to the ramification of the problematizations that shape what is to be numbers in the political life of contemporary governed, to the programmes that seek to give America. Its 14 essays examine the forces effect to government, and to the unrelenting shaping such diverse practices of quantification evaluation of the performance of government as economic statistics on growth, productivity that characterizes modern political culture. and military expenditure, official statistics What is particularly significant about the books of family income, national income accounts, by Cline Cohen and Alonso and Starr is that controversies over the census, the politics of they enable one to construct, albeit in a rough measuring ethnic@, population forecasting, the and preliminary manner, a hypothesis concern- relations of statistics to democratic politics, to ing the relation between numbers and demo- the relations of federal and state governments, cracy. It is upon this aspect of the relation and the ways in which technological develop- between government and numbers that I wish ments such as computer technology and social to focus in this essay. developments such as the privatization of The hypothesis can be simply stated: there is statistical services relate to political values. a constitutive interrelationship between quan- What do we learn from these studies con- tification and democratic government. Demo- cerning the relations between numbers and cratic power is calculatedpower, and numbers politics? Firstly, of course, that the relation is are intrinsic to the forms of justification that reciprocal and mutually constitutive. As Alonso give legitimacy to political power in democracies. and Starr point out in their introduction, acts of Democratic power is calculating power, and social quantification are “politicized” not in the numbers are integral to the technologies that sense that the numbers they use are somehow seek to give effect to democracy as a particular corrupt - although they may be - but set of mechanisms of rule. Democratic power because “political judgments are implicit in the requires citizens who calculate about power, choice of what to measure, how to measure it, and numeracy and a numericized space of how often to measure it and how to present and public discourse are essential for making up interpret the results” (PN, p. 3). Further, it is self-controlling democratic citizens. not simply that political debate deploys num- bers, or that so many political decisions affect- ing our lives entail the deployment of numbers UNDEMOCRATIC AND DEii-OCRATIC in their calculation and legitimation. As Alonso NUMBERS and Starr again point out, our images of political life are shaped by the realities of our society How should one study the relation between that statistics appear to disclose. And many of politics and numbers? I would like to draw out the essays in their collection help us situate four significant themes from previous studies. debates over accuracy, adequacy, abuse, pri- The first is the link between government and vacy and ethics within such a perspective on knowledge. This is made most clearly by Michel how the domain of numbers is politically Foucault in his consideration of “governmenta- composed and the domain of politics is made lity” or the mentalities of government that up numerically. characterize all contemporary modes of exer- But these books raise some more funda- cise of political power in the West (Foucault, mental issues concerning politics and numbers. 1979). From about the eighteenth century The organization of political life in the form of onwards, to govern a domain - a population, the modern state has been intrinsically linked an economy - has entailed seeking to exercise to the composition of networks of numbers a power over it that is modulated by a know- connecting those exercising political power ledge of its laws, processes and conditions. 676 NIKOLAS ROSE

Statistics here emerges as one of the key 198 1). Turning the objects of government into modalities for the production of the knowledge numericized inscriptions, then, enables a mach- necessary to govern, rendering the territory to inery of government to operate from centres be governed into thought as a domain with its that calculate. own inherent density and vitality. Fourthly and arising Erom this, it is clear that The second theme is the link between such numbers do not merely inscribe a pre- government and information. This is emphasised, existing reality. They constitute it. Techniques for example, in the work of Pasquale Pasquino of inscription and accumulation of facts about (1978). In the eighteenth-century German “the population”, the “national economy”, writings of von Justi, Sonnenfels, Obrecht and “poverty” render visible a domain with a other theorists of “police”, a vital link is certain internal homogeneity and external constructed between a politics of calculated boundaries. In each case, the collection and administration of the population - with the aggregation of numbers participates in the ends of wealth, public order, virtue and happ- fabrication of a “clearing” within which thought iness - and information. There can be no well- and action can occur. Numbers here delineate ordered political machinery or enlightened “fictive spaces” for the operation of govern- administration, they argue, without a know- ment, and establish a “plane of reality”, marked ledge of the state of the population, and the out by a grid of norms, on which government numbering of persons, goods, activities, births, can operate (Miller & O’Leary, 1987; Rose, crimes, deaths and much else provides the 1988; Miller & Rose, 1990). material on which administrative calculation If we start from these four themes, there can operate. appears to be a distinction between the Euro- The third important theme I would like to pean approaches to the social history of emphasise concerns the formation of centres of quantification and those that have emerged calculation. This is stressed in the work of from the U.S. Those familiar with the writings I Bruno Latour (1987). To exercise power over have just cited may well have gained the events and processes distant from oneself it is impression that this “statisticalization” of poli- necessary to turn them into traces that can be tics is bound up with- attempts by the State to mobilized and accumulated. Events must be control and subordinate individuals and popu- inscribed in standardized forms, the inscrip- lations. Studies of the European “science of tions transported from far and wide and police” in the seventeenth and eighteenth accumulated in a central locale, where they can centuries have certainly stressed the role be aggregated, compared, compiled and caicu- played by the collection and centralization of lated about. Through the development of such statistics in the exercise of surveillance and complex relays of inscription and accumula- discipline over the population (Oestreich, tion, new conduits of power are brought into 1982). Studies of the relation between social being between those who wish to exercise quantification and social politics in the nine- power and those over whom they wish to teenth century have stressed the role of exercise it. And, as Ian Hacking has pointed out, statistics in charting the moral topography of over the past two centuries in Europe, political populations: a quantification of the problem attempts at the calculated administration of life spaces of crime and degeneracy that would have been accompanied by a veritable “avalanche appear to find its apotheosis in eugenics of printed numbers”. These did not merely (Jones & Williamson, 1979; Rose, 1985). Other connect centres of calculation to other locales; accounts have linked the quantification of the they enabled the centre to act as a centre by mind and of human conduct to the rise of means of its centrality in the flows of informa- disciplinary organizations such as the prison, tion that “re-present” that over which it is to the factory, the school and even the hospital, calculate and seek to programme (Hacking, and have pointed to the link between such statistical individualization and regulatory re- government could learn the military and colon- gimes seeking to exercise a hierarchical sur- izing potential of a country and plan for veillance and normalizing judgement over their adequate food at time of siege or famine. But inmates (Foucault, 1977). Thus, it is not also, as he enrolled the subjects, the censor surprising to find such a sensitive and percep- would be inspecting, exposing and judging tive historian of statistics as Ian Hacking arguing them, serving thereby “to expell all drones out that the collection of statistics is enmeshed in of a commonweale, which sucke the honey the formation of a great bureaucratic State from the Bees, and to banish vagabonds, idle machine, part of the technology of power of the persons, thieves, cooseners, and ruffians . . who modern State. Statistics, in enabling the taming although they walke in darkness, yet hereby of chance, in turning a qualitative world into they should bee seene, noted and known” information and rendering it amenable to (Bodin, [ 16061 1962, pp. 537-546, quoted in control, in establishing the classifications by CP, p. 37). which people come to think of themselves and None the less, both Cline Cohen and Starr their choices, appears to be bound up with an trace a different, democratic destiny for the apparatus of domination (Hacking, 1981, p. quantification of politics. It is true that, in 15). Britain in the late seventeenth century, William Both Cline Cohen’s book and Paul Starr’s Petty’s political arithmetic sought, as Starr puts opening essay in the Alonso and Starr collection it, “the application of rational calculation to the remark upon this link between statisticalization, understanding, exercise, and enhancement of surveillance and discipline. They point out that state power” (PN, p. 14). But political econom- the term censor dates from Roman times: the ists were sceptical of the reliability of data, and censor was one who tensed, who counted adult of the assumptions of a politics of State male citizens and their property for purposes of governance of economic life. Starr draws upon taxation and to determine military obligations Peter Buck’s argument that, in the second half and political status, and one who censured, who of the eighteenth century, a broad ideological was charged with the control of manners. The shift transformed political arithmetic from “a earliest relations between statistics and politics scientific prospectus for the exercise of state maintained this link between numbering, sur- power” into “a program for reversing the veillance and censure but combined it with the growth of government and reducing its influence notion that the power of the prince could and on English social and economic life”. For Buck, should be exercised in a rational way, depen- this is a matter of conceiving of people not as dent upon a knowledge of and a calculation subjects but as citizens, and of freeing political about those over whom government was to be arithmetic from State power, “allowing it to exercised. Paul Starr reminds us that the term reenter the domain of public controversy on statistics derives from the seventeenth-century new terms” (Buck, 1982, quoted in PIV, p. 15). German notion of a science of states. In From this point both Cline Cohen and the Conring’s notion of Stautenkunde, the system- essays in Alonso and Starr connect with a more atic study of states was based upon the benign and optimistic American account of the collection of and systematic tabulation of facts, links between statistics and government. Starr although these facts did not consist exclusively does cite Otis Dudley Duncan’s claim that of numbers. It was the science of police that social and economic statistics, like other forms developed in Europe in the seventeenth cen- of measurement, are developed, promoted and tury that entwined statistics and the census. imposed at particular historical moments be- Patricia Cline Cohen cites Jean Bodin’s argu- cause they serve particular interests, including ment that it was expedient to enrol and number a State interest in co-ordination and control the subjects of a commonwealth partly because (Duncan, 1984, cited in PN, p. 9). But in the from the numbers, ages and quality of persons a American writings, this interest in control and 678 NIKOMS ROSE co-ordination is not construed in terms of numbers, this is not simply a matter of the rise surveillance and discipline. Rather. it is analysed of technocracy. The officials who use these in a pluralist manner, in terms of the means statistical and calculative methods are them- whereby private entities may co-ordinate one selves constrained by the calculative apparatus with another; in terms of the defeat of supersti- they use. And this means that quantification tion by the belief in quantitative control; in produces a certain type of objectivity. As terms of the replacement of old relations of Anthony Hopwood has remarked, a network of status, rank and dependence by those of the apparently precise, specific and quantitative objectivity and truth. emerges out of, and is superimposed upon, the Theodore Porter has recently developed contentious and the uncertain (Hopwood, these themes (Porter, 1986, 1990). He argues 1985, p. 4). that statistics certainly entails standardization. For Porter, the objectivity imposed by stan- But standardization is not just a matter of the dardization and quantification is not merely a imposition of a system of bureaucratic regula- matter of epistemology. The establishment of a tion. Rather, it is a condition for interaction in domain of objectivity is linked to those social diversified societies with an expanded division transformations that increase mobility of popu- of labour, requiring a common means of lations, and expand the domain of trading into “trading” between difficult sectors - that is to new markets and locales. The old bonds that say, requiring something that will provide a assured the mutuality of persons entering into certain “translatability”. Stable standards thus trade no longer figure: a new objectivity is a enable the co-ordination of commercial activi- substitute for that lost trust. In that it attempts ties across wide time-space zones, producing a to externalize the individual from the calcula- means by which widely dispersed activities can tion, the objectivity conferred by calculation be made commensurable one with another. establishes a potential domain of “fairness” of For Porter, quantification is significant be- that which is above party and peculiar interests. cause it standardizes both its object and its And to the extent that decisions are trans- subject. It standardizes the object in that it formed from acts of judgement to the outcome establishes in univocal terms what is a yard, a of rule following, the opportunity for discretion bushel, a kilometre, the exchangeable worth of and the imposition of partiality is reduced. Thus a piece of coin. Measure is no longer modulated numerical rules constrain: impersonality rather by judgements based on experience of the than status, wisdom or experience becomes the quality of the thing measured (cf. Kula, 1986). measure of truth. In a democratic society with This puts an end to practices such as those an elaborated sphere of “civil society” and a which for so long enabled the quantum of land plurality of interest groups, numbers produce a or grain that counted as a particular unit of public rhetoric of disinterest in situations measure to be increased or decreased in the of contestation. One could follow Anthony light of a judgement as to its quality. Further, Hopwood here in putting this rather more quantification standardizes the subject of sharply: numbers, and the specialist know- measurement - the act of exchange is no ledges and professional techniques associated longer dependent on the personalities or sta- with them “can become implicated in the tuses of those involved. The lord can no longer creation of a domain where technical expertise require that his bushel be measured out in grain can come to dominate political debate” (1985, poured from a greater height into the container, p. 5) A spiral of “technicization of politics” thus packing it more densely, or in a wide, emerges between the new visibility of “the shallow container that will gather a greater facts” and the imperative of increased technical quantity in the heaping. Hence, while quantifi- expertise to gather and interpret them. Num- cation is certainly bound up with the emergence bers are not just “used” in politics, they help to of a specialist elite who calculate in terms of configure the respective boundaries of the GO\TRNING BY NUMBERS 679 political and the technical, they help to estab- and use. Cognitive organization refers fo the structuring lish what it is for a decision to be “disinterested”. of the information itself, including the boundaries of Neither of the two books under review inquiry, presuppositions about social reality, systems Of classification, methods of measurement, and official contributes much to the array of intellectual rules for interpreting and presenting data. tools available for the analysis of the numeric- ization of politics. Cline Cohen implies that the From this promising beginning, however, Starr power of numbers arises, in large part, from moves to a general conspectus running rapidly their “ordering capacity”. Numbers are “order- through issues ranging from the origin of ing”, she claims, for four basic reasons. Firstly, statistics in the idea of a science of statecraft to enumeration creates a “bond of uniformity” the phenomenological critique of official statis- around the objects counted - one cun add tics. Despite the eclecticism of this account, his oranges and apples if one wants to know how thinking about the links between statistics and much fruit there is. Secondly, numbers enable politics is certainly in the benign pluralist