Notes on the History of Quantification in Sociology--Trends, Sources and Problems

THE three major nouns in the title of this paper are necessarily vague. Quantification in the social sciences includes mere counting, the development of classificatory dimensions and the systematic use of "social symptoms" as well as mathematical models and an axiomatic theory of measurement. The notion of history is ambiguous because some of these techniques evolved several hundred years ago while others were developed within the last few decades. Finally, there is no precise line between sociology and other social sciences; with the economist, the sociologist shares family budgets, and with the psychologist he makes the study of attitudes a joint concern. The task of sketching out the history of quantification in sociology is made more difficult by the fact that it rarely has been seriously attempted. Both the history and the philosophy of science have been concerned almost exclusively with the natural sciences. Their discoveries have been linked step by step with their antecedents; their relation to the political, social and religious events of the time has been spelled out; even their effect on belles lettres has been traced. The few comparable studies in the social sciences have usually been concerned with broad, semi-philosophical systems. There has been hardly any work on the history of techniques for social science investigation. In following some of these procedures back to their origins, it was often necessary to draw attention to historical situations or to men with whom the American reader is not likely to be familiar, and to report something about the broader political and ideological contexts in which the pioneers of sociological quantification worked. The need for such details required a severe restriction in the scope of the paper. Actually, it deals with only three major episodes. They were selected because they carried the seeds of many subsequent developments and foreshadowed discussions which continue today. To give the three major sections of this paper a proper frame, a few words are needed about how a future history of quantification in sociology might look. It would begin with a preparatory phase lasting approximately from the middle of the 17th to the beginning