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Alain Desrosières (18 April 1940 – 15 February 2013) was a statistician, sociologist and historian of science in France, known for his work in the history of statistics. He is the author of The Politics of Large Numbers: A History of Statistical Reasoning , published in 1993, translated into several languages, including English in 1998, and subsequently reviewed in the LRB in 2000. This described the origins of statistics as technical machinery for administration in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the attempts to measure human and economic development. The text is an account of the statistics and their use in abstracting features of society to better measure and understand them, with particular aims.

His major technical work on the socio-professional categorisation scheme used in French official statistics was updated in five editions over more than fifteen years. Further collected papers were published in two volumes as The Statistical Argument in 2008, and a final collection published posthumously in 2014 as Prouver et Gouverner. His major contribution was to frame public statistics as constructed reality, with categories created to describe society, but tracked carefully using these definitions. Thus bridging the opposing views that they are either objective facts or political propaganda due to his unusual combination of sociological study and statistical training.

References

1. "L'UQAM décerne un doctorat honorifique à Alain Desrosières dans le cadre du 25e anniversaire du CIRST". Université du Québec à Montréal. 2011. Retrieved 16 February 2013.
2. Raveaud, Gilles (15 February 2013). "Alain Desrosières est mort". Alternatives économiques (in French). Archived from the original on 31 August 2015. Retrieved 15 February 2013.
3. Desrosières, Alain (1998). The politics of large numbers : a history of statistical reasoning. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00969-1.
4. Lorraine Daston (2000). "Why statistics tend not only to describe the world but to change it". London Review of Books. 22 (8): 35–36. ISSN 0260-9592.
5. Bruno, I.; Jany-Catrice, F.; Touchelay, B., eds. (2016). The Social Sciences of Quantification: from politics of large numbers to target-driven politics. Springer. ISBN 978-3-319-43999-0.

External links

• Obituary, Le Monde
• Obituary, Libération
• Special issue, Statistique et Société, 2018 (in memoriam)

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