Objectivity and Authority: How French Engineers Reduced Public Utility to Numbers

Objectivity and Science The wisdom of the ancients still meant something to nineteenthcentury quantifiers, and they were known to express their very modern dogma in a dead language: Mundum numeri regunt. As metaphysics, numbers rule the may be timeless, but only in the nineteenth century did this empire of counting and calculating begin to extend itself over public life. Depending on the ideology and temperament of the interpreter, this quantification of almost everything has usually been explained either as a natural outcome of the ceaseless growth of scientific knowledge or as part of a technocratic power grab. I want to argue here that the scientists cannot stand alone as either heroes or villains. The intrusion of objectivity into the domain of politics has as much to do with changes in the political order as with the growth of science. Or rather, this massive growth of quantification shows that the identity of knowledge and power announced by Bacon is more nearly accurate than we might suppose in a world where politics appears irrational, and science (especially quantitative social science) abstract and otherworldly.