Paolo Parra Saiani

P. PARRA SAIANI, The (non) quantification in the study of society. Social indicators between social control and democratic participation The social indicators movement seems to be regaining its appeal. It was an heir to the supporters of quantification in the Social Sciences, as numbers were believed to be objective and scientific per se. Echoing the London Statistical Society’s policy that was declared two decades earlier, the newly created Statistical Society of Paris resolved in 1860 that «statistics is nothing else than the knowledge of the science of facts». It was, their statutes continued, an indispensable science for a liberal state: «It ought to provide the basis upon which society is governed». But the aspiration to know the territory was not always the simple thirst for knowledge: initial attempts were conducted by governments to carry out a policy of control and taxation. Only in the mid-18th century did many initiatives flourish. These concerned the collection of information in a more democratic spirit: information was now considered to be a citizen’s right. The study of society in its various dimensions has stimulated the search for and construction of statistical indicators and indices. The search for a better way of studying the progress of societies has often led to inappropriate uses of indicators and measures. GNP, for example, has been commonly considered to be an indicator of wellbeing. The lack of a conceptual frame for studying well-being is not the only problem, nor even the greatest. Of similar importance are the meagre statistical skills of journalists and policy-makers. All together, these elements facilitate limiting the use of data in public debate. In this paper, I will consider the shift from political arithmetic to modern social reports (par. 1); the success of quantification in the Social Sciences (par. 2); the use of quantification (par. 3); the validity of official statistics (par. 4); the current non-use of quantification and the search for contextual conditions that interfere with the transformation of information into knowledge (par. 5). Key words: social indicators, policy, democracy, quantification, well-being, knowledge.