unlike orders of magnitude to be brought into a tradition. For example, he distinguishes the pre- relation with one another - distances over modern census, “used explicitly for keeping oceans with altitudes of mountains, the volume people under surveillance and control” (PN, p. of a barrel of ale and that of a tub of lard, the 1 l), from the modern census, which, he claims, climate of Massachusetts and that of London. “has as its primary and manifest function the Thirdly, numbers can sort out the combined production of quantitative information” (PN, p. effects of several components and hence stabil- 11). The distinction illustrates clearly the ize a process which is in flux: velocity can be limitations of analyses that construe power as decomposed into time and distance, population control and suppression, where suppression growth into fertility and mortality. And num- cannot be found, the analyst feels able to ignore bers can be utilized in matters of probability, to power effects. Hence, while Starr suggests that convey a notion of risk. These cognifive the key issue to be explored concerns “the features of number are drawn upon in certain demands of the modern state for social and cultural conditions, she suggests, thus in con- economic intelligence” (p. 15), it is not texts of social and intellectual disorder, flux and surprising that his analysis does little to help us spiritual ‘disarray, the ordering powers prove to understand these demands. attractive and are capitalized upon - hence the Starr is similarly inconclusive in relation to spread of numeracy. How well this account the question of whether there is something, in fares, we shall see presently. general, that numbers can do for politics as a Paul Starr, in his opening essay of Alonso and result of what he terms “the cognitive organ- Starr’s collection, attempts something more ization of statistics systems”. He does, however, substantial in the way of a review and synthesis draw out some aspects of significance. At root, of the very varied literature on the sociology of he argues, statistical systems reduce complexity. official statistics. He proposes the notion of a “Social conditions and the characteristics of “statistical system” as a means of conceptualiz- people are myriad and subtly varied; statistical ing the social organization of numbers. A inquiries must be limited to particular items statistical system is (PN, p. 8): and categories of response. Yet the raw data thereby collected C&I be combined and analyzed a system for the production, distribution, and use of in sundry ways; scarce cognitive as well as numerical information. A statistical system may be said economic resources dictate that only some fo have two kinds of structure - social and cognitive. routes be followed” (PN, p. 40) Starr here Its social organization consists of the social and alights upon an issue that has been illuminated economic relations of individual respondenrs, state agencies, private firms, professions, inrernational organ- in particular by a French tradition of history and izations and others involved in producing flows of data philosophy of science. As Gaston Bachelard from original sources fo points of analysis, distribution, and, more recently, Bruno Latour have shown, 680 NIKOLAS ROSE the technical processes which materialize the to be what they purport - their role as world - in graphs, figures and other traces - cognitive commitments, their place in con- necessarily perform an act of simplification temporary political rhetoric, their normative more akin to the “realization” of theoretical content, the danger when they are used as categories in the world than the “representa- “automatic pilots” in decision making. This is a tion” of the world in thought (Bachelard, 195 1; point taken up in the contribution to PN by Latour, 1986; cf. Gaukroger, 1976). Kenneth Prewitt. To assign responsibility for Starr, however, focuses on the sociological classification to the statistical system, Prewitt implications of this reduction of complexity. argues, transforms the thing being measured - This, he claims, can be neither ideologically nor segregation, hunger, poverty - into its statis- theoretically innocent. On the contrary, the tical indicator. The search for objective rules to processes of simplification embody the expec- eliminate subjective judgement, here as else- tations and beliefs of the responsible techni- where in rule of law politics, merely pushes cians and officials; the discretion that they politics back one step to disputes about methods. inevitably exercise is dissimulated by the claim Again, a technicization of the political has been that their expertise, whilst indispensable, is accomplished: “Arguments about numerical “merely technical”. Expectations and beliefs are quotas, availability pools and demographic embodied in the framing of statistical enquiry, imbalance become a substitute for democratic for example, shaping what is counted and in discussion of the principles of equity and relation to what explicit or implicit theories. justice” (PN, p. 272). They are embedded in the systems of classifica- Yet, despite his criticisms, Starr ends on an tion adopted, for example ethnicity rather than optimistic note. However imperfect they may race, nationality, ancestry, cast or religion. They be, statistics are a means for reducing the fear of are embodied in how the measurement is done, unchecked power (PN, p. 57): and what forces have their concerns embedded in numbers. They are bound up with questions To subordinate ourselves under an impersonal rule is as to how often to measure and how to deal the fundamental reason why we have laws and constitu- with change, for example data on the money tions. However imperfect, a rule of law tends to restrain the use of powers and thereby enlarges liberty. supply is published monthly but estimates of Statistical systems help to accomplish similar purposes, poverty are annual and the census is taken and. despite their imperfections, they may also contri- every ten years. And they are embodied in the bute to our freedom. ways in which bureaucrats choose to shape and present the data, for example the “specious These American considerations of the politics accuracy”, to use Morgenstern’s term, in which of numeracy and quantification echo themes figures are reported to several decimal places. common to much American sociology and The ultimate reduction of complexity in political science. Thus, many of the examples official statistics, Starr notes, is the choice of the discussed by Cline Cohen and many of the single number that will figure in the briefings contributions to Alonso and Starr raise points an3 speeches of politicians and in the headlines. about why particular numerical indices are Others have discussed the power of the single salient rather than others, about why this is figure, drawing attention to the particular counted rather than that, about the accuracy of potency of those numerical technologies that the figures, or about the disputes between can reduce the complexity of experience to a different forces, locales, interests about what single comparable, quotable, calculable number should be counted and by whom. They demon- (Miller, 1989; cf. Hopwood, 1986). Starr over- strate that political numbers are bound up with looks these calculatory and regulatory con- struggles and contestations amongst interest sequences, concentrating instead upon the groups and sectional lobbies. They illuminate features that undercut the claims of the figures the clashing cultures, values and objectives of GO\ZRNING BY NUMBERS 681 the academics who theorize the figures, the (CP, p. 41). Economically, she points to three statisticians who calculate them, the techno- strands of development. More people were crats who utilize them and the politicians who drawn into the world of monetary exchange calculate or pontificate in terms of them. They involving calculation and bookkeeping by the contribute to what one might term the “political rise of capitalism. Seamen had to be introduced sociology” of numbers, But beyond their own to mathematics in the navigational develop- perspectives, we can link these amiable American ment required for overseas trading and adven- reflections to the European concerns about turing. And the disruption of population stability power. For they enable us to explore the “loosened some men from their roots, setting relations between quantification, numeracy, them adrift in English society, and startled other statistics and democracy as a mentality of men, like Bodin, into quantitative inquiries in government and a technology of rule. an effort to create order” (0, p. 41). But Cline Cohen places her emphasis on cosmology - not the Weberian link between Calvinism and THE NUMERICIZATION OF AMERICA calculation, but the inability of the Aristotelian system of scientific classification to make sense Patricia Cline Cohen begins her book by of a world newly teeming with activities cutting posing an apparently simple historical question: