“What Use Is It in the Long Run to Resist Something That Is Bound to Happen Anyway?” The Statistical Mind Settling in Nineteenth-Century Politics

This chapter demonstrates the tough but inevitable emergence of “working numbers” in politics in an expanding and modernizing society. It discusses the settlement of official statistics in the Netherlands after 1850. The more democratic political system created a demand for information to get insight in the intervention of government in society, which was increasingly carried out by an expanding civil service. The involved politicians and officials had been introduced into statistical thinking at the university. The developments were accompanied by a new way of thinking, which meant a passion for a systematic collection and processing of observations of external reality. The new approach distanced itself consciously—and not without struggle—from styles of thought that based themselves on the unique case and the deductive method.