The Taming Of Chance by Ian Hacking
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In this amazing work, Ian Hacking shows us the development of statistics. At first, statistics was used to find the “laws” of society. The patterns that were discovered were then utilized to as both prediction and explanation, to calibrate both the past and the future. Out of this use, the figure of the “normal” took over. This reinforced a position by which society then sought to calibrate itself in mediocrity. The present was thus always in decay, as normal slipped away due to change. At the same time, normal was understood as a purified state, one that people needed to attain to be “healthy.” The resolution that these statistical laws were explanation and prediction thus reproduces itself in the field as ideology.
Both past and future are colonized by our imagined laws, explained by nothing yet colonizing everything.
Hacking here presents the theoretical mechanism, the heirs of Newtonism, as developing the formula for state policy and social control. From the end of the French Revolution to the development of the centrist liberal state, we have a consistent march towards state intervention through the technicalities of a healthier, managed people.