across the classic categories (CP, pp. 44-45). “why was it that in the 1820s and 1830s there As I have already suggested, quantification suddenly appeared many types of quantitative emerges, for Cline Cohen, as a new mode of materials and documents that previously had imposing order. Given that all the “ordering been quite rare? Not only government agencies qualities” of numbers existed in the seven- but private associations and individuals were teenth century; in those “turbulent and dis- eagerly counting, measuring, and churning out orderly years, quantification must have seemed data” (CP, p. 4) She answers this question by an alluring way to impose order on a world in examining two correlative processes. On the flux” (CP, p. 44). One is tempted to agree with one hand, projects to spread “numeracy” in the Paul Starr, when he points out that “unsettling population. On the other, the spread of what conditions cannot, in themselves, produce an she usefully terms the “domain of numbers” as interest in quantification, except perhaps in the things once thought of solely in qualitative context of particular intellectual traditions” terms become subject to quantification. (RV, pp. 22-23). For it is certainly as unsatis- Whilst in the course of her account she factory to seek to explain new modes of proposes a number of pragmatic and nrl hoc cognition by pointing to “social conditions” as reasons for the expansion of the domain of it is to point to “economic needs” or “political numbers, from administrative convenience, functions”. But even to pose the question in this comparability across time and space, planning way is to become locked in the interminable and the like, she argues that quantification itself debates about the relations between “ideas” emerges in the seventeenth century in response and their “social context”. Social conditions to major political, economic and cosmological are never active in human affairs as raw shifts marked by disorder and even chaos. experiences but only in and through certain Politically, she points to the development of the systems of meaning and value. Ideas are con- new concepts of public administration embodied stitutively social in that they are formed and in mercantilism, in which the government circulated within very material apparatuses for claimed a right to regulate economic activity. the production, delimitation and authorization This, she suggests, created a justification for of truth. It is perhaps time, once and for all, to evaluating national resources, including the cease to distinguish the intellectual from the population and the volume of trade, and social only to ask how they are related. increasingly such evaluations were quantitative Cosmological changes, for Cline Cohen, also 682 NIKOUS ROSE account for the spread of numbers in the there was an issue of personal conduct at stake. eighteenth century. She denies the familiar Numbers were bound up with a certain way of sociological explanation in terms of the growth approaching the world. They conferred certainty. of commerce, proposing instead that the key they contributed to knowledge, they revealed factor was a change in the way in which men regularities, they created regularities. And, in thought about human affairs and divine inter- doing so, numbers fostered detachment from vention. Specifically, she argues, it was the feeling, passions and tumults (CP, p. 115). The decline of religious fatalism and uncertainty, promulgation of numbers was thus inseparably and the discovery of peculiar regularities in bound up with the valorization of a certain type events once thought to be under divine powers of ethical system. Numeracy was an element in which led to the rise of a spirit of control and the ethical technologies that would, it was the evolution of “the mathematical sense” (0, hoped, produce a certain kind of disciplined p. 83). This explanatory relationship between subjectivity. cosmological and social changes is rather unsatisfactory, not least because it assumes what it sets out to prove. But this should be CITIZENS MUST CALCULATE: NUblERACY seen neither as a reason for retreating to a AND DEMOCRATIC SUBJECTMTY history of ideas, nor as a plea for finer-grained and more detailed historical investigation. It was in the nineteenth century, argues Cline Rather, I suggest, we should re-pose our Cohen, that numbers established the basis for question. Cline Cohen, like so many others, asks their modern hold on the American political the question “why?” - why this new use of imagination. numbers at this time and this place. But what if we free ourselves from a certain principle of The commercial revolution stimulated reckoning skills causality, a certain search for determinants and as it pulled more people into a market economy. The explanations in history (cf. Foucault, 1986). We political revolution that mandated the pursuit of happiness as an important end of government found its would then be able to ask a more productive proof of the public’s happiness in statistics of growth question: not “why?” but “how?” In relation to and progress. And the proliferation of public schools, what problems, by means of what intellectual designed to ensure an educated electorate, provided a technologies, according to what ethical systems vehicle for transmitting numerical skills to many more and governmental problematics, did numbers people (CP, p. 117). become such an essential part of American political culture? It is at this point that Cline Cohen illuminates Notwithstanding its occasional appeal to most clearly the relation between disciplined cosmology, Cline Cohen’s account is rich with subjectivity, numeracy and democracy. Arith- evidence concerning these more down-to-earth metic was to cease being commercial; it was to matters. She identifies two central issues in the become republican. eighteenth century: epidemic disease and per- Take, for example, decimal money. Decimals sonal conduct. The numerical charting of had been studied for two hundred years by patterns of epidemic illness and the quantitative mathematicians, but nineteenth-century America demonstration of the success of inoculation was the first country to put them to practical induced a change of attitude to numerical use. Jefferson, in 1790, had argued for the arguments: human intervention could alter the superior ease of reckoning in decimals in these course of nature; quantification was essential as terms (Jefferson, 1790, quoted in CP, p. 128): a tool for both doing this and assessing the The facility which this would introduce into the vulgar results; one was entitled to so intervene in arithmetic would. unquestionably, be soon and sensibly order for each to live their full life (CP, p. 108). felt by the whole mass of people, who would thereby be Further, for Protestants like Benjamin Franklin, enabled to compute for themselves whatever they GO\TRiiING BY NUMBERS 683

should have occasion to buy, to sell. or measure. which significant. But this significance is not that the present complicated and difficult ratios put beyond usually accorded to them by historians of ideas. their computation for the most part. It is not that either the roots or the evidence of I citizenship are to be found in them; rather they Cline Cohen argues that proponents of the new can be seen as intellectual problematizations of, federal money based on the decimal system and philosophical commentaries upon, their took up these concerns, and claimed own times. To understand the genealogy of citizenship as a socio-historical phenomenon that they were democratising commerce by putting we should lower our eyes from these grand and computation within the reach of nearly all. At the same time, the self consciously utilitarian spirit of the new airy deliberations and examine also the mun- nation invaded education and elevated arithmetic to the dane, the small scale, the technical. Citizenship status of a basic skill along with reading and writing. should be studied at the level of the practices, Decimal money and arithmetic education were justified technologies and mentalities within which as fruits of republican ideology; numeracy was hailed citizens were to be formed, not simply as the as a cornerstone of free markets and a free society (CP, p. 127). moral subjects that philosophical deliberation seeks to equip with abstract rights and freedom, ‘Fe pedagogy of numbers was not only repub- but as the subjects of governmental technolo- lp because it generalized the competence to gies, ethicalized individuals capable of exercis- alculate, it was republican because it was a ing self-mastery, discipline, foresight, reason edagogy of reasoning itself. As the investiga- and self-control. Ian Hunter has shown the ways ion of mathematical truths accustomed the in which pedagogic discourses and techniques ind to method and correctness in reasoning, it in the nineteenth century took such a “re- 1, as, as the author of the first American sponsibilizing” role upon themselves, seeking elementary arithmetic text to be published in to utilize practices ranging from playground the new republic put it, “peculiarly worthy of supervision, through teaching style to curri- rational beings” (Nicolas Pike, quoted in CP, culum content in the service of the production p. 132). Or, as Catherine Beecher put it in of a regulated subjectivity (Hunter, 1989). Such 1874, the object in studying arithmetic “is to a genealogy linking democratic mentalities of discipline the mind’ (quoted in CP, p. 145, government, pedagogy and regulated subjectivity i zmphasis in original). gains support from Cline Cohen’s account of republican arithmetic. Democracy requires As Cline Cohen puts it (CP, pp. 148-149): citizens who calculate about their lives as well as their commerce. Henceforth, the pedagogy numeracy spread in the early nineteenth century under of numeracy was an essential part of the the influence of two powerful attitudinal changes: the constitution of subjects of a democratic polity. extension of the commercial, or marketplace, frame of If government was to be legitimate to the mind and the growing dominance of certain ideas associated with the fostering of democracy, especially extent that it was articulated in a discourse of the notion that rationality in the greatest possible calculation, it was to be democratic to the number of people was desirable. As commerce invaded extent that it required and sought to produce everyday life, more people had somehow to acquire the responsible citizens, with a subjectivity dis- mental equipment to participate in it. As widespread ciplined by an imperative to calculate. rational thinking came to be perceived as necessary to the workings of democracy, educators looked to mathematics as the ideal way to prepare a republican citizenry. CALCULATING AUTHORITIES: FROM STATISTICS TO THE CENSUS Of course, there are Innumerable philosophical writings debating the meaning of citizenship In the American case, the statisticalized md its moral basis. No doubt these texts are census was to be a vital point of linkage 684 NIKOLAS ROSE between government and number. Of course, diverse United States . . .Facts would dispel the as we have seen, both the census as a count of factious spirit” (CP, p. 155)., Facts, being above population for purposes of tax and surveillance, factions, would illuminate that overarching and statistics as science of state, predate realm within which the nation was to be unified democracy. Furthermore, the will to quantify in a single moral universe. was not the prerogative of the public powers. In This theme is developed in various contribu- the U.S., from the late eighteenth century and tions to PN. Thus Nathan Key-&z cites William throughout the first half of the nineteenth Kruskal’s argument that the census I’provides a century, a host of individuals carried out sense of social cohesion, and a kind of non- enquiries into the civil condition of the people religious communion: we enter the census and compiled these into gazetteers. It was, in apparatus as individual identities with a handful the first place, these diverse quantifiers who of characteristics” but the census itself confers made the link between number, fact and good a kind of group national identity upon us (PN, government. To govern legitimately was not to p. 238). And Steven Kelman, in his discussion of govern at the mercy of opinion and prejudice, the political foundations of American statistical but to govern in the light of the facts. On the policy, singles out this celebratory aspect of the one hand, government needed more facts. On census, its place as a ritual of national identityi. the other, government could be pressed to The census, argued members of congress ia adjust its policies - in relation to the miseries 1879, was “the great picture of our physical an of the public prisons, the suppression of social freedom . . . displayed for the judgment o,% intemperance, the availability of educational mankind” from which not only foreigners bu facilities - in the light of the facts. The also “our own people” were to learn “what w / formation of a numericized public discourse is really are” (Ply pp. 287-288). not only a resource for government; as Kenneth If facts are necessary for good governmend, Prewitt points out in his contribution to PN, it is then it makes sense for the facts to be also a resource whereby various forces may governmentalized. Herein lay the argument for seek to mobilize government by challenging its an expanded census. The requirement for a claims to efficacy. Indeed information, “facts census was built in to the Constitution, for a and figures”, “may give an advantage to the periodic count of free and enslaved persons was weak, whose case, if strong and technical, can necessary to determine the numerical basis for count for something” (Wilensky, cited by representation in the lower house of Congress. Prewitt, PN, p. 271). In modern democratic In the early nineteenth century, many agreed discourse, numbers are thus not univocal tools with James Madison that an expanded census of domination, but mobile and polyvocal re- was desirable because “in order to accommo- sources. I shall return to this point at the date our laws to the real situation of our conclusion of this essay. constituents, we ought to be acquainted with But statistics in America were to have a that situation” (quoted in CP, p. 160). Yet, second democratic vocation. They were to be whilst some made demands for all sorts of deployed in a problem space peculiar to an information in addition to the count of occupa- ethic of democratic authority - that of con- tions that Madison had sought, others opposed stituting a public domain that unifies individual anything but a simple head count. Why the wills, of governing diversity in the name of the controversy? common good. As Cline Cohen puts it: “pro- One issue concerned the content of counting ponents of statistics claimed that a comprehen- - what it was legitimate to count and why. TO sive knowledge of general social facts could be this I shall return. But a second, perhaps more the foundation of a new politics. Knowing the fundamental issue concerned the nature of the exact dimensions of heterogeneity would com- polity in a democracy. As Cline Cohen argues, pensate for the lack of homogeneity in the this was a controversy over the existence of GCWERNINC BY NUMBERS 685 lpeculiar interests as opposed to the common that arose around the issues of race, slavery and good - should democratic government be insanity. lbased upon the premise of a single common Amongst those who had become objects of good embracing the whole community, or government by 1840, and hence objects of should it seek to adjust itself to the several statisticalization, were the mad. The 1840 classes of persons with their various, principally census added a count of the insane and idiots, economic, interests. Some viewed society as an distinguished by race and by mode of support, organic whole. For them, as Prewitt points out, to the counts of the blind, deaf and dumb, that the object of government was the pursuit of a had been included in 1830. When the results of public good that could not be divided, and the the census were published in 1841, the total pursuit of politics an exercise of virtue. Others, number of those reported as insane or feeble notably Madison, “viewed society as consisting minded in the U.S. was over 17,000. More to the in multiple and diverse interests. To govern point, perhaps, nearly 3000 were black, and the such a society in democratic fashion required rate of insanity amongst free blacks was 11 complex information about the composition of times higher than that of slaves and six times the public” (Ply, p. 268) By 1820, the Madisonian higher than that of the white population. For ideal of democracy, as a nicely calculated those who opposed abolition, like U.S. Vice exercise of power, had prevailed. The polity President John C. Calhoun, these census figures was now to be broken into its several classes; proved that blacks were congenitally unfit for the census was to require each household to be freedom. Abolition, far from improving the allotted to one, and only one, sector of the condition of “the African”, worsened it: where economy. As Cline Cohen puts it “The common “the ancient relations” between the races had good was being broken into constituent parts, been retained, the condition of the slaves had and the social order could now be compre- improved “in every respect - in number, hended through arithmetic” (0, p. 164). comfort, intelligence and morals . . .” (quoted in In the preface to the 1838 edition of his Gilman, 1985, p. 137). Gilman cites an essay in Almanac, Joseph Worcester wrote: “all intelli- the American Journal of Insanity as late as bent and judicious legislation must be founded, 1851, citing the 1840 census as proof of the in great measure, on statistical knowledge”: if inferiority of the blacks. For Cline Cohen statistics on population, manufactures and agri- however, the significance of the public and ill- culture, crime and pauperism, education and tempered wrangle between the various officials Teligion were collected regularly, it would and congressmen is that it took a novel form: a “greatly increase the ability of the national and questioning of the factuality of numerical facts. State governments, as well as of societies and This debate marks, for her, the moment of loss individuals to promote the interest, and advance of innocence for political statistics - the fhe moral civilization and improvement, of the recognition that statistics could lie, and that people” (Worcester, 1838, quoted by Kelman statistics could be challenged by other statis- in PN, pp. 281-282). And Steven Kelman tics. But the key point of this episode, as she quotes President Martin Van Buren: the IS40 also recognizes, is that political controversy and census should “embrace authentic statistical numerical controversy have become insepar- returns of the great interests specially entrusted ably intertwined. From this point on, that is to to, or necessarily affected by, the legislation of say, political disputes will be waged in the Congress”. (Ply p. 282.) It is with this census of language of number. 