The New Politics of Numbers

The New Politics of Numbers: Utopia, evidence and democracy is a multi-author book edited by sociologists Andrea Mennicken and Robert Salais and published in 2022 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Synopsis
This work connects to the 1989 volume The Politics of Numbers of William Alonso and Paul Starr, as well to the French school of sociology of quantification of Alain Desrosières’ The Politics of Large Numbers, Laurent Thévenot, the same Robert Salais, and other scholars in France and the UK. The volume sets out to investigate the power of numbers, how they travel across countries and domains, how they may be implicated in dreams of making things differently and creating new worlds, and how they establish new regimes of accountability and regulation. The book devotes particular attention to the linkages between numbers and democracy.

The book was inspired by a working group on social quantification at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2014. It is inspired by two strands of research: one related to Foucauldian ideas of power and control, which were studied by historians and sociologists at the London School of Economics; and the other being the "economics of conventions" or "theory of conventions", studied by various French scholars, including Luc Boltanski, Laurent Thévenot, and originally by Alain Desrosières.

Content
The chapter of Peter Miller investigates the role of numbers in the making of health policies. The role of quantification in the making of international certification standards is discussed by Thévenot. Uwe Vormbusch provides an account of the movement of the quantified self, while Boris Samuel provides an example of Statactivism staged in French Guadeloupe. Ota De Leonardis discusses how numbers permit a semantic shift in the meaning of inequality. The book also contains chapters from other scholars such as Emmanuel Didier, Martine Mespoulet, Tom Lang, Corine Eyraud and others. Wendy Nelson Espeland writes the foreword "What Numbers Do".

Reception
Harro Maas writes that "it is just impossible to open a newspaper or news site without being reminded of the themes addressed in this volume" after having read the book.

Related readings

 * Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers: a history of statistical reasoning, Harvard University Press (1998).
 * Alonso, W., & Starr, P. (1989). The Politics of Numbers, Russell Sage Foundation.
 * Bessy, C., & Didry, C. (Eds.). (2022). L’économie est une science réflexive, Chômage, convention et capacité dans l’œuvre de Robert Salais, Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
 * Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton University Press, 1995.