Learning from the history of the probabilistic revolution: the French school of Alain Desrosières

In this chapter, Fabrice Bardet, a long-life student of Alain Desrosieres tells the amazing academic dynamic that Alain Desrosieres created around him. From the 1990s to his death in 2013, he was, without any doubt, the French scholar situated in the center of the sociological field dedicated to quantification’s processes. Fabrice first comes back on the history of his master, a story that he had been told several times, by his side. Then he tells the story of the influence of his master on several generations of scholars, in France and abroad. He insists, among other things, on the importance that Alain Desrosieres gave, from his main book published in 1993, The Politics of Numbers, to his most recent publications, to the influence of the writing of The Probabilistic Revolution, in the 1980s, in an international context, set up in Bielefeld, Germany. From this perspective, he explains how, in his own view, this focus made by Desrosieres participated in creating a French school for sociology of quantification.