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The Laws that Govern Chaos

This chapter focuses on Adolphe Quetelet, who was among the few nineteenth-century statisticians who pursued a numerical social science of laws, not just of facts. Quetelet's contribution to statistical thought and to the mathematics of statistical analysis was a characteristic if not unsurprising product of his syncretic approach. Social physics was an elaborate metaphor that integrated his genuine concern for the advancement of scientific knowledge with his desire to turn science to the promotion of sound government and social improvement. Quetelet's fascination with the possibility of subjecting ostensibly uncontrolled social phenomena to scientific order was at the heart of his dedication to the concept of statistical laws. Characteristically, he gave this idea its fullest development in reference to such events as crime and suicide, the immoral materials for that “moral statistics” which was central to the early statistical movements in Britain and France as well as the Low Countries. The notion of statistical law achieved its fullest expression in Great Britain during the 1850s, the decade when laissez-faire liberalism reached its intellectual apogee.