1840 that Cline Cohen’s book ends. Some had The key argument for the expansion of the hoped that this was to be a “full dress inventory census in the U.S. from the 1840s to the present of the greatness of America”, but Cline Cohen was put succinctly in 1849: “the American argues that this census led to a new scepticism statesman”, argued Senator Hunter, must “obtain over the reliability of numbers, a scepticism a full and accurate view of all the parts of that 686 i’iIKOLA.5 ROSE vast society whose machinery he directs” over whom they claim the right to exercise1 (quoted by Kelman in P,V, p. 282). The obvious, it. I but none the less significant, consequence was that what was counted was what was proble- matic for government. As Kelman points out iMAKING UP THE NATION: (PN, p. 283): DEMOCRACY AND THE CENSUS

The introduction of questions on manufacturers in the What is the nation? This question has a 18 IO census reflected a new interest in the industries of particular salience for democracy. Democracy the industrial revolution and demands for legislative as an ethico-political governmental rationality action to aid them. The dramatic expansion of statistics about social problems such as illiteracy, ill health, is based upon the legitimacy apparently con- insanity, pauperism, crime and so forth, that began in an ferred upon political power by a quantitative important way with the censuses of 1840 and 1850 relation between those holding political authority mirrored a growing concern that the large wave of and those subject to it. The debates over immigration of poor people was creating social prob- apportionment illustrate the complex relation- lems. The collection of wage statistics and detailed information about the railroad and insurance industries, ship between such a political rationality and the introduced after the Civil War, was a sign of the growing technologies of government which can help to legislative interest in labour relations and big business. operationalize democracy. Prior to the Con- stitutional Convention of 1787, each state had By 1880, few would dissent from Representa- equal power within the Confederation. How- tive Cox’s assertion that “a country without a ever, at that convention the delegates from the census cannot be well-governed” (quoted in larger states wanted to give equal weight to PN, p. 283). each person, and thus most power to the states Three themes emerge clearly from the genea- with the biggest populations. As William Petersen logy of the American census in the nineteenth explains: century. Firstly, numbers are linked to specific problematizations. To problematize drunken- The compromise effected was to balance power by establishing a bicameral Congress; in the Senate, with ness, idleness or insanity requires it to be equal representation from each member of the Union, counted. Reciprocally, what is counted - the less populous states had relatively more weight; and slavery, pauperism, insanity - is what is in the House, with representation proportional to the problematized. To count a problem is to define population, those with more inhabitants dominated. To it and make it amenable to government. To maintain this balance the number in the lower house had to be adjusted periodically to population growth, govern a problem requires that it be counted. and the first link between politics and enumeration was Secondly, numbers are linked to evaluation of thus inscribed in the Constitution itself (fiv, p. 192). : government. To count is bound up with a new critical numeracy of government, to measure But, of course, the delegates from North and the success of government is to measure South were divided, above all, on the question quantitative changes in that which it seeks to of slavery; the compromise on this was precisely govern. As George Tucker put it in his 1847 numerical: apportionment was based on all free prospectus for a nationwide General Statistical persons except Indians “not taxed” (that is, not Society, statistics alone enable us to trace the living in the general population), plus three- success of government in relation to “a nation’s fifths of “all other persons”. For each 100 slaves moral and religious improvement; its health, in a congressional district, that is to say, it wealth, strength and safety” (CP, p. 22 1). received representation equivalent to that for Thirdly, numbers are essential to authority’s 60 free persons (PN, p. 193). claim that it is legitimate because it is represen- From the time the Constitution was written, tative. Numbers figure out the continual adjust- the census was bound up with both the spatial ment between those who have power and those and the racial distribution of political power. By ’ GOVERNING BY h-LWBERS 687 the end of the nineteenth century, this was come from Northern Europe in order to taking the form of a new politics of blood and preserve the exiting racial balance of the race, problematizing now not the rate of nation. The National Origins Act of 1924 called increase of the population of free white men for a calculation of “the number of inhabitants and coloured slaves but immigration. Francis in the continental United States in 1920 whose Walker, “the intellectual founder of the immi- origin by birth or ancestry is attributable to gration restriction movement . . warned native [each] geographical area” (quoted by Petersen, Americans that they were being overrun by in Ph',p. 220). The Act operationalized the hordes of ‘degraded’ immigrants from Southern numericization of the population through and Eastern Europe: ‘beaten men from beaten immigration quotas, cut immigration to 150,000 races”’ (Walker, 1899, quoted by Conk, Ph',p. per annum, and allocated 71% of the quotas 162). And Francis Walker was none other than to Great Britain, Germany and Ireland. As director of the census. the related events of the next two decades Walker’s theories of the difference between in Europe were to show, such a numericiza- old immigrants and new immigrants, and the tion of a politics of the population founded on evidence he gathered in his new techniques for blood, race and territory was to have global monitoring changes in the population though implications. centre of population maps and population But the numerical inscription of race is density maps, proved crucial in the passage of two faced: it can also ground a positive poli- the legislation that restricted immigration to tics of identity. As Petersen points out (PN, the U.S. on racial lines. A range of events - the P. 218): effects of mobilization for the war on percep- tions of immigrants from the Central Power those departing from the multi-ethnic pre-1914 nations, the 1919 strike wave - led many to empires of Central and Eastern Europe had little or no see the cities and their polyglot population as consciousness of belonging to a nationality. He was the subject of a particular state, for example Russia; he destroying the fabric of American democracy. spoke a particular language, for example Lithuanian, he Congress balked at passing the reapportion- was an adhetent of one or another religion, and he ment legislation that was indicated by the 1920 regarded a certain province or village as home The census, for population growth would add technical requirement that the question on ethnicity be representatives to those urban industrial states put in a simple form - ‘What was your country of birth?” or something equivalent helped solidify new with large foreign-born populations. But if the ethnic groups. Having learned that they belonged to a census produced and demonstrated the prob- nation, some of the immigrants submerged their lem, it could also promise to resolve it. provincialisms into a broader patriotism, their local A study of the national origins of the dialects into a language. population, showed that though immigrants were one of the fastest growing groups in the Hence it is not paradoxical that the first population in the early twentieth century, the Lithuanian newspaper was published in the U.S.; descendants of persons enumerated at the that the Erse revival began in Boston; that the second census actually made up over half the Czechoslovak nation was launched at a meeting 1990 white population. The grounds for this in Pittsburgh. Identity, here, as in the case of the characterization of the composition of the contemporary fabrication of Hispanic identity American population in 1790 was W. S. Rossiter’s in the U.S., is literally a matter of being counted rather speculative estimate made on the basis of as identical. the surnames listed in the enumeration. None The controversies that surrounded the 1980 the less it enabled the restrictionists to argue census included 54 lawsuits filed by cities, that, since the majority of Americans in 1800 states, private citizens and lobbying groups came from Northern Europe, the majority of against the census bureau claiming that it in- twentieth-century immigrants would have to adequately or improperly counted the population 6888 NIKOLAS ROSE

(Conk, in PN, pp. 155-l 56). So much was its statisticians dreamed of further advances in now at stake, including not only the re- statisticalizing national reality. Amongst their apportionment of seats in Congress in the light products over the next decade were the of population movements, but also the use of Current Population Survey, monthly unemploy- population numbers in attempts by minorities ment statistics and the National Income and to press their case for social justice. But if the Product Accounts. census has become an arena of political struggle, The case of National Income Accounting is this has a significance that goes beyond the revealing, as Mark Perlman shows in his contri- bargaining of interest groups: it reveals the bution to PN, Like the other examples that I intrinsic dependence of the problematics of have discussed, national income accounting democratic politics upon technologies for num- demonstrates the relations between the forma- bering of the population. tion of political problematizations and the attempt to render them calculable through numerical technologies. Prior to the 1930s AN ECONOMY OF NUMBERS attempts to estimate the distribution of American income and wealth were bound up with issues Census numbers are not only politicized, of social distribution, with which social classes they are also monetarized. In the U.S., complex bore the costs and reaped the benefits of the allocative mechanisms have been built into incidence of taxation, of seasonality in employ- legislation that tie grants of government funds ment, of the growth in manufacturing output. By to population statistics. Grant programmes the 1930s Simon Kuznets was pointing out that from federal to state and local governments in the play of economic forces could be measured the pre-Depression period already used numer- at a number of levels, production, distribution ical formulae in making their allocative deci- or consumption, the level of measurement sions, based on such measures as population, being determined by the question to be asked. area or road mileage. With the New Deal Kuznets was concerned about the social impor- programmes of the ?33Os, in which large sums tance of the distribution of family income, and of federal money were allocated to state and the roles played by banking and by government local agencies for social welfare programmes, in stimulating growth. He concluded that the new measures were introduced based on such best measures of welfare and growth were to be numbers as per capita income, maternal mortality found at the level of income received by rates or population density. The census, that is individuals “after it leaves the productive units to say, became enmeshed in national income proper and before it has been diverted into the redistribution. As Margo Conk points out “A various channels of consumption” (Kuznets, new set of census apportionment mechanisms 1933, p. 205, quoted in Perlman, PN, p. 137). - this time designed to distribute economic During the 1930s statisticians helped to power - was being born” (PN, p. 169). shape a new problematization to which national Margo Conk argues that Congress and the income accounts would be the solution. The public had looked to the census in the early arguments put forward by those who advocated years of the Depression for a description as to an increased governmental role in the prepara- what was happening and clues as to why. The tion of such accounts sought to enrol a variety census could not even provide a credible count of allies in support of accurate and adequately of the unemployed. Hence the Roosevelt ad- classified national income data. The administra- ministration and the New Deal put the experts tion needed them in order to design appropriate to work in upgrading the statistical system. welfare and economic recovery programmes. More people were employed in counting and in The Inland Revenue needed them for analysing numbers, more things were counted, making projections of the effects of tax changes. more numbers were published. The bureau and Business needed them for market analysis. But GOVERNNG BY NUMBERS 689 only the federal government had the resources Their success in the case of military procure- to provide them in a form that was untainted by ment appeared to demonstrate that a calculable accusations of unreliability and bias. “Thus relation could be established between the developed an identifiable new objective for deployment of national resources and the national income accounting, namely an equit- achievement of national purposes. able, efficient, reliable, and speedy numbers Equipped with the intellectual technology of supply, essential to the experimental functions Keynesian macroeconomic theory, with the associated with economic reform through legis- techniques and inscriptions of national income lative action” (Perlman in PN, p. 139). A new accounting, with the regulatory powers con- plane of reality was to be composed in the jured up in the face of total war, accounting had process, a public habitat of numbers encompas- demonstrated its capacity to calculate its way to sing business activity, purchasing power, de- national objectives. In the post-war American mand for employment, government action, economy, the economists were confident that social welfare and economic recovery, and they could provide for growth in peace as in within which businessmen, politicians, econo- war, and many new measures of national and mists and scholars could calculate their way to international economic activity were devised their objectives. and tabulated. The measures for operationaliz- One might regard this public habitat of ing accounting technologies would certainly numbers, in the 1930s and 19405 as “Keynesian”. entail an increase in the scope of action of the This was not in the sense that it was originated public powers. But, to the extent that they or inspired by Keynes, but in that Keynesian operated by shaping the conditions under “macroeconomic” theory came to provide the which free agents made their choices, this intellectual medium within which measures of exercise of power for national purposes would economic activity could be seen as vital relays not be totalitarian but democratic. And to the between socio-economic problematizations - extent that they were guided by expertise, it fears of economic stagnation and large scale would not be arbitrary but scientific. It appeared unemployment - and political programmes - as though a democratic society could be calculated attempts at economic management governed in the national interest through by government. Indeed, as Perlman points out, accounting, expertise and calculation. National this “Keynesianism” was embedded in the way Income Accounting thus took its place within a in which the whole national accounting system range of other measures that sought to calibrate focused on measuring consumer purchasing the welfare of the nation in order to improve it. powers as a key to economic recovery. The Great Society programmes of the 1960s Wartime was to provide a key test and a key prompted increasing use of census data for triumph for these projects of “accounting for social programmes. “One man, one vote” government”. Roosevelt demanded far more in entered the national political vocabulary, and it the way of tanks and planes than his experts had was argued that the bureau had a constitutional deemed possible; Kuznets, who with Raymond duty under the equal protection clause of the Nathan was now at the War Production Board, Fourteenth Amendment to count everyone. took charge of military procurement, estimat- Counting was seen as a central plank of ing how and where the American economy regulatory government. could summon up the resources to meet the Ronald Reagan was elected to President as new targets. They used the national accounts the 1980 census was being completed. His system and accounts of capital formation in election appears to mark the start of a reversal devising measures ranging from the transfer of in the rise and rise of political numbering. $7 billion of resources from civilian capital Funds for the Census Bureau were cut, the formation to war-related purposes, to reduction Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards of consumer demand by increased taxation. was disbanded. The political problematics of 690 NIKOLA.5ROSE

Reaganomics and neo-liberalism are, of course, society is preserved when the public has marked by a profound suspicion of the capacity reliable ways of knowing whether policies are of governments to calculate and regulate in the having the announced or promised effect. Is national interest. But, at the same time, neo- inflation being brought under control? Is a war liberalism relies upon and seeks to utilize the of attrition being won? Are defence expendi- calculative capacities of individuals and firms, tures buying national security? Numbers, a part who, in calculating to serve their own best of this publicly available political intelligence, interests, will cumulatively serve all our best consequently contribute to the accountability interests. The numerical saturation of public required of a democracy” (piv p. 267). Num- discourse in contemporary Britain and the U.S. bers that have integrity, numbers that are reveals the new potential that such modes of safeguarded against political or professional government provide for a public habitat of manipulation, are essential elements for in- numbers, and the new importance that is formed civic discourse in advanced industrial accorded to all those private agencies and societies. consultants who claim that they can trans- Few would disagree with Prewitt’s descrip- form market conditions into numbers and tion. But we need to locate this morality of to make private calculation effective. Under numbers within its own politico-ethical matrix. neo-liberalism, a new “privatized” relationship As Paul Starr and Ross Corson argue, a tradition between numbers and politics is born. of American political thought going back to Madison and Jefferson has asserted that the success of democratic government is depen- A PUBLIC DISCOURSE OF NUMBERS dent upon an informed public, for “access to information is vital to the knowledge of one’s Of the essays in Alonso and Starr’s collection, own interests and of the broader life of the Kenneth Prewitt gives the most considered community” (PN, p. 438). That is to say, account of the relation between public statis- democratic political rationalities that accord tics and democratic politics. “Public statistics in significance to rational and calculative self the United States”, he argues, “are generated as steering of independent citizens in their per- a part of democratic politics” (PN, p. 262). For sonal and business activities also must sustain a him this invites enquiry into the ways in which public environment of numbers within which the “number system” of the United States those citizens may calculate. This is not only a “advances or retards democracy, informs or matter of any individual’s own personal evalua- distorts civic discourse, helps or hinders politi- tion of this or that course of action. It is also a cal participation” (PN, p. 262). In particular, matter of the organization of economic life. As Prewitt argues that democracy entails practices Prewitt points out, substantial amounts of that will call power holders to account, and he money are committed in the market-place on cites evidence that voters hold office holders to the basis of the figures in national statistical account less on the grounds of their own series - hundreds of thousands of dollars personal experience than on the basis of what change hands in the commodity markets as they know about national economic perfor- soon as data from the Crop Reporting Board of mance. And, of course, what they know comes the Department of Agriculture are released. to them largely in terms of the “upward or Whilst nineteenth-century arguments stressed downward movement of statistical indicators of the need for numbers as an aid for governmental those important issues for which government legislation and actions action, contemporary has assumed responsibility: unemployment, in- economists, as Steven Kelman points out, flation, balance of trade, interest rates, test argue for just such a public statistical habitat scores, poverty levels, crime rates” (PiV, which will enable differentiated and private p. 264). Prewitt’s argues that “A democratic enterprises to calculate actions and decisions. GOVElWING BY NUMBERS 691

It is in this context that we should locate or moral commitment, as if it were a charm that the evidence that Starr and Corson provide in ensured liberty, fairness and justice. Perhaps it their account of the rise of the statistical is. But democracy, as it has come to operate in services industry which concludes the Alonso the advanced liberal capitalist societies of the and Starr collection. Whilst statistics might west, is more than a set of political ideals, and once have been a governmental activity, since more than a set of mechanisms for delivering a the mid-twentieth century it has become a representative executive and holding them business. For “with the technological and periodically to account. As we are beginning to economic changes of the 1970s [emerged] a recognize, democracy, as a way of seeking to substantial industry of private Iirms selling exercise and justify power, depends upon a repackaged public data and privately collected complex set of technologies for linking up the statistics, statistical models, and analytical ski%” exercise of government with the entities - (PN, p. 415) Statistics are now intimately civil society, independent power sources, private connected to corporate strategy, through the wills, and so forth - upon which it depends. new discourse which binds economic success And numbers have been, and remain, indispens- and business expansion to market segmentation able to such technologies of demographic and targeted take-overs and marketing. Statis- government. tical information, linking public demographic Democracy, if it be taken seriously as an art of information on socioeconomic and geographical government rather than as philosophy or rhetoric, distribution to all manner of other computer- depends upon the delicate composition of ized information, is vital in the programmes to relations of number and numeracy enabling a sell different products, in different ways, to calculated and calculating government to be different customers. exercised over the persons and events to be Neo-liberal rationalities of government may governed. Democracy in its modem, mass, revive the old nineteenth-century liberal liberal forms requires a pedagogy of numeracy themes of freedom, the market and choice. to keep citizens numerate and calculating, However, they become possible bases for a requires experts to inculcate calculative tech- technology of government only in the presence niques into politicians and entrepreneurs, re- of a population of personal, social and economic quires a public habitat of numbers. Democratic actors who will reason and calculate their mentapes of government prioritize and seek freedom. They require a numericized environ- to produce a relationship between numerate ment in which these tree, choosing actors may citizens, numericized civic discourse, and govern themselves by numbers. And they numerical evaluations of government. Demo- depend upon the elaboration of an expertise of cracy can operate as a technology of govern- number, embodied in all those professions ment to the extent that such a network of (economists, accountants, statisticians, demo- numbers can be composed and stabilized. This graphers) and all those techniques (censuses, is not a question of the intrinsic capacity of surveys, national income tabulations and form- numbers - we should not expect to Iind any ulae, accounting practices) which render exis- essential unity to the relations of numbers and tence numerical and calculable. politics. Bather, it is a question of the “what” and “where” of the deployment of numbers, and the “how” of their alignment with other FIGURING OUT DEMOCRACY governmental technologies. These two books deserve to be read, whatever their conceptual Today, the word democracy is uttered reve- limitations, for they help us to turn our eyes rentially in more and more nations, by more from the grand texts of philosophy to the and more diverse political forces, as if embrac- mundane practices of pedagogy, of accounting, ing democracy were a matter of a philosophical of information and polling, and to the mundane 692 NIKOLAS ROSE knowledges and grey sciences that support rationalities and the numerical tech- them. They enable us to begin to map out this nologies that promise to make them operable. relationship between democratic political

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