Professional Documents
Culture Documents
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Poetics Today
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Objectivity and Authority:
How French Engineers Reduced
Public Utility to Numbers
Theodore M. Porter
History, UCLA
This research was supported by fellowships from the Earhart Foundation, the
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I thank Lor-
raine Daston, Margaret Schabas, and Cecil Smith for helpful comments.
Poetics Today 12:2 (Summer 1991). Copyright ? 1991 by The Porter Institute for
Poetics and Semiotics. ccc 0333-5372/91/$2.50.
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
246 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 247
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
248 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 249
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
250 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 251
most completely explicit. Once one has the numbers, results can in-
deed be generated by mechanical methods, as the preeminent role
of computers in analyzing numbers in our own day attests.2 Faith in
the mechanical character of numerical operations is related to the an-
cient idea that mathematics yields perfect certainty, which is largely
responsible for the enormous and long-standing prestige of mathe-
matics. The second reason for the importance of quantification in
generating objective public knowledge is the vast range and flexibility
of the quantitative methods available. This point needs to be qualified.
Those methods were not given by God, nor, on the whole, are they
accidental by-products of pure scientific research. In fact, the main
reason that so powerful an array of methods has been developed is
that they do such valuable work in generating impersonal knowledge.
Still, numbers are more like a language than the subject of a distinct
science. There are few, if any, subjects that cannot be studied quan-
titatively. Scholars in many fields may feel that numerical approaches
simply evade the deep and important questions. Often, though, an
objective answer is more valued than a profound one.
Indeed, the enormous expansion of quantification in the last two
centuries must be understood partly as a response to the growing
demand for the appearance, at least, of objectivity in the dual sense
of fairness and impersonality. That it is only an appearance is now
widely, and perhaps too sweepingly, argued by scholars in studies of
science (Albury 1983). The political usefulness of objectivity, how-
ever, continues almost unabated, despite this widespread skepticism.
Its appeal reflects the very particular circumstances and political cul-
tures of the contemporary period. Even descriptive statistics, which
are not my main subject here, are collected and used in ways that
reflect the political tradition. Where effective power is local, there is
often little interest in aggregate numbers and sometimes, as when
feudal seigneurs felt themselves challenged by centralizing monarchs,
real aversion to them. Absolutist old-regime states generally regarded
population figures as state secrets, as indeed has the Soviet Union,
though somewhat less so of late. Nineteenth-century statisticians were
correct to insist that the growth of their science reflected an increased
sense of responsibility to the public (Chevalier 1860). The prolifera-
tion of numbers after about 1820 in enquetes, parliamentary reports,
and the like contributed enormously to the vast modern extension of
the range of state power, but it was associated also with a belief that
the public should be kept informed and even a need to justify action
or inaction to that public.
2. Even computers, however, cannot always reliably replicate the same results, not
only because researchers must usually adjust the raw data, but also due to slight
differences in software (see Mirowski and Sklivas 1989).
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
252 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 253
for approving new drugs and certain categories of public works in the
United States, which, since the war, has undoubtedly nourished the
greatest efflorescence of practical quantification ever seen. In previous
centuries, quantification rarely had a prescribed role within govern-
ments. More typically, it was advocated as part of a bid for influence
by a few scientists who saw themselves as standing for reason against
arbitrary power. The eighteenth-century project of Condorcet and
others to calculate, using mathematical probability, the reliability of
juries and the trustworthiness of testimonies is characteristic, both in
the extravagance of its ambitions and its futility (Daston 1988). The
only real hope that such calculations would be put to work was that
a truly enlightened monarch might ascend the throne. Somehow, this
never happened. Ambitions like Condorcet's could not begin to meet
with success until they gained the support of powerful institutions.
Thus, the growth of bureaucracy was almost a prerequisite to the
quantification of public life. This is very nearly true even of descrip-
tive statistics, which began to flourish in the most advanced states
of Europe and North America only in the nineteenth century. For
bureaucrats and legislators concerned with crime, education, public
health, factory labor, poverty, and a host of other conditions that
were coming to be known as "social" problems, numbers provided
indispensable information that often was not accessible through per-
sonal observation. Further, a considerable bureaucratic effort was re-
quired to collect and process the data. Because administrators could
define the categories into which people, events, and activities were sub-
divided, they played a large role in determining how these numbers
would eventually be interpreted (Scott 1988). To label them simply
"descriptive" is thus a bit misleading, but that is characteristic of the
rhetoric of statistics that grew up in the nineteenth century. Thomas
Gradgrind in Hard Times called them simply facts. Numerical facts
were valued as a way of enlisting public support and justifying gov-
ernmental action (Porter 1986).
The more ambitious calculations with which I am mainly concerned
here were not so well suited for direct public consumption. The num-
ber of murders recorded in Belgium or the value of cotton textiles
exported from Britain to India was more easily regarded as an un-
problematical fact than was a measure of the public utility of a canal
or rail line. Such recondite calculations could only become instru-
ments of power within the administrative apparatus of the state. We
must not, however, view their more technical character as an argu-
ment against understanding them in terms of their social uses. To the
contrary, their meaning was almost exclusively public and rhetorical,
in contrast to descriptive statistics, whose information content came
to be regarded as invaluable even for decisions that could be shielded
from public view. The uses of calculation were simply different from
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
254 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 255
that public choices were not merely a matter of the play of inter-
ests and were free from the taint of corruption. Servants of a higher
logic, engineers would be responsible to the public and yet gain some
protection from political pressures. Their reliance on numbers was
encouraged, in a way, by the French government, which required a
"declaration of public utility" before the right of eminent domain
could be used to secure land for highways, canals, and railroads. Still,
it was the choice of the engineers to interpret public utility increasingly
in terms of numbers and calculation. This was a way of responding
to the reasonable demand that the public interest be served without
encouraging the corps' business to become a matter of public debate.
Quantification implied that these matters were mainly the concern of
an authorized corps of specialists and outside the competence of the
citizenry. This is at least partly in contrast to the more descriptive aims
of public statistics, which could be seen as bound up with liberalism
mainly because they exposed both the grounds and the consequences
of state activity to public view. Calculation provided evidence that a
corps like the Ponts et Chaussees was acting in the public interest, but
did not go very far towards empowering the general public to assess
and criticize corps decisions.
Neither, however, was calculation the only, or even the most effec-
tive, way to exclude the public. The normal processes of French bu-
reaucracy shielded it far more completely from the public gaze than
quantification ever could. The French bureaucratic ideal ascribed to
each functionary his function, stipulating that nobody was more quali-
fied than he to perform that function or to judge it (Chardon 1908,
1912). Administrative practice, if anything, made functionaries even
less responsible to the public, and several commentators have sug-
gested that such offices continued to be held almost as private prop-
erty, passed down from father to son, even into the twentieth century
(Sharp 1931; Legendre 1968; Hoffmann 1963). Where such condi-
tions prevailed, there was no reason to justify choices with fancy cal-
culations. Numbers became indispensable precisely when public inter-
est, or public suspicion, was too much aroused for the administration
simply to make decisions on its own authority.
Public works, especially canals and railroads, were systematically
subject to public scrutiny in nineteenth-century France. Any major
project required authorization of funds by the parliament (Chardon
1904; Weiss 1989). Even minor ones had to pass through political au-
thorities, the prefects. State engineers, then, could not escape politics.
Politics required each deputy to get his own departement linked up to
the network of canals or railroads. Members of the Corps des Ponts
could not help but be alert to this dimension of the engineer's craft.
They also, however, had a sense of themselves as professional elites.
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
256 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 257
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
258 Poetics Today 12:2
of wealth than the entire cost of the cheaper one. Such superfluity
should be avoided, it seemed clear. This, Minard argued, was part of
the engineer's responsibility, and quantification was the appropriate
tool for making decisions. For every project, one ought to "evaluate, in
money terms, the utility of the [proposed] construction, and to com-
pare it . . . with the costs" (Minard [1850], quoted in Ekelund and
Hebert 1978: 648).
The skeptical modern reader may detect a curious coincidence of
interests between the general public and the Corps des Ponts et Chaus-
sees itself. But since the French rail system came to be built mainly
with private funds (Doukas 1976), state engineers could not remain
wholly aloof from the more parochial considerations of revenue. From
the 1840s and 1850s, their standard forms of quantification were in-
creasingly respectful of market incentives. They commonly held that
the public utility could not be maximized by building lines requiring
massive public subsidies. Minard, for example, challenged the gen-
erous measure of benefits implied by Navier's formula. The reason
that some traffic on a canal drops out when a high price is charged,
he observed, is precisely that the benefit of the canal to that traffic
is less than the price. This objection was made more pointedly by
Jules Dupuit, who introduced into the debate considerations involv-
ing what would later become known as marginal utility. He argued,
against Navier, that the utility to be derived from an object, or from
transportation on a road, canal, or railroad, is not a fixed property of
the good or service itself but a quantity that varies, depending on the
circumstances of each user. Some individuals are willing to pay an ex-
tremely high price for the convenience and speed of a railway journey
because they derive a corresponding benefit from it; others may not
use the railroads unless transport on them is almost free. In conse-
quence, the only coherent way to represent the demand for a good or
service is as a schedule, or function, of price. At very high prices, the
demand will be small. At low prices, it may be very great. The utility of
a public work is the sum of the (very different) utilities derived from it
by all users, whose behavior is assumed to be rational given the prices
they face. Dupuit's strategy for quantification, in short, was designed
to summarize the values of the market, not to judge the market against
an external standard (Dupuit 1844; see also Etner 1987).
Dupuit's methods led to considerably lower measures of the utility
of public works than Navier's. This in itself was not altogether to the
liking of his colleagues in the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees. Still more
threatening was his attempt to bring utility into the realm of observ-
able economic quantities. State engineers had taken it for granted that
their concerns were higher than those of mere capitalists, who were
interested only in revenue, while they themselves were concerned with
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 259
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
260 Poetics Today 12:2
mum of utility to the public. Such aims put engineers of the Ponts et
Chaussees in the business of quantifying something much more elu-
sive than revenue in order to maximize some combination of utility
and fairness.
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 261
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
262 Poetics Today 12:2
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 263
References
Albury, Randall
1983 The Politics of Objectivity (Victoria, Nsw: Deakin University Press).
Belpaire, Alphonse
1847 Traite des depenses d'exploitation aux chemins defer (Brussels: J. F. Buschmann).
Brown, Peter
1982 Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faber and Faber).
Brun, Gerard
1985 Technocratie et technocrates en France, 1918-1945 (Paris: Editions Albatross).
Cahan, David
1989 An Institutefor an Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Chardon, Henri
1904 Les Travaux publics: Essai sur le fonctionnement de nos administrations (Paris:
Perrin et Cie).
1908 L'Administration de la France: Les Fonctionnaires (Paris: Perrin et Cie).
1912 Le Pouvoir administratif, nouvelle ed. (Paris: Perrin et Cie).
Chevalier, Michel
1860 Opening Address,Journal de la Societe de Statistique de Paris 1(1): 1-6.
Collins, Harry M.
1985 Changing Order (Los Angeles: Sage).
Colson, Clement-L6on
1910 Cours d'economie politique professe a l'Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussies.
Vol. 6, Les Travaux publics et les transports, 2d ed. (Paris: Gauthier-Villars et
Felix Alcan).
Comoy, Guillaume E.
1847 "Observations sur les conditions dans lesquelles on doit mettre les canaux
de navigation pour qu'ils puissent augmenter la fortune publique," Annales des
Ponts et Chaussees 14(2): 133-217.
Daston, Lorraine
1988 Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University
Press).
Day, Charles R.
1987 Education for the Industrial World: The Ecoles d'Arts et Metiers and the Rise of
French Industrial Engineering (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Doukas, Kimon A.
1976 The French Railroads and the State (New York: Octagon Books/Farrar, Straus
and Giroux).
Doyat, Laurent
1846 "Sur le projet d'un chemin de fer allant de Rouen a Dieppe, en ce qui
concerne la base a adopter pour les tarifs de tous les chemins de fer," Annales
des Ponts et Chauss&es 11(2): 129-44.
Dumez, Herve
1985 L'Economiste, la science et le pouvoir: Le cas Walras (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France).
Dupuit, Arsenee-Jules
1844 "De la mesure de l'utilite des travaux publics," Annales des Ponts et Chaussees
8(2): 332-75.
Ekelund, Robert B., and Robert F. Hebert
1978 "French Engineers, Welfare Economics, and Public Finance in the Nine-
teenth Century," History of Political Economy 10(4): 636-68.
Etner, Francois
1987 Histoire du calcul economique en France (Paris: Economica).
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
264 Poetics Today 12:2
Fourcy, Ambroise
1987 [1837] Histoire de l'Ecole Polytechnique (Paris: Belin).
Fox, Robert
1974 "The Rise and Fall of Laplacian Physics," Historical Studies in the Physical
Sciences 4: 89-136.
Fuller, Steve
1991 "Is History and Philosophy of Science Withering on the Vine?" Philos
of the Social Sciences 21(2).
Gigerenzer, Gerd, Z. Swijtink, T. Porter, L. Daston, L. Kruger, and J. Beatty
1989 The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and Everyday
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Hoffmann, Stanley
1963 "Paradoxes of the French Political Community," in In Search of France
Stanley Hoffmann, C. Kindleberger, L. Wylie, J. Pitts, J.-B. Duroselle,
F. Goguel, 1-117 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Kranakis, Eda
1989 "Social Determinants of Engineering Practice: A Comparative View of
France and America in the Nineteenth Century," Social Studies of Science 18(1):
5-70.
Kuisel, Richard
1981 Capitalism and the State in Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press).
Legendre, Pierre
1968 Histoire de l'administration de 1750 jusqu'i nos jours (Paris: Presses Universi-
taires de France).
Le Play, Frederic
1885 "Vues generales sur la statistique,"Journal de la Socitte de Statistique de Paris
16(1): 6-11.
MacLeod, Roy, ed.
1988 Government and Expertise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
McCloskey, Donald
1985 The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
Minard, Charles Joseph
1850 "Notions elementaires d'economie politique appliqu6es aux travaux pub-
lics," Annales des Ponts et Chaussees 19(2): 1-125.
Mirowski, Philip, and Steven Sklivas
1989 "Why Econometricians Don't Replicate (Although They Do Reproduce)."
Unpublished manuscript.
Navier, C. L. M. H.
1832 "De l'Execution des travaux publics, et particulierement des concessions,"
Annales des Ponts et Chaussees 3(1): 1-31.
Pearson, Karl
1892 The Grammar of Science (London: Macmillan).
Picon, Antoine
1989 "Les ingenieurs et la math6matisation," Revue d'Histoire des Sciences 42(1-2):
155-72.
Polanyi, Michael
1958 Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
Porter, Theodore M.
1986 The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press).
1990 "Natural Science and Social Theory," in Companion to the History of Modern
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Porter * Objectivity & Authority 265
This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Sun, 07 Jan 2018 20:52:33 